Shared by iand
What does this mean for HR departments? Should they take the Cowell approach?
Earlier I promised:…Or it could have been a witty commentary on how the Dunning-Kruger Effect keeps Simon Cowell in a job…
Here's that post. I'd actually been meaning to write this for a while, but I only found the link again recently. OK, I'm madly oversimplifying here, but basically, the Dunning-Kruger effect basically says that if you're really bad at something, then you don't know, because you can't evaluate your performance properly. Probably the easiest way to look at this is that if you plot people's actual performance against their perceived performance, you don't get a straight line – you get a kind of U-shape.
So what does this mean? Basically, people who are utterly hopeless at something, are protected from realising how useless they are, by not really knowing what's going on. This is how most people (yes, those people that you have to share the roads with) think they're good drivers, when in actual fact – oh, you know.
Anyhow, this stuff keeps Simon Cowell in a job, because it's responsible for the squads of talentless losers who shuffle up for an audition. I mean, that's the best bit, isn't it? That's why they changed the format so there was five weeks of auditions. Because we all love watching Simon Cowell crush people's dreams don't we? I know I do. Oh yes.
Talisians – Talis People Past and Present, 5th Jan 2009
Posted by edgling 
Notes from the edge 