Via Ectoplasmosis.

Via VideoSift

Via VideoSift.

If you don’t know what they’re going on about with the actual news section of the video, here’s the story. It’s worth looking at even if you hate real news, as there’s some humorous photoshop mashup mockery submitted by readers.

e.g.,

You’ll be the first to die! Tee-hee!

More interesting to me at the moment is the graphic used to show our impending doom: SkiFree! Squee! Clearly, I’m perfectly okay with doom providing it comes with classic computer game references.

Of course, that isn’t stopping me from exacerbating his embarrassment by blogging the video, which, like most videos I post, I found on VideoSift.

This reminds me of Unskilled and Unaware of it, which I also linked above.

Basically, some of Cornell psychologists hypothesized that the reason the incompetent are so profoundly unaware of their deficiencies is that one needs some degree of proficiency in a thing in order to accurately judge success in any endeavor related to that thing. So people who are really truly terrible at a thing often think that they are really good at it, simply because they do not understand what being good at it means.

Ironically, the reverse is also true: people really good at a thing often tend to assume they are only averagely good at it - it comes so naturally to them that they have trouble recognizing it as a skill not everybody has.

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that “the trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.” This is true whether one interprets “stupid” as foolish (short on smarts) or as ignorant (short on information). Deliberately or otherwise, his sentiment echoes that of Charles Darwin, who over one hundred years ago pointed out that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

The thing about this phenomena is that awareness of it probably changes it. I.e., do I think I’m terrible or mediocre at various things I do because I actually am really quite good at them (at least good enough to realize my limits), or because I’ve read this paper and am subconsciously compensating for incompetence?

No matter. The short of it is: if ever someone claims to be good at something, don’t take their word for it. Likewise, don’t trust people who claim to be bad at things. In fact, just don’t trust anybody who makes any claims whatsoever about things they may or may not be skilled at.

Via VideoSift, by BluBlu.

I’m especially entertained by this today, as I cooked something similar last night (only using real food). If you’re coming to dinner tonight, you’ll get to try some. I’m hoping it’s as good reheated as it was fresh!

Here are some scenes of the Wilhelm in action, via videosift:

Now you too can get some snarky pleasure out of films like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Thanks to videosiftbannedme for the wonderful post title idea.

Keegan and I have been playing a lot of Mario Kart recently. Some of the rainbow road boards (SNES and Wii in particular) really are quite frustrating, and do indeed make the Rainbow Road appear to be some sort of hell dimension creepishly floating miles above earth where heaven should be. Maybe the leprechauns had a coup and reworked the organization of myth as we know it.