Nothing particularly pressing to talk about and some neat stuff hanging around the browser, patiently waiting to be used, so you know what that means.
It’s time to put the dynamite in the pinata and fire up the weed whacker!
Also, it means I am gonna share some neato video clips with you and, inevitably, share my impressions of them with you lucky, lucky people.
First up on Channel Me, we have this fascinating little experiment in art and technology where a man is documenting every moment of his life and storing it for other people to see.
The artist;s name Alan Kwan, according to this HuffPo piece on the subject, and the idea is that Kwan wears a custom made full video lifelogging device on his glasses that records everything he sees and hears during the day.
He then uploads that video to a different ‘house’ in his virtual environment every night, where the memories can be accessed as ‘blocks’ by people participating in the environment.
It is a simple and audacious idea, and I am quite fascinated by it as both technology and art.
As art, I must first say that I absolutely love the visual style of the environment. The tension between the high resolution of the visuals and their line-art simplicity is sublime. You could imagine that it is real video with a very abstract filter applied to it, and that, along with the now standard but still effective device of breath sounds coordinated with your movement, really makes the whole thing seem extremely immersive, and yet, also highly surreal.
That said, I am pretty disappointed at what happens when you actually reach the blocks of memory. The way they are presented in the video makes them highly disjointed and impossible to truly experience. They are just bundles of random sensory experiences, suggestive perhaps, but not truly illuminating.
And that is a real pity, because Bad Trip could be a highly stimulating gateway to lifelogging’s truly amazing potential as an art form, and that is to provide the closest thing possible yet to being able to actually find out what it is like to be someone else.
Imagine what it would be like to virtually walk into one of those memory blocks and have the screen fill with what Kwan actually saw and heard, including what he said. It would be an out of body experience of profound psychological impact.
We would no longer be trapped in our own lives and experiences. It would be an amazing experiment in perspective. It would be even more so if it could be presented in 3D via 3D glasses with built in earphones. Then it would truly be like being someone else.
In the comments, Kwan says he is working on an updated version of Bad Trip. Let’s hope that the next version will take immersion to the next level.
Next, we have this very interesting little video about a very interesting psychological effect.
It is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and it is quite a hot bit of psychology because it explains something that many of us have grappled with in our lives : the know-nothing expert, the person who thinks they are extremely good at something when it is clear to anyone else that the exact opposite is true.
The basic idea of Dunning-Kruger is that people who are very bad at something are not just bad at the thing themselves, they are bad at assessing their own ability at it. Therefore, people who are incompetent at a skill tend to vastly overrate their ability in that skill, whereas the competent at the skill have a more realistic idea of their limitations.
At least, that is how it is usually interpreted, but I think that, as important as their findings are, I think Dunning and Kruger rather missed the boat when interpreting their data.
What they missed was that no matter how good or bad someone was at a skill, when asked how good they were at said skill, they all gave roughly the same answer.
Taking this into account, I think it is obvious that the real result here is that people do not want to admit weakness or incompetence to psychological interviewers. The masks we wear to protect our social image and our self-worth are quite efficient and seamless, and operate largely subconsciously, so that in most cases, people act to keep them intact without even thinking about it.
And this is most true when we are around strangers. With those close to us, the mask comes off and we are more honest and vulnerable. But with those we do not know and trust, we are anything but.
That is, incidentally, why people lie to their doctors. Doctors are authority figures you only see for brief periods. That double down on the reluctance to be honest and vulnerable.
But back to Dunning and Kruger. Who, really, is going to admit they are incompetent at very broad and deep subjects like logical reasoning or sense of humour to some graduate student with a clipboard? Even if they maybe privately suspect they may be not so great at them?
This does not even take into account the nature of the faculties tested. We have strong social and psychological reasons to think we have good senses of humour and especially logical reasoning.
To admit to ourselves that our logical reasoning skills are poor would be to admit that we really have no idea what is going on around us and that we are quite helpless before a world that is far too complicated for just going on your “gut feeling”.
That is not acceptable for an adult, and so people in that position will have psyches which are very heavily armored against that very realization.
In conclusion, I think Dunning-Kruger are on to something, but their interpretation is incomplete and needs to take more social and psychological factors to be complete.
And just remember, the next time someone is being incredibly stupid online and does not seem to know it, just say to them “You’re wearing the juice, aren’t you?”