Primrose Road

It's fascinating (yet not surprising) that confidence doesn't correlate with correctness at all. In fact, when a professor teaching a Cognitive Psych class showed us some studies published in educational psychology journals that suggested a negative correlation between learner confidence and learner correctness, I wanted to jump up out of my seat and wave the studies in the faces of those "self-esteem philosophy" advocates who prefer feel-good teaching to methods of teaching that actually allow learners to, well, learn.

Harriet Hall offers a nice summary of this concept in her review of On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You're Not, which will most likely be my book-of-choice for a 12-hour train ride I'll be taking early next month.

Though I wish the commenters on the Science Based Medicine blog would stop hatin' on postmodernism. ::sniffle:: ;)