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And there's the "Drone Prix" in Dubai, I had no idea there was such a thing. Probably there wasn't, but now there is, and that's the new way of the world and if you didn't know you're an idiot...
I say that in Irony. If you knew I'd tell you you need a life...and that, sincerely...
And Drones, they're cool and all, and drone racing, well, I appreciate it, but imagine...
What if we gave out prizes for self-driving car competitions, and AI competitions, evolving AI, or genetic engineering, green energy, or other cutting edge technologies, where would we be? These are the things that deserve our attention...
Not drones, superficially cool, but autonomous drones that can interact with their surroundings, with convincing AI - Human interfaces, so many deserving endeavors and the basest of them get their own grande-prix...bloody hell...
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Because I'm pretty sure you didn't read through the last article to the "See Also", I've abbreviated a couple of my findings here:
"Ultracrepidarianism is the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one's knowledge."
And this...
"Hanlon's razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways including "never assume bad intentions when assuming stupidity is enough", "never assume malice when stupidity will suffice", and "never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity""
You're welcome.
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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" - Charles Darwin
Yep, we all know that person, in my case that crowd...I need to go back and add that tag to a hundred articles...
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.
Hmmm. I'd completely forgotten about this. The problem is that we all have our blindspots, and I sure as hell have mine...but, as the effect notes, I'm probably not able to see it...
Dunning and Kruger attributed this bias to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their own ineptitude and evaluate their own ability accurately.
But my favorite has to be:
...The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras....
Read more at the Wiki, and the next time you're speaking with that co-worker you might want to work in the term...
Note: In the event that you've seen me work a magic trick or a hot woman at a bar, I'm aware, I'm aware...It's only 9 parts incompetence, the other 1 part is entirely Irony...
Read through to the "See Also". Oh, yeah...
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I will give you this, that if you've found this, that art to you isn't some accurately rendered portrait of a duck, panda-bear or wolf. That you've set the bar a little bit higher and have some appreciation of both the history and role of art...
That said, there's no accounting for taste. Still, I'll try and sum up my own tastes and expectations below...
The role of the artist is to open us up to new experiences, thoughts, feelings, realizations and understandings. These things are not done from the center, they are done from the outskirts, from the margins...you cannot see or describe the shape of the world if you live at the center, from the center you see the world spreads out limitless and without end, rather you must live and travel upon it's edges...
...the artist, they delineate and describe the shape of our world, our expectations, of emotion, of love, of thought, they open up to us the doors to worlds we are too fearful and inadequate to explore ourselves firsthand...
...there is the myth of the self-destructive artist, Orpheus, any one of a number of popular singers, Van-Gogh, ... the myth survives, because what do we expect of them? That they travel further than us, experience more than us, that they feel, love, understand, intuit more than us, and that they somehow bring us back and translate some portion of their understanding, so that we may, vicariously, live through that minute remainder of their experience, the bored suburban housewife who never has been camping, a picture of a wolf upon her wall, the articulate university graduate, never been kissed, Klimt's "The Kiss", the pedant, never outdoors a single night his entire life, "Starry Starry Night", the voyeur, Egon Schiele...from a person's taste in art we may somewhere discern where their life is lacking, what speaks to them...
...For those who would live, they need nothing, they need only to create, for the rest there is the artist, that shared and subdivided, infinitely replicated portion of life that is dulled the moment it is shared and discovered, perhaps only music stands up to the endless replication and division of art, everything else wears thin...but if you were wondering why art doesn't grow in the suburbs, why, it's the same reason that love doesn't, life doesn't, intelligence doesn't, art demands a richer soil, and the comfortably numb will never weep for joy or sadness to fertilize it...
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Now it seems, what with the elections recently passed in Canada and Alberta, and elections happening in the US, that we're not being offered a viable selection of candidates to choose from.
Popularity is not a qualification.
Now while leadership courses abound, few offer any measurable increase in skills and none are relevant towards leading a country. And everyone seems to have their own idea as to what constitutes "leadership" - in Alberta, most people feel that business is a great background, as if the country were somehow a corporation that exists to serve shareholders. While some aspects of the metaphor hold up, what generally transpires then is you end up with a government that favors corporations over people, and a fundamental principle of government is "For the people, by the people", not "For the corporations, by the corporations".
Education - degrees in Economics, Drama, Teaching, Political Science - where relevant embraces only a narrow aspect of government, or embraces theory over fact, and where irrelevant serves only to make the leaders a laughingstock.
So what then, would be an appropriate combination of skills and background, that would serve as a prerequisite for leading the country? Implicitly we like a post-secondary education, a church-going family man (married, with children), it's nice if you speak French (Canada is bilingual, after all), it's swell if you've a successful business background (inspires confidence), but each of these skills on their own and taken together hardly qualify anyone to run a Country.
But explicitly, what qualifications should we ask for? If we were running a help-wanted ad for Prime Minister, what would be some of the skills and background we'd look for?
Probably someone who had lived a fair number of years both in the East and West of the country, to gain an broad understanding of each of the provinces expectations of government. Too frequently we select leaders that have lived their entire lives in a single province, and govern as if that province were the world. A demonstrable understanding, first-hand, of the global economy, and of the history of the country, a shared determination as to the future of the country, perhaps someone who had financed their own education (because those people who have had their education given to them have a very different view of the world than those who have had to earn it), and perhaps favor candidates who had lived abroad a minimum of X years in countries that differed Q,Y,Z in terms of politics, GDP, etc.
These are just suggestions with a view at making you think: What background would your ideal candidate have? And what prerequisites would you consider imperative for the governance of a Country?