Kid in a stroller, being pushed along the sidewalk, plays with a rattle. Baby clumsily manipulates the toy, looking at it from various angles. Finally, kid freezes for a moment and still looking at the toy – drops it on the ground. When a baby cautiously drops something – it’s an important and weighty experiment. Because it is far from obvious that all dropped things fall, why should they! Indeed, in our earthly realms they…
150 is a nice, round approximation of what is known as the Dunbar Number. Named after British anthropologist, who was seeking for correlation between the brain size (more specifically – the most recently evolved part of cortex) in primates and the span of their social network. Initial estimation, based on a relatively small sample of data was burdened with a significant measurement error – but a few other studies concluded with similar results (while couple…
By the end of last century Justin Kruger and David Dunning wrote and published their famous work entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”. Their paper was published by the American Psychological Association in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and had many follow ups since. The cognitive bias tackled in the article was later named after the authors as the Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE).…
Idea At Time is my first public blog. It is born of my exuberant need to play with writing and my want to share thoughts on various conceptions. I won’t try to sell you anything, nor pretend that I’m the master of a given subject. Many topic will lay widely outside my field of expertise and might have scarcely anything to do with what I do professionally. This blog is my very personal enterprise with major…