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competence, credibility, and the value of apologies

via the original Wiki, Donald L. Kirkpatrick on the four levels of (increasing) competence:

1. Unconscious Incompetence = you don't know that you can't do it well. (and nobody can tell you - see the full report of the Cornell study on incompetence)
   
2. Conscious Incompetence = you know you can't do it well.
   
3. Conscious Competence = you do it well, and you think about the work as you do it.
   
4. Unconscious Competence = you're so successful it's "automatic" -- you do it well, without thinking about it.

Of persons/institutions on the four levels, the one you least want to be on the receiving end of (due to the likelihood of being misled) is #1.

given that all people/institutions screw up from time to time, how do you determine whether or not the one you're dealing with is a #1?

Answer: (i think) are they aware when they screw up, and just as importantly do they let you know? Some people are virtually incapable of admitting fault - they seem to be the more competitive ones, who are afraid of finding themselves in a "one-down" position. Some institutions don't want to admit fault because (i think) they want to project an image of power and competence to their customers (some of whom might not have noticed the error).

But to those customers who have noticed if, if you try to cover it up/pretend it never happened this tells them that either you don't know you erred or that you hide your errors (and leave people believing wrong info). Neither of which is conducive to trust.

If you want to rebuild damaged credibility, the most effective way to do it is to repair the damage directly, by saying "I/we did X, where X was wrong, Y is right, I/we will try not to make this mistake in future." Otherwise your customers have no way of knowing that you're aware it was wrong.

moral of story: apologies build trust if they demonstrate that you share the standards of your customers.

posted by Anna at 8:54 PM

 

optimism (from somebody else)

from an essay by Theresa Nielsen Hayden a few years ago:

I wouldn't want to live in Tomorrowland, where the social patterns and infrastructure are all so spiff and modern and rational and well-designed that any remaining problems must needs be insoluble, and so a cause for despair. And I'm not any fonder of the idea that we're living on the tattered, weary, played-out edge of postmodern time.

My own personal theory is that this is the very dawn of the world. We're hardly more than an eyeblink away from the fall of Troy, and scarcely an interglaciation removed from the Altamira cave painters. We live in extremely interesting ancient times.

I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don't know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.

posted by Anna at 6:48 AM

 

creepy

the actual SARS mortality rate is considerably higher than the reported 3-5%:

It is likely from all reports that those patients that will die, do so between one and three weeks after they go to hospital. Which means that the death rate should not be calculated by dividing the number dead by the number of cases now, but by dividing the number dead by the number of cases one or two weeks ago...

Evidence that the Iraqi museum looting may have been planned. This is sick.

posted by Anna at 12:59 AM

 

binocular coverage

been meaning to pull together coverage of same (or roughly same) story from different sources for a while now. Here's the first round:

Anonymous anti-Martin hit piece and the guy behind it:
Sac News and Review, Yubanet, The Union

Sea Change in county govt with election of Bedwell and Sutherland:
Yubanet, The Union 1, The Union 2

Property Rights Politics -
Yubanet (re Nevada County), Sac Bee (not local to us)

Bedwell's illegal apartments
Yubanet, The Union

I understand that The Republic is out there somewhere but have not been able to find it.


posted by Anna at 9:07 PM

 

stuff

points made by Fareed Zakaria in How to Wage the Peace:

Weren't the forces of democracy also the forces of ... harmony and tolerance? Actually, no.
Elections require that politicians compete for votes. In societies without strong traditions of tolerance and multiethnic groups, the easiest way to get support is by appealing to people's most basic affiliations... Once one group wins, it usually excludes the other from power.
...The single most important strength a society can have is a committed, reformist elite. That has been at the heart of the success of Central Europe, weathering through all its ups and downs. When Michael Camdessus, former head of the IMF, is asked why Botswana, a diamond-rich African country, has done well, while most diamond states have not, his answer is, "Three words: three honest men." Botswana has had three honest and competent presidents.

Add "tries to hire hit men to kill the neighbor" to the litany of local conservatives' antisocial behaviors. If you are an ethical conservative, please get involved, and take back your party! Your county and your country need you.

posted by Anna at 7:49 PM

 

i like these people

Wash. Post on parents of James Riley:

..."That's just who we are, we're eccentrics," Jane Riley said with a laugh.
...
Like their son, the Rileys said they intensely dislike public attention. Why then, they were asked today, were they putting up with reporters camped in their back yard, their sunroom and their driveway, and giving nonstop interviews to all who wanted their time?

"Because that's what our son was over there fighting for -- freedom," Athol Riley said. "We believe freedom of the press is very important. If you've lived where it's not free, or even not totally free, you find out how important it is."

posted by Anna at 7:35 PM

 

the route of all evil

Big White Guy (in Hong Kong) on SARS:

I've been meaning to mention this for some time, but one avenue of transmission of the SARS virus that's been overlooked or largely ignored is money.
...
An article I just read pointed out a study on how easily money can transmit diseases. The American Society of Microbiology examined dollar bills collected from students at a high-school game and from shoppers at a grocery stores. Of the bills collected, 7% contained serious pathogenic bacteria, 86% carried ordinary bacteria, and 7% were clean. Thirty years ago, the American Medical Association reported that 42% of notes and 13% of coins were contaminated by dangerous fecal germs (such as E. coli) and staphylococcus...

later, being a silver lining kind of guy, he adds:

...I like to maintain a balanced look at things. There are benefits to the outbreak.

I haven't seen anyone pick their nose in weeks.

in retrospect maybe it would have been better if we'd skipped putting a man on the moon and stuck to finding a cure for the common cold...

posted by Anna at 7:24 PM

 

vivid imagination dept

The omnipotent four year old in me is convinced that she has aroused the wrath of the paper gods. In the unlikely event that she is correct, she requests that they not aim at innocent civilians.

and although i am clearly not the target market (except for ammunition) perhaps the pre-Jan 02 archives might be brought back to life? currently they give a 404.

posted by Anna at 7:23 PM

 

accuracy, fairness and balance

Accuracy, fairness and balance are said to be the fundamentals of good journalism.

but when there are two factions and the facts do favor one, or the preponderance of X (whatever X is) lies on one side, how can the reporter go about conveying this info to the reader in a fair and balanced way?

What is balance? if you are not balanced, can you still be fair?

presumably "balance" does not mean positioning the viewpoint of the story equidistant between said factions? or does it? if it does, doesn't accuracy (in mirroring the world) suffer?

is "contextual objectivity" ("an attempt to reflect all sides of any story while retaining the values, beliefs and sentiments of the target audience") the de facto meaning of Balance in the U.S. media as it is for Al Jazeera? (other Al Jazeera articles here)

those are my questions, & here are some writings that resonate with what I see as reality:

The media is failing if it does not educate its readership on the facts

on journalism, objectivity and bias:

The difference between fact and opinion is not a bright line: It is a spectrum. At one end you have "2 + 2 = 4," and on the other you have "Social Security should be privatized"

Tied up in balancing:

What we in the media are concerned about are allegations of bias or imbalance. Fairness is all, but the attaining of a position of perfect balance between two positions on an issue is something else entirely. The pursuit of balance has lead to vast slabs of inadequate copy that can be characterised as "he said-she said" journalism.

This holds that the story is adequately handled if you go first to one side then the other and line the comments up side by side. What might be said might be highly misleading or completely untrue or just meaningless drivel but who cares - journalism is about collecting and collating opposing comments.

There are a myriad of difficulties with this approach. Who said there is only two points of view to most issues? [If it's] a Tweedledee and Tweedledum affair of two sides equally and mutually scared of upsetting the same bunch of horses, the comments can usually be predicted pretty perfectly and won't amount to much anyway. The usual suspects for comment will be those with their hands up, and those least likely to have anything new, different or challenging to say.

The alternative view is that the story is not done, unless you are telling the punter what is really going on. Simply collecting and collating the he saids and she saids won't do that, but requiring comments to be meaningful and challenging those that are untruthful might. This usually implies going to he and she for their comments after a bit of basic digging into the story, rather than going there first and only there.

what ails journalism:

Some critics charge that objectivity is illusory to start with since journalists inevitably control the sources (or, as is sometimes the case, sources control the journalists). Others feel that the objectivity mindset leads to point-counterpoint or he said/she said formulas of news reporting that ultimately have a paralyzing effect on the public. So long as journalists see themselves as detached, value-neutral observers, news becomes a mere recital of context-free information -- often irrelevant, often misleading.

On balance as equidistance:

You [reporters] think you've covered a story when you put yourself equidistant between two groups and then you don't have to evaluate who's telling the truth or what their records are." -- Jeff Cohen

objectivity:

Patty Calhoun: "I think it's more important that we pursue the truth, and I think that's what we're doing. By saying objectivity isn't out there, what we're saying is you cannot, bottom line, be objective because you're going to go in with certain biases. You're going to go in and say I'm a white woman without a girdle who's writing a story. I'm writing it differently than a white woman in a girdle on a daily newspaper might be. Those biases are there and that's going to rule out objectivity, but you can certainly pursue accuracy and fairness and the truth, and that pursuit continues."

Kim Elton:

Michael Kinsley, a journalist, once noted that if a politician declares that two plus two is five, reporters might note in the story that the position is not without some critics. Indeed, he added, journalists probably would quote another politician in the opposite party saying the sum should be four. They might even quote a third politician suggesting there is a possible compromise between the advocates of `five' and the advocates of`four'.

By strict journalism standards the story headlined "Politicians battle over sums" would be balanced if all three politicians are quoted. But readers who don't know what the sum really is or how math really works will have to guess at the truth and may go for the most facile quote.

Reporting that reflects reality instead of `spin' too often is limited by the radical agnosticism in the media that refuses to classify any quote as untrue...

Deni Elliott (in a much more general and wide ranging article):

If a statement known to be false is worth publication, news organizations should help their readers understand that the statement ought not to be believed. The era in which news organizations could claim that they ought not be accountable for knowingly printing falsehoods disappeared in the 1950s coverage of Senator Joe McCarthy and his unchallenged claims of communists in our midst.

posted by Anna at 10:20 PM

 

psychology today

on inferring other peoples' motives -
a few months back I was talking to someone who mentioned offhand that being manipulative was the normal human condition. which blew me away. then yesterday ran across this MMPI description:

Amorality -...
High: Justifies manipulativeness by projecting own selfish opportunistic and exploitive tendencies onto others.
Low: Denies that other people are selfish, opportunistic, and manipulative.
...A unique scale. It's not as pathological as "Amorality" sounds. It would be better to call it, "Manipulativeness", or what Alex Caldwell (1988) likes to call it, "Opportunism"...

and in combination with other recent events it got me thinking about how we as a species - not just the Opportunists - do infer motives, and I think projection is the way we all do it - i.e. an awful lot of the inference comes from just mentally putting our own psyches into the other person's, uh, shoes. So as a mirror it can be informative.

(digression - footwear metaphor complaint - of course it hurts when the shoe is on the other foot! this is to be expected, says nothing about the intrinsic worth of the shoe.)

Lectures on The Emerging Mind are still in process but if all are as good as the first one (Phantoms in the Brain), read. The explanation of why we laugh will shed scales from your eyes.

definition for today:
witzelsucht (vit'sel-zoocht) [Ger.] - "A mental condition characteristic of frontal lobe lesions and marked by the making of poor jokes and puns and the telling of pointless stories, at which the patient himself is intensely amused."

and a very interesting article from Paul Krugman on the evolutionary psychology of investing (The Ice Age Cometh), and why we do so badly at it...

The more I look at the amazing rise of the U.S. stock market, the more I become convinced that we are looking at a mammoth psychological problem. I don't mean mammoth as in "huge" (though maybe that too), but as in "elephant". Let me explain...

posted by Anna at 8:48 PM

 

happy Iraq links

from Electrolite, wonderful Time mag photo. of Infantrywoman Felicia Harris making herself at home at Chez Uday...

and POW James Riley and others from his company found safe.
posted by Anna at 8:44 PM

 

i covet my neighbor's truck

snow again this morning.
truck reappeared.

we sure have some fine vehicles in this town.

posted by Anna at 12:02 PM