Ran across this quote In today's New York Times & immediately thought of 62.6:

“When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead . . . they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

The paper from which it is quoted also has a great title -- “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments,” by David Dunning & Justin Kruger.

There may be other lines that fit even better, but having received 62.6 a couple times lately I feel perfectly indicted.

Permalink to the article, which is full of prickly insights for the diviner:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/

There seems to be a lot of holes in this ...um, theory.

for instance: Dunning and Kruger argued in their paper, “When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine.”

If one was incompetent in the strategies to achieve success and satisfaction, then, presumably, they would not be successful nor satisfied. So why would the writer say they are left with the erroneous impression that they are doing just fine? I guess the idea is that their idea of what success and satisfaction possibilities there are is limited and so they are satisfied to that extent.
Sounds like a narcissistic personality rather than the general population. (Would seem like most people are more prone to deflated self-assessment, in any case)...the theory seems to be referring to arrogance (pretending one knows to mask not knowing and not ackowledging the feedback that says you dont know) which I guess is what narcissism is about.

anyway, the little bird in 62.6 presumably meets with disaster, which hopefully becomes his learning curve, his humbling experience. he hopefully realizes there are those unknown unknowns.

But there will always be unknown unknowns for all of us, right? In some ways, I would rather be the little bird in 62.6 who makes a huge blunder due to incompetence and then begins to ask new questions than to be the person who never makes a move because he is too aware of the presence of unknown unknowns..that seems to spell paralysis.

I wonder what the solution to the problem of unknown unknowns is? Humility and openness, perhaps. 46.6 ....or a connection to a higher mind, Higher Power, universal intelligence. left to its own devices, the human mind will always be limited.