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Humor has the same quality that PG describes in his discussion of programming languages, although PG only considers the language "power" continuum and perhaps t

Humor has the same quality that PG describes in his discussion of programming languages, although PG only considers the language "power" continuum and perhaps there is more than one relevant dimension for humor. (I'm not sure about this multidimensionality; more consideration is required.) When one uses a language, one pities those who use less powerful languages at the same time is simply confused by more powerful languages. When one "gets" a joke, one also gets all simpler jokes of the same sort. When one doesn't get a joke, it is deeply offensive to suggest that the joke even exists. Of course you're right about the global consequences. Many people would rather that the world be destroyed in a nuclear conflagration, than that some politician they don't like had told a joke and they hadn't laughed. A few wise people long ago realized that everything is a joke; they also program in Lisp.

robocat 4y ago
Humour was one of the skills tested by the original Dunning-Kruger paper. The paper suggested that the underskilled overestimated their ability to judge if people would find something funny, and the highly skilled underestimated their skill. See section 4.1 of https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One's_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_Self-Assessments https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_... Participants were 65 Cornell University undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who earned extra credit for their participation. We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from Woody Allen (1975), Al Frankin (1992), and a book of “really silly” pet jokes by Jeff Rovin (1996). To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny). [. . .] Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable (a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = -.09).

robocat 4y ago

Humour was one of the skills tested by the original Dunning-Kruger paper. The paper suggested that the underskilled overestimated their ability to judge if people would find something funny, and the highly skilled underestimated their skill. See section 4.1 of https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_and_Unaware_of_It_How_Difficulties_in_Recognizing_One's_Own_Incompetence_Lead_to_Inflated_Self-Assessments https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_... Participants were 65 Cornell University undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who earned extra credit for their participation. We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from Woody Allen (1975), Al Frankin (1992), and a book of “really silly” pet jokes by Jeff Rovin (1996). To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny). [. . .] Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable (a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian's ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = -.09).