Critical Path

This is something gabbled at me by an old dragon of a Maths teacher many moons ago. She also predicted me a D at GSCE (Serves me right for disliking her son I guess) but I got 'A's at GCSE, AO and A level so shows how much you knew Mrs A!

Anyway the phrase isn't just used in the context of a personal vendetta against fearful students. Apparently it's part of an ancient Arabic proverb:

He who knows not and knows not he knows not: he is a fool-shun him.
He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple-teach him.
He who knows and knows not he knows: he is asleep-wake him.
He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise-follow him.

It highlights the difference between what you know and what you think you know. Worse than an idiot is an idiot who doesn't know it. People are notoriously bad at rating their own competence at a whole variety of tasks. We call it the Dunning Kruger effect. Dunning and Kruger found that people who were not very good at X also tended to lack the skill to rate themselves at X. As such they often figured that the limited information they had about X was all there was to know and that they were consequently more knowledgeable than average. Moreover people who really were quite knowledgeable about the subject tended to underestimate their ability. Perhaps because they knew enough to be aware of how much more there was to know.

So it was interesting to find, via the excellent Pharyngula blog, an on-line test to measure what they're calling "Risk Intelligence": Your ability to assess your own confidence in quiz answers.

http://projectionpoint.com/

Try it.

You'll see a number of True False questions and you have to give your confidence that they're true. Some of them you'll know are definitely true, give them 100%, some you'll know are definitely false, mark them as 0%

Some you won't have any idea about. Mark them as 50% and of course you'll probably find that some of them you're not certain about but you lean one way or another and that's really what this test is about.

What you're aiming for is that all the statements you marked as 100% confident are in fact true
Of the statements you marked as 70% confident, 70% of them will be true and so on.

So it's not a test of general knowledge but a test of self knowledge.

You can get full marks (100) by knowing all the answers and marking them at 100% and 0% appropriately. This would fall into the category of "He who knows and knows he knows: he is wise-follow him."

However you can score just as highly by knowing only two answers at 100%, certain-it's-true or 0%, definitely-not-true; whilst marking everything else honestly as don't-have-a-Scooby, 50%. This is of course "He who knows not and knows he knows not: he is simple-teach him."

This relatively ignorant person out scores not only the person who confidently plumps for the wrong answer The eponymous "He who knows not and knows not he knows not" but also the person who knows all the right answers but is too timid to express the confidence their answers deserve: "He who knows and knows not he knows"

PZ Scored 83, I got one less at 82. Then I gamed the system and got 100. You have a go and see what you think.