Ducking the Dunning–Kruger Effect (Part 1)

Dunning-Kruger Effect describes a lot of activists on the right and left. The only cures are hindsight, skepticism, humility, and listening. Duck.

We slowly learn that "e-waste dynasty" is really not that special.   It has been a good ride. It brought something new for career recyclers like myself to get excited about, after the goals of universal curbside recycling, recycled content, household hazardous waste collections, and landfill capping and closure became yawn-ho-hum.

And it is indeed important not to squander the carbon embedded in the manufacture of gadgets.  Vital to respect the enormous burden of mining on Earth's habitats. Our demand for copper, silver, gold, zinc, palladium, rhodium, tantalum, and other minerals and metals to make our chips, capacitors and circuits is crushingly important.  

But the "impact" of discarded electronics on landfills and foreign beaches has been overplayed.   The associated toxics are far less newsworthy than "a-waste" (automobiles), original mining of the metals, original manufacture, or even the use and disuse of the electronics during its life.

What "the great e-waste crisis" offered was illusory superiority.  In a vacuum of data and definition, we became our own titles.  We announced ourselves as "non-exporters", or "professionals", or "stewards", or "certified".   We became "Good guys".  Our companies were "Creative", and "Synergistic" and "International" and "Solutions", all competing (for attention and investment) in "solving the e-waste problem".

A new cause is an opportunity to claim expertise as the journalists come looking.  But what were we "experts" in, really, except the "topic" of a new category of scrap?

What do you know, really, about the oldest Texas Instruments calculator in your house?   You've owned it 30 years.  Are you an expert about its end-of-life?  Does the fact that you own it, and the prospective buyer (in China) does not (yet), make you the expert on e-waste?

"The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.^[1] Actual competence may weaken self-confidence, as competent individuals may falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding."

"Where Unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority..."  How well does the Dunning-Kruger effect describe rallies to the cause of electronics recycling?

Everyone in the developed world, and billions of people in the emerging world, have something electronic which was worth a lot of money once and now isn't.  It's the "wealth" of "e-waste" haves.  You are a "have",  I'm a "have".  Six billion out of seven billion - the "non-OECD" - have been defined as the "have-nots".   Yet 80% of them are actually "haves" as well.  But if you are looking for a 30 year old "waste" item, like a TI calculator, you better look first among the "haves" of Christmas Past.

We have evolved to save things which we procured at cost.  Our ancestors survived on the reuse of spear-heads, and scavenging biproduct bones.  We are programmed to get value back out of things we have invested in.   But if there's nothing economic to do with it, it just manifests itself as guilt.

Interpol's Sending Africa "Back to Eden"

INTERPOL targets foreign trade Between Europe, Africa (Lyons, France)

"Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice" - Senator Barry Goldwater

Back-wards To Eden.  

I am well aware that white people using the word "racist" are vulnerable to being ignored.  We just don't get it, my African friends and me.  40 businesses arrested, goods seized.  USA laws proposed to outlaw trade between us.   Study after study shows that the African entrepreneurs have no financial incentive to pay for the import of junk.   Studies show that the "e-waste dumps" filmed by do-gooders from IFIXIT to Pieter Hugo depict mainly African electronics, used by Africans for years, sometimes "traded in" for newer used models, sometimes collected from the streets by scrap dealers (the same as rag pickers and newspaper drives collected recyclables from the alleys of New York, Philadephia, or Boston).

Anyone who has lived in Africa knows that a family without formal education dreams of a handful of jobs for their kids.  Agriculture (e.g., Fair Trade Coffee picked "by hand"), the army, and working for a multinational like Exxon or Nike, those are considered the "good" jobs.

Poaching elephant tusks, gorilla hands, bushmeat hunting, sex tourism, drug smuggling, and using toxic mercury to delve the rivers for gold... those are the jobs I'd want my kids to avoid.

Of all these jobs, of all the resource-curse jobs, the globalist sweat shop jobs, the finite material mining, the pollution, of all these ways for Africans to earn income, David Higgins of Interpol in Lyons, France, has elevated one of them to criminality.

Reuse and repair of used electronics.   That's the bad one.

There's a new idea circulating in Europe for Africa's future.   "Back to Eden".

Here's the thing.

used outfit:  confiscate

I need TWO HANDS to count the number of my friends who have lost 30-60% of their life savings, who have been arrested, or whose goods have been labelled as "toxic", despite the fact that these people cherry pick like all hell, and all of them refuse 90% of the material that comes through our door.

Yet I have never, ever, been questioned on the 90% of junk, toxic, crap, obsolete material that I ship to white people.

So please someone, explain this "Eden" solution to me.  I'm listening.

100 Years Ago, before USA was OECD

Emailed from my mother in the Ozarks.  Great grandfather Freeland bought her property in 1908, then bought a used printing press and started a newspaper (Taney County Republican).

At the times William Freeland wrote his daily news columns, here is what the USA was like.  Today, more people have electricity in the non-OECD than in the USA during my parents childhood.

Here are some statistics for the Year 1910:

************ ********* ************

The average life expectancy for men was 47 years.

Fuel for a car was sold in drug stores only.

Only 14 percent of the homes had a bathtub.

Only 8 percent of the homes had a telephone.

There were only 8,000 cars and only 144 miles of paved roads.

The maximum speed limit in most cities was 10 mph.

The tallest structure in the world was the Eiffel Tower 

The average US wage in 1910 was 22 cents per hour.

The average US worker made between $200 and $400 per year.

A competent accountant could expect to earn $2000 per year, a dentist $2,500 per year, a veterinarian

between $1,500 and $4,000 per year, and a mechanical engineer about $5,000 per year.

More than 95 percent of all births took place at HOME.

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