"if I find in myself desires nothing in this world can satisfy / I can only conclude that I ... "

[larryhammer]

Five reasons to love Wikipedia:

1. You cannot do anything with Japanese poetry without running into Shiki Masaoka, the first great modernist Japanese poet and critic. He revitalized both the haiku and tanka forms and gave them the names we use now, and set the contemporary tone for how classical Japanese poetry is viewed and discussed.* Thanks to his article, I now know that he also played baseball, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame on the 100th anniversary of his death from TB.

* For what it's worth, he was right about the first poem of the Kokinshu being worthlessly trivial, but not about the collection as a whole.

2. The Dunning-Kruger Effect, aka "Unskilled and Unaware of It," is culturally dependent.

3. Also, Dunning and Kruger recognized the idea was hardly new:

Although the Dunning–Kruger effect was put forward in 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger have quoted Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge")[3] and Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision")[4] as authors who have recognized the phenomenon.

To which one could add "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

ETA: Also, I just ran into Touchstone's "The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool" (As You Like It, V, i)

4. But one probably shouldn't, and not just because it turns out that Yeats was paraphrasing Prometheus Unbound there.

5. There is a disambiguation page for Disambiguation. (There is also meta meta, but it's more trivial.)

... that I was not made for here

---L.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I've noticed the Dunning-Kruger effect myself, but didn't know it had a name! So thank you. Now I'm wondering how far (although he was writing a few years before Prometheus Unbound) Keats's notion of negative capability might be seen as a pre-emptive answer to the Shelley-Yeats idea that some desirable qualities drive each other out.

[A]t once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, & and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

For long time I viewed this as a rather shallow defence of wishy-washiness - and a recipe for the kind of conviction-lacking paralysis Yeats complained of. And maybe it is. On the other hand, Shakespeare (if Keats read him right - a big assumption) was far from paralysed: perhaps the trick is to learn to live with the contradictions, to be aware of them, and still to remain capable of action. Perhaps the capability should be stressed as much as the negativity.

Sorry - I'm not sure that actually makes any sense, but you made me connect those quotations in a way I hadn't before, so I splurged.

[larryhammer]

No, it makes sense. I've always struggled with what, exactly, Keats was Getting At with "Negative Capability." My own answer is that he meant that sort of imaginative empathy with one's characters that is mature enough to allow them to be as complex and contradictory as real people are, but that's a simple enough explanation that I sometimes doubt it, given all the ink and phosphors used debating the issue. It is also possible that, prior to the Realism movement made possible by the rise of the novel, this was not as obvious a concept as it might seem to us today.

(Have you read Keats's letter to Shelley, offering advice on writing? -- which given class issues must have felt doubly presumptuous to the older poet. "Load every rift with ore," indeed.)

I think Coleridge might have also addressed the Shelley/Yeats issue in Biographica Lliteraria, or however that's spelled. Leading one to wonder if it was in the Romantic air & water.

---L.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

"Load every rift with ore," indeed.

It's still politer than "Cut the waffle, Percy".

[larryhammer]

*snrk*

[klwilliams.livejournal.com]

In the four stages of how people go about performing new tasks, the first stage is being confident yet knowing nothing about what needs to be done or how to do it.

[larryhammer]

Yup -- D-K slots very well into the unconscious incompetence/conscious incompetence/conscious competence/unconscious competence stages.

---L.