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Showing posts with the label overestimate

So What Do the Top 5% Think of Themselves?

Recently I commented on a piece at smartplanet.com that talked about how 40% of us think we're in the top 5%. But what about that top 5%?  What do they think? According to a new article at smartplanet.com, the same researcher who gave us the 40% number now says that those people don't think they're very smart at all. Say what?   Cornell University psychology professor David Dunning says, "By far it is more common to find people overestimating rather than underestimating themselves, but a minority of the time it is certainly possible for people to slip into perceptions of 'impostorship.' They do so mostly for the same reasons that people overestimate: Life provides no answer sheets objectively telling people how well they are doing. They have to infer it, and they can make mistakes." Writes Alyson Windsor, "I found this article fascinating because many of my smart and successful friends and colleagues seem to have the opposite problem. The...

Stub Your Toe? Don't Go to the ER

Admit it. You've gone to the emergency room when it really wasn't an emergency.  Strep throat.  My son falling out of my jogging stroller headfirst on the pavement.  And through a glass coffee table (maybe that one counts). But emergency rooms today see people for head colds, scrapes and even mosquito bites, and they're sick of it, according to The Washington Post. And they're taking out an ad to stop it. The ad was created by Britain's National Health Service and it shows well-dressed people waiting in line with balloon captions like "stomachache," "cough" and "unsure about illness" over their heads. "Here in the United States, emergency room trips have steadily grown, from 67 million visits in 1996 to 119 million trips in 2008, and ER trips can be expensive," Sarah Kliff posts. "One study back in 1994 found that treating non-emergency conditions in an emergency department setting contributed $5 billion to $7 billi...