A possible explanation for the continuing presence on the Australian political stage of Pauline Hanson, David Leyonhjelm, Tim Wilson, Darren Hinch, Ian Macdonald, Barnaby Joyce, Michaelia Cash, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Christian Porter, Julie Bishop, Josh Frydenberg, Greg Hunt, Alan Tudge and Malcolm Turnbull - Rupert Murdoch suffers from the Dunning‐Kruger effect and has infected much of the mainstream media.
Monday 6 August 2018
'Too Dumb To Know That They Are Dumb': an unexpected explanation of why political extremism in Western democracies is as it is.....
A possible explanation for the continuing presence on the Australian political stage of Pauline Hanson, David Leyonhjelm, Tim Wilson, Darren Hinch, Ian Macdonald, Barnaby Joyce, Michaelia Cash, Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, Peter Dutton, Christian Porter, Julie Bishop, Josh Frydenberg, Greg Hunt, Alan Tudge and Malcolm Turnbull - Rupert Murdoch suffers from the Dunning‐Kruger effect and has infected much of the mainstream media.
A
widely cited finding in social psychology holds that individuals with low
levels of competence will judge themselves to be higher achieving than they
really are. In the present study, I examine how the so‐called “Dunning‐Kruger effect” conditions citizens'
perceptions of political knowledgeability. While low performers on a political
knowledge task are expected to engage in overconfident self‐placement and self‐assessment when reflecting on their
performance, I also expect the increased salience of partisan identities to
exacerbate this phenomenon due to the effects of directional motivated
reasoning. Survey experimental results confirm the Dunning‐Kruger effect in the realm of
political knowledge. They also show that individuals with moderately low political
expertise rate themselves as increasingly politically knowledgeable when
partisan identities are made salient. This below‐average group is also likely to rely
on partisan source cues to evaluate the political knowledge of peers. In a
concluding section, I comment on the meaning of these findings for contemporary
debates about rational ignorance, motivated reasoning, and political
polarization.
PsyPost, 16 April 2018:
For his study, Anson
examined 2,606 American adults using two online surveys.
He evaluated the
knowledge of the participants by quizzing them regarding the number of years
served by a senator, the name of the current Secretary of Energy, the party
with more conservative positions regarding health care, the political party
currently in control of the House of Representatives, and which of four programs
the U.S. federal government spends the least on.
Most of the participants
performed poorly on the political quiz — and those who performed worse were
more likely to overestimate their performance.
“Many Americans appear
to be extremely overconfident in their political knowledgeability, because they
have no way of knowing how little they actually know about the world of
politics (this is the so-called ‘double bind of incompetence’). But there’s a
catch: when Republicans and Democrats engage in partisan thought processes,
this effect becomes even stronger than before,” Anson explained.
“Partisans with modest
factual knowledge about politics become even more convinced that they are
savvier than average when they reflect on a world full of members of the opposite
party. In fact, when I asked partisans to ‘grade’ political knowledge quizzes
filled out by fictional members of the other party, low-skilled respondents
gave out scores that reflected party biases much more than actual knowledge.”
“The results seem to
indicate the existence of a widespread failure of political discourse in the
United States: when a partisan talks to someone of the out-party, they are
pretty likely to misjudge the political knowledgeability of themselves and
their conversation partner. More often than not, this means that partisans will
think of themselves as far more politically knowledgeable than an out-partisan,
even when that person is extremely politically knowledgeable,” Anson told
PsyPost.
“I think this has major
implications for the breakdowns in political discourse we often observe in
contemporary American democracy.”
Sunday 5 August 2018
Tell me again why the Turnbull Government is insisting My Health Record will become mandatory by the end of October 2018?
It is not just ordinary health care consumers who have concerns about the My Health Record database, system design, privacy issues and ethical considerations.
It is not just the Turnbull Government which has not sufficiently prepared public and private health care organisations for the nationwide rollout of mass personal and health information collection - the organisations themselves are not ready.
Lewis Ryan (Academic GP Registrar) |
* 65% of GP Registrars have never discussed My Health Record with a patient
* 78% of GP Registrars have never received training in how to use My Health Record
* 73% of GP Registrars say lack of training is a barrier to using My Health Record
* 71% of GP Registrars who have used the My Health Record system say that the user interface is a barrier
* Only 21% of GP Registrars believe privacy is well protected in the My Health Record system
In fact Australia-wide only 6,510 general practice organisations to date have registered to use My Health Record and these would only represent a fraction of the 35,982 GPs practicing across the country in 2016-17.
UPDATE
Healthcare
IT News, 3
August 2018:
The Federal Government’s Health Care Homes is
forcing patients to have a My Health Record to receive chronic care management
through the program, raising ethical questions and concerns about
discrimination.
The government’s Health Care Homes trial provides
coordinated care for those with chronic and complex diseases through more than
200 GP practices and Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services
nationally, and enrolment in the program requires patients to have a My
Health Record or be willing to get one.
But GP and former AMA president Dr Kerryn
Phelps claimed the demand for patients to sign up to the national health
database to access Health Care Homes support is unethical.
“I have massive ethical concerns about that,
particularly given the concerns around privacy and security of My Health
Record. It is discriminatory and it should be removed,” Phelps told Healthcare IT News Australia.
Under a two-year trial beginning in late 2017, up
to 65,000 people are eligible to become Health Care Homes patients as part of a
government-funded initiative to improve care for those with long-term
conditions including diabetes, arthritis, and heart and lung diseases.
Patients in the program receive coordinated care
from a team including their GP, specialists and allied health professionals and
according to the Department of Health: “All Health Care Homes’ patients need to
have a My Health Record. If you don’t have a My Health Record, your care
team will sign you up.”
Phelps said as such patients who don’t want a My
Health Record have been unable to access a health service they would otherwise
be entitled to.
“When you speak to doctors who are in involved in
the Heath Care Homes trial, their experience is that some patients are refusing
to sign up because they don’t want a My Health Record. So it is a
discriminatory requirement.”
It has also raised concerns about possible future
government efforts to compel Australians to have My Health Records.
“The general feedback I’m getting is that the
Health Care Homes trial is very disappointing to say the least but,
nonetheless, what this shows is that signing up to My Health Record could just
be made a prerequisite to sign up for other things like Centrelink payments or
workers compensation.”
Human rights lawyer and Digital Rights Watch board
member Lizzie O’Shea claims patients should have a right to choose whether they
are signed up to the government’s online medical record without it affecting
their healthcare.
“It is deeply concerning to see health services
force their patients to use what has clearly been shown to be a flawed and
invasive system. My Health Record has had sustained criticism from privacy
advocates, academics and health professionals, and questions still remain to be
answered on the privacy and security of how individual's data will be stored,
accessed and protected,” O’Shea said. [my yellow highlighting]
An ethics question for corporations large and small
Labels:
access & equity,
greed,
society,
Wealth
Saturday 4 August 2018
Quote of the Week
“Behind every great fortune is a great crime.” [Anon, 2016]
Labels:
say no more!
Friday 3 August 2018
Supermarket giant Coles’ “bagflip’’ did not go down well and the company was stopped in its tracks
This was typical of the response to the Coles Supermarkets Australia Pty Ltd end of July 2018 announcement that is was indefinitely suspending a full ban on the use of free plastic shopping bags in its stores.
The Daily Examiner, 2 August 2018, p.13:
Supermarket giant Coles’
“bagflip’’ in continuing to hand out free reusable plastic bags is a perplexing
move.
After spending the past
month getting its customers used to the idea there would be no more single-use
bags, Coles management has caved in to the tantrums of some customers unable to
get their head around the notion of doing something to help the environment or
pay up.
Not surprisingly the
environmentalists are outraged.
For a start the
so-called reusable plastic bags are just a step up from the tissue-thin,
single-use bags clogging landfill and choking marine wildlife.
The smart thing about
the proposed bag ban was that the supermarket was using a price signal to
reinforce the change, a language its bargain-hunting customers were sure to
understand.
No longer.
The customer has come
first, ahead of the environment, good planning and common sense.
Without a price tag,
customers are going to treat the reusable bags just like the old ones, which
will add a splash of colour to the litter.
It has the same logic as
trying to improve a child’s behaviour by giving in to its demand.
The “child” in this case
does spend millions of dollars in your store, but with Woolworths continuing to
charge the 15 cents for resuable bags, shoppers didn‘t have many options.
By midday on 2 August 2018 Coles reversed its backflip and set a new deadline for stores - 29 August 2018 is now the deadline for handouts of free reusable plastic shopping bags.
Hopefully by the beginning of 2019 even reuseable plastic bags will no longer be available for purchase.
Labels:
Australia,
environment,
pollution
NSW Roads & Maritime Services bungling and corrupt in 2018?
NSW Minister for Roads Maritime and Freight has a policy of sending IT jobs offshore?
With the
national unemployment rate running at 5.4 per cent nationally in June 2018 and
the New South Wales rate sitting at 4.8 per cent or 192,000 people, is the Minister for Roads Maritime and Freight & Nationals MP for Oxley Melinda Pavey secretly closing off employment opportunities for Australian information technology workers as a departmental cost-cutting measure?
These are not exactly the highest paying jobs in this country, averaging $46,000-$100,000 pa and, with the IT worker pool standing at est. 600,000+ nationally it is not as though there is an obvious scarcity of skilled workers available for hire.
So at first it was not easy to explain this......
The Daily Telegraph, 20 July 2018. P.2:
Leaked details of a
meeting between Roads and Maritime Services and seven companies bidding for a
$100 million IT contract contradict state government denials that it mandated
a 30 per cent quota of cut-price overseas workers.
The February 13 meeting,
convened by chief information officer Rob Putter, came six days after the RMS
called for tenders to provide IT services, on the condition that a “minimum” of
20 per cent of jobs would be sent overseas in the first year
and 30 per cent in the second year.
Three Indian firms, Tata
Consultancy Services, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra, attended the meeting along with
Fujitsu, Datacom, Accenture and Wollongong company itree, with 25 people in the
room and 18 dialling in.
A source who attended the
meeting said Mr Putter showed a PowerPoint slide titled RMS Pricing Principles
which stated the RMS was “seeking to achieve the lowest possible cost” to
provide the IT service.
The slide stated RMS’s
“target offshore resource utilisation” required 20 per cent of jobs offshore
in year one, 30 per cent in year two and a “measured ongoing approach
to increase offshore efforts” over the rest of the seven-year contract.
Photocopies of the slide
were provided to attendees, who “discussed at length ... the need to offshore
resources (jobs)”, the source said.
“The RMS personnel
stated that it was mandated by the (Roads) Minister that to achieve the lowest
price they need to seek offshore resources,” the source said.
“This clearly
makes a joke of the Minister’s denial that this tender mandated offshoring.” As
The Daily Telegraph revealed last week, the RMS had called for companies to
provide “development, testing, maintenance and service management for
transport-related software applications and in-the-field hardware”.…..
The RMS announced Mr
Putter’s resignation last week.
Despite NSW Government denials, the fact remains that it is highly likely that jobs were to be sourced overseas as the RMS IT operational budget blowout had reached $80 million in the 12 months to June 2018, following a $40 million blowout in the operational budget in the previous financial year.
It appears that Roads and Maritime Services has bungled its $1 billion IT systems upgrade with more bad news expected.
Dollars for mates?
Dollars for mates?
Crikey.com.au, 2 August 2018:
is under fire after six government
contracts, none of which went to public tender, were awarded to the company after
it hired former state roads minister
Duncan Gay.
The Daily Telegraph ($)
reports that the firm has been awarded contracts from the Roads
and Maritime Services agency worth over $4.46 million after hiring the former
department head as an “executive adviser” just weeks after Gay left parliament
in late 2017. The firm has reportedly hired at least 11 former Roads and
Maritime Services staff members, including two as directors, however Gay says
he has “not been involved in any RMS contracts that MU have won”.
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