Learning from the news

When a news story starts taking attention of a large part of the country, like the recent implosion of the Titan sub or as COVID was sweeping the world, many people become “experts”, as shown in memes like this one:

It’s a tricky place to be. Most people indeed learned more about COVID as it happened, but we saw a lot of the Dunning-Kruger effect where people learned a little and thought that they knew a lot. As I shared a few years ago, the Dunning-Kruger effect is essentially:

… a cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task underestimate their own ability.

The key, as I see it, is to learn what you can from the events, but remember how far you remain from being an expert. Curiosity helps.

The Titan

Using the recent implosion of the Titan submersible, I learned quite a lot about what happened. This may be old news for many of you, but for me it was brand new information:

• I now know that “1 atmosphere”, like we feel in the air around us, is roughly 14.7 PSI (pounds per square inch).
• At the depth of the Titanic, the pressure is around 400 atmospheres, or just shy of 6,000 PSI.
• I learned a lot by watching recent interviews with…