"[..]
Colin, my poor scientist-amongst-the-engineers, do you not realize that this posting of yours (both the content, the lack of humor,"
My post was not very funny, but it was not totally void of humor ("A.I. my arse" and the renaming a department to have "Science" in its title without "Engineering" in order to avoid confusion that it is relevant to engineering). Though perhaps that I have gone to such effort to track these examples will amuse you.
" and the lack of perception of humor from others) epitomize the "demi- paedagogical" epithet that I applied to your class in an earlier email?
[..]"I confess I did not really detect this in your posting, but fair enough.
"While the subject matter is not exactly the same, I recommend this for a good read: - the idea that if you're outside you can't see in, and if you're inside your perception of the outside is skewed - is highly apposite."
At over ten pages, I have a doubt that I will read much of it so perhaps I will never know whether you think I am arrogant but as for some parts of the first page which I have noticed: "[..] Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments Justin Kruger and David Dunning Cornell University People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. [..]
It is one of the essential features of such incompetence that the person so afflicted is incapable of knowing that he is incompetent. To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense. (Miller, 1993, p. 4) [..]"
I can agree that one does not necessarily realize one's own problems and I am optimistic. I have also noticed in others that a modicum of knowledge of a topic can result in inappropiate obsession with dominating the topic without ever realizing that still not enough has been learnt about it. This could apply to me too. Something which definitely applies to me is that many important things which are needed for any project I work on I do not know, but that is fine: I do not need to know everything: I work in multi-skilled teams. I have also noticed people who are supposedly experts in something and who have no problem of reminding me of this when we have conflicting ideas instead of showing me empirical evidence that their claims are true.