High-Level C***s***er Fired By School Board

I didn't even hear of this story at the time.

A high school history teacher didn't like that one of his students was wearing a US Marines sweatshirt, to honor his dad, who's a Marine. (Or maybe just because his dad got it cheap at the PX -- either way, doesn't matter.)

This history teacher decided it was time to do some Truth to Power teachin' of this patriotic little monster.

Salcido didn't get up in front of the class and go on an anti-military rant one day as part of a lesson plan. This was a personal attack aimed at one particular student. The incident began when 17-year-old Victor Quinonez wore a "Marines' sweatshirt to Salcido's class. He was wearing the sweatshirt because his father is a Marine Corps veteran who served in Afghanistan and because he had considered following in his father's footsteps and joining the Marines one day. But when he got up to turn in his homework, Salcido noticed the sweatshirt and then tore into the military.

"We've got a bunch of dumb sh**s over there," Salcido said. He continued, "Think about the people who you know who are over there -- your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever--they're dumbsh**s. They're not, like, high-level thinkers, they're not academic people, they're not intellectual people. They're the freaking lowest of our low."

Yeah, they're not high-level thinkers and intellectuals and academics like high school history teachers who can't separate their seething personality problems from their overpaid dayjob.

Salcido then warned, "You better not freaking go" and added, "Don't wear that in here." He also said people who joined the military did so because their parents didn't love them enough to push them academically. It's not hard to see how Victor Quinonez would take this as a very personal attack on his father.

I've ripped off a lot of John Sexton's background only because I left so much back at the link -- all this was caught on phone audio, and he's got that audio over there. Plus he has video of this high-level c***s***er doubling down in a hearing before a schoolboard, saying it's his job to do all he can to keep his students from doing bad in school and having to go to Iraq, as John Kerry said.

Plus, he has the resolution of the school board hearing. Which I guess I gave away in the headline, but hit the link for the details.

You know what we need a national, federally-funded war on?

We've had Wars on Drugs, Crime, and Poverty.

What we really need is a National War on the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

In the field of psychology, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is. The cognitive bias of illusory superiority derives from the metacognitive inability of low-ability persons to recognize their own ineptitude; without the self-awareness of metacognition, low-ability people cannot objectively evaluate their actual competence or incompetence.[1]

Conversely, highly competent individuals may erroneously assume that tasks easy for them to perform are also easy for other people to perform, or that other people will have a similar understanding of subjects that they themselves are well-versed in.[2]

As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

...

In Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (2005), Dunning described the Dunning-Kruger effect as "the anosognosia of everyday life", referring to the condition in which a disabled person either denies or seems unaware of his or her disability. He stated: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."[6][7]

...

Dunning and Kruger tested the hypotheses of the cognitive bias of illusory superiority on undergraduate students of introductory courses in psychology, by examining the students' self-assessments of their intellectual skills in logical reasoning (inductive, deductive, abductive), English grammar, and personal sense of humor. After learning their self-assessment scores, the students were asked to estimate their ranks in the psychology class. The group of competent students underestimated their class ranks, while the group of incompetent students overestimated their ranks...

Across four studies, the research indicated that the study participants who scored in the bottom quartile on tests of their sense of humor, knowledge of grammar, and logical reasoning overestimated their test performance and their abilities; despite test scores that placed them in the 12th percentile, the participants estimated they ranked in the 62nd percentile.

Meanwhile, the competent group underestimated their rankings as compared to their peers in these areas.

In other words, very stupid people incorrectly believe that other people are also very stupid (but stupider than themselves, because their stupid egos need it to be such), whereas competent people incorrectly believe that other people are about as competent than themselves, or even moreso.

So competent, intelligent people also have a problem with estimating the ability of others. But at least that misestimation results in them believing they have to try harder to keep ahead of the pack they wrongly believe is nipping at their heels.

Whereas the deeply stupid and incompetent believe that everyone is actually much dumber than they are, so they can afford to coast on their non-achievements, resulting in their already-below-normal-level performance stagnating further to become diagnosable-intellectual-dysfunction-level performance.

There's a rule you hear when learning chess: Don't assume your opponent will make the dumbest move you can think of. Assume he will make the best move you can think of. If you count on your opponent to make dumb moves to win, 1, you will not train yourself to think of the best move possible, 2, you will not improve your own game, and 3, you will almost all the time, because your opponent will not in fact make the dumbest move you can think of, because he's probably not a dumbfuck who has an egotistical need to believe he has illusory superiority, and is probably himself imagining you will make the best move possible.

Which you won't, if you're a dumbfuck, but it doesn't hurt the smart player to be prepared for the best move and simply adjust their plain to exploit the stupid moves of their dumbfuck opponents.

This guy also seems to have a problem with impulse control and emotional outbursts -- another sign not of the notably intelligent, but of the cognitively challenged.

I'm sure he'd rate himself in the 62nd percentile as far as impulse control and emotional stability, though.

posted by Ace of Spades at 06:14 PM

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