No one was more surprised than McArthur Wheeler when he was arrested for bank robbery. After all, he’d smeared his face with lemon juice, you know, the stuff they use to make invisible ink? So how come it didn’t make him invisible too?
When this 1995 item from the Pittsburgh Police blotter caught the eye of Cornell Psychologist David Dunning he enlisted his graduate student Justin Kruger to figure out what was going on. They reasoned that, while many people have inflated views of their abilities and aptitudes in various endeavours, some mistakenly assess their abilities as being significantly higher than they actually are. And thus was born the “Dunning-Kruger Effect,” or the illusion of confidence leading to the cognitive bias to dramatically over-inflate one’s abilities.
When extreme ego is packaged with extreme ignorance, as is the case with the “President” of the United States, the result is too often a Dunning Kruger Effect exemplar – an inability to assess the extent of their own incompetence. Hence Donald Trump, a man not unlike McArthur Wheeler, who thinks invisibility is an actual thing, and […]
I’d never heard of the source of this article, the “Palmer Report.” Here is what the Wikipedia entry on it says: “The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins called the Palmer Report “the publication of record for anti-Trump conspiracy nuts who don’t care about the credibility of the record.”[9] The New Republic’s Colin Dickey claims that Palmer “routinely blasts out stories that sound serious but are actually based on a single, unverified source,” such as the time when he reported Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts had ordered Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch to recuse himself from all Trump-related Russia hearings, with his only sourcing coming from a “single tweet from an anonymous Twitter account under the name ‘Puesto Loco.'”[10] Palmer previously ran a site called Daily News Bin, described by Snopes.com editor Brooke Binkowski as “basically a pro-Hillary Clinton ‘news site.’ It was out there to counter misinformation with misinformation.”[11] In late 2017, Palmer Report was fully vindicated on a matter that Snopes had previously claimed Palmer Report had gotten wrong; since that incident, Snopes has ceased publishing negative fact checks about Palmer Report. [12] The site has been criticized for building a large following based on “wildly speculative theories about Donald Trump.”[10] ” I don’t approve of Donald Trump. But the “Palmer Report” sounds about as credible as Trump does.
Thanks, for this Paul, I hadn’t heard of it either, but the story was sent to me by a leading scientist. I should have checked. That said, I don’t use Wikipedia because it is so grossly inaccurate about anything that touches on nonlocal consciousness. And, at least in this case, the commentary on Dunning-Kruger is accurate, as you can easily ascertain by searching PubMed or Scopus. I have read at least a dozen research papers on this, published several in SR. But, I appreciate your cautionary comment about Palmer and won’t use them again.