#2: Three Things I Enjoyed This Week
podcast episodes about class, signaling theory in the mafia, and the Dunning-Kruger effect
Well, if I was looking for a lesson in humility, then this week was it. After getting back on the metaphorical horse last week and relaunching my newsletter, I wrote 0 words this week. Thankfully, I was able to shelter in the leniency of no one probably expecting the newsletter, anyway. So! Here we are, week two of three things I enjoyed. But first, a small update.
Home-ish in London at last
I’ll tell you first what I did NOT enjoy: We arrived in London on Tuesday after waking up at 5am in Athens to take an early flight. Our cab driver got a flat tire on the highway, but we made it in time. The plane was prompt, as was our train from the airport, despite the chaos of trains in this country. We were winning! Then, we walked through the door to the flat we are renting for the next six weeks and immediately, I saw the situation at hand.
Grime! Filth! I will spare you the details, but it became clear that in a year of renting, they had never cleaned once. (Though we’d offered to pay for a cleaner before moving in, the guy we’re subletting from said he’d take care of it.) Four hours of scrubbing the bathroom and 2.5 days of deep cleaning later and it finally feels home-ish. We’re in Dartmouth Park (for whom my alma mater is also named), which is dotted with cute cafes and food shops and lined with beautiful row houses. Though it’s raining as I write, it’s been mostly sunny this week and the streets are dotted with cotton candy-like cherry trees.
Deep-cleaning the apartment gave me the opportunity to think about cleanliness: how standards differ because of its inherent subjectivity, how it’s linked to morality (purity), and how cleaning and perceptions of hygiene are related to class. So, next week’s longer essay will be about these things, as well as the planning fallacy and Hofstadter’s law (everything takes longer than you think it will, even when accounting for Hofstadter’s law).
Three [podcast episodes] I enjoyed this week
While scrubbing away this week, I binged the backlog of the Social Science Bites podcast, hosted by David Edmonds and made in conjunction with SAGE Publishing. Since I didn’t have much time to read or watch this week, I thought I’d share three episodes worth starting with. As the title implies, the episodes are quite short—most range from 18 to 25 minutes.
David Dunning on the Dunning-Kruger Effect
If you’ve ever listened to a droning mansplainer, then this is the episode for you.
You may be familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect, named for the two social psychologists who identified this phenomenon in 1999. People who are not expert in a field lack the expertise to recognize they lack the expertise. As Dunning puts it, he wanted to examine how much “people who don’t know don’t know that they don’t know.” He discusses how they established the validity of the effect. The people in the bottom 25% tended to think they were doing above average. You see this effect in areas where “the skill or expertise [needed] to judge how well you are doing is that you need to produce an accurate decision in the first place.” Basically, if you are unknowledgeable, you can’t know what knowledge you lack. And as we know, gaining a little knowledge gives you the sense that you’ve learned a lot. His biggest piece of advice for improving your own research? Explicitly attempt to disconfirm your ideas. And, find unrelated experts—plural—in a variety of different fields.
Listen here (19 min)
Diego Gambetta on Signaling Theory
If you want to know about how the mafia get across their message, listen to this episode.
Diego Gambetta is a professor of social theory at the European University Institute in Florence and he studies how signaling theory works in our lives. Basically, this is about how we convey information that conveys the validity (or not) of what we say. These types of symbolic communication can have positive outcomes—as in an engagement ring, if you’re into that kind of thing—or negative, like racial profiling by taxi drivers in New York City.
Listen here (24 min)
Sam Friedman on Class
If the Nepo baby talk has confounded you, then this is the podcast to listen to.
Sam Friedman, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics, talks the intractable class barriers in the UK and assesses how elite professions (like CEOs, academics, doctors, journalists, architects, cultural and creative professions) are not the meritocracies that many would like to think they are. These professions have an “outsize cultural influence” on society, and remain class-bound professions, not just in who is accessing these occupations, but in terms of who is progressing within them. Even when controlling for educational credentials, those who come from privileged backgrounds progress faster than those from working-class backgrounds. I’m looking forward to reading the book he co-authored with Daniel Laurison, The Class Ceiling: Why it Pays to be Privileged.
Listen here (27 min)
Hofstadter's law is my favorite excuse for everything.
I thought the podcast Social Science Bites would be all about what's wrong or "bites" but apparently not! I have added these pocasts to my to listen list.