Dr. Richard Carrier PhD: A Case Study in the Dunning-Kruger Effect
In a famous paper published in 1999, psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning described a phenomenon that has since become widely known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. These authors were not the first to be aware of this phenomenon. They cite Charles Darwin, who had observed more than a century earlier that "ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
As Kruger and Dunning describe it, the effect can be summarized as follows:
We argue that 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 mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.
In other words, the effect describes the situation where someone who is incompetent and insufficiently educated in a particular field believes that their judgement within that field trumps that of real experts. One sees this quite often, but perhaps nowhere more so than in the collected works of Dr. Richard Carrier PhD, the independent scholar.
Is there no limit to this person's delusional self-aggrandizement? Richard Carrier, who holds a Ph.D. in ancient history, ceaselessly makes authoritative-sounding pronouncements on such diverse topics as mathematics, artificial intelligence, physics, zoology, art, music and psychology.
Consider his assertions a propos the question "Is the brain a computer [that is, a piece of hardware that runs a programme]?" This question was answered in the negative by philosopher John R. Searle in an article in which he described the well-known
Chinese Room argument. There is an extensive literature on this question and Searle's controversial thought experiment. It is not my intention to delve into this controversy here; I would just like to show how a comically incompetent dilettante like Dr. Carrier demonstrates the Dunning-Kruger effect.
If
we are to believe Dr. Carrier, this John R. Searle, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is some kind of ignoramus, who "does not seem to know what he is talking about", who "doesn’t know what a computer is," who is "ignoring science, and ignorantly sitting in the armchair doing pseudoscience, " and who is "a terrible philosopher who doesn’t know jack about brain science."
On the other hand, the thinker who has settled this matter once and for all is no less a person than Dr. Carrier himself:
My argument against his is already in Sense and Goodness without God. That is, I there refute his claim that the mind cannot be a computer. My argument is conclusive on that point. There is nothing more to be said.
"There is nothing more to be said." Hahahahahaha.
Granted, it is not a priori impossible that an unemployed blogger who was trained in papyrology, ancient languages, and Roman history knows more about the theory of mind and artificial intelligence than a world famous philosopher who has made it his life's work to think and write about these things. It is possible that such a philosopher enjoys tenure at one of the most prestigious universities in the world, and yet doesn't know shit about computers and neuroscience. Possible, but not
likely.
Instead, it is far more likely that it is Dr. Richard Carrier PhD who is the bullshitting ignoramus who doesn't know what he is talking about. No, this is not an appeal to authority. That would be the case if I had written, "Dr. Searle must be correct, because he is a famous philosopher who works at a top tier university." I'm not saying that Searle is correct. I'm saying it is extremely unlikely that Carrier is better educated in this subject than a professional.
Carrier's book
Sense and Goodness without God is best described as an attempt to do philosophy by someone who lacks the competence to do so. It is a litany of ill-defined concepts and apodictic statements. Someone who knows a bit about the subjects touched upon could read it to have a good laugh, but otherwise it is a worthless abomination. It's cargo-cult philosophy: Philosophy by an incompetent who believes he is more competent than the experts in the field. A textbook case of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I could give many examples of laughably wrong statements in this book. Consider the following:
Many animals have unique personalities, memories, and mental abilities, and can be “conscious” of their surroundings, even to a certain extent themselves. But to be able to fully perceive themselves—as a mind, as a person—requires a special organ capable of such a computation, and an organ capable of perceiving a whole pattern of such a size and complexity would have to be vastly complex itself, far more than any other sensory organ like, say, the human eye.
It just so happens that we have one of these: a cerebral cortex, the most complex biological organ in the world—in fact, as far as we know, the most complex thing in the whole universe. Animal brains are simpler, lacking this organ.
So much wrong and so little time. Of course, all mammals have a cerebral cortex; this is not some kind of unique, independently evolved organ that is only found in humans, as Carrier seems to believe. Mice have a cerebral cortex. Chimps have one. There are dolphins with more neurons in their cerebral cortex than Richard Carrier.
What we see here are the over-confident statements of the person who lacks the knowledge to realize that he is spouting nonsense. A deluded sufferer from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
To return to the Searle controversy, in response to a comment by one of his readers,
Carrier writes:
I don’t understand what you think you are arguing. You asked me to demonstrate Searle was wrong. I demonstrated Searle was wrong. That’s the end of that.
Of course, Carrier did not "demonstrate" that Searle was wrong; he just demonstrated his own ignorance. One final citation of Carrier's bullshit should make this apparent:
1.
“A hurricane can be simulated on a computer. That does not imply that a hurricane is a computer.” Yes, it is. Computation theory entails that the most efficient computer for calculating the behavior of a system is the system itself (see
Labyrinths of Reason). All systems are information processing computers. The only question is what the input and output are, i.e. what is being computed. In weather’s case, what is being computed is where atoms go. Given the inputs, you get the outputs. The laws of physics are just the software code, implemented in the hardware of the shape of spacetime (and perhaps particles moving in it, although even they might just be knots of spacetime). Searle does not know information theory (all thermodynamics analogs to information theory, for example…in other words, all of physics is just information theory played out on a computer made of spacetime and particles). He does not know computation theory (he does not know that analog computers are a thing, for example, or that a Turing computer is just one type of computer, and indeed just one type of
digital computer, which is also in turn just one type of computer).
Again, there is so much wrong here that it would take far more words than I care to devote on the ramblings of Dr. Carrier PhD to show all the mistakes and misconceptions. Let me just point out that it is not true that a "Turing computer" (the proper term is Turing Machine) is "just one type of
digital computer." Anyone who knows anything about computer science knows that this is not even wrong. Even more egregious is Carrier's shifting of the goal posts in his attempted refutation of Searle. Where Searle had explicitly defined a computer as a piece of hardware that carries out a certain specified programme, Carrier argues that in some very general sense [i[everything[/i] is a computer. So Searle was wrong, because if everything is a computer, than the brain is a computer. QED.
This is like "winning" a game of chess by vomiting over the pieces, so that your opponent gives up in disgust. It doesn't make Dr. Carrier PhD a brilliant chess player. Just a sad, deluded figure.
Returning to the original paper by Kruger and Dunning, it may be insightful to compare their predictions about incompetent people with an actual incompetent, Dr. Richard Carrier PhD.
They write:
These shards of empirical evidence suggest that incompetent individuals have more difficulty recognizing their true level of ability than do more competent individuals and that a lack of metacognitive skills may underlie this deficiency. Thus, we made four specific predictions about the links between competence, metacognitive ability, and inflated self-assessment.
Prediction 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria. [Carrier: Check.]
Prediction 2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it-be it their own or anyone else's. [Carrier: Check.]
Prediction 3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability. [Carrier: Check.]
Prediction 4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly. [See my comments below, JS.]
I am not so sure about their Prediction 4. It seems to me that one of the character flaws that makes a person incompetent and yet willing to pretend to be competent outside their field of expertise is an unwillingness to confront reality. Educating themselves may be a painful confrontation with their incompetence. We see in Dr. Carrier that attempts by his commenters to correct him are simply dismissed in the rudest possible way. Like this:
Searle ignored the science then. And continued to do so, as I just showed here again, with your own ignorant example (you evidently don’t know the science either, as otherwise you’d have never imagined the article you sent me was any good).
That’s fundamentally bad philosophy.
End of story.
Instead of Kruger and Dunning's Prediction 4, I'd predict the following:
Prediction 5. The incompetent who are bold enough to make authoritative-sounding statements in subjects outside their area of competence will resist attempts to educate them.
Dr. Richard Carrier PhD is a case in point.
Reference
Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. 1999. Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77(6): 1121--1134 (PDF available
here).
