RuddNet Day 3. The armchair-expert “network engineers” who infest Whirlpool, people who’ve never built a network more complex than the one linking their porn stash to the TV, are suddenly spouting off about national-scale infrastructure not just there but everywhere. Pity their friends.

So began the article I wrote for Crikey on Thursday 9 April.

As John Safran once said, thanks to the internet, “We can all now chip in and pool our ignorance.” The Dunning-Kruger Effect operates full force. As always.

And nowhere was that ignorance better represented than on Twitter.

I’m such a hypocrite. I’ve previously slagged off journalists for simply copying comments from Twitter without adding any value. And this piece is, essentially, a summary of what’s been said on Twitter. Oh dear. Anyway, you too can be a journalist by following the same technique. The Crikey piece explains how.

You can use Twitter Search to find every tweet mentioning “nbn”. But for a richer experience, the much prettier Twitterfall lets you view an animated twitterstream, pearls of wisdom dropping as Manna from Heaven.

Just imagine. With the NBN it won’t just be typed words, you’ll be able to see and hear all this in living colour and surround sound. Ah, $43 billion…

I’ll probably have a summary of some of the better commentary when I return to work mode on Tuesday.

Manifestations include:

1. incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their own level of skill,
2. incompetent individuals fail to recognize genuine skill in others,
3. incompetent individuals fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy,
4. if they can be trained to substantially improve their own skill level, these individuals can recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill.

This certainly applies to a news story I stumbled across today: Texas has appointed an anti-intellectual creationist as the head of their schools board. A school head who thinks education is a bad thing?