Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Tipsy Tuesday

For today's tips, I'm going to point y'all to agent Jenny Bent's blog on Rookie Mistakes in querying. Good stuff here.

Oh, and Nathan Bransford had a post where he mentioned Dunning-Kruger effect. Have you heard of this? I hadn't. The basic theory is this: When people are incompetent at something they tend to lack the ability to realize it and they overrate their abilities relative to others. Meanwhile, people who actually are good at something tend to underrate their abilities and may as a result suffer from lack of confidence.

Well, I've certainly seen this, I just never knew it had a name! According to Wikipedia: ...the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.

Huh. Ya learn something new every day, eh?

2 comments:

Colleen Love said...

Wow, Sherrill! Love that! I've seen people like that many, many times and never knew it actually had a name either!☺ Very interesting! hehe

Sherrill Quinn said...

Colleen, I have heard it called something else. The father of one of my sisters-in-law used to say, "You can't argue with stupid." He was right!