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Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

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Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#11

Post by jimmaswell »

beefield wrote: post #5

Don't know about questions, but there are couple of answers I have learned to be serious red flags: 1. Yes, I understand. (with no further elaboration or clarifying questions) 2. It's okay/good/going well (again, with no further elaboration when asking how something is going/set up etc) First one typically translates to something between "I have a completely unfounded illusion of understanding" and "I have no clue bu…

>"I have a completely unfounded illusion of understanding" and "I have no clue but don't dare to say it"

Or "I'm tired of this droning conference call/meeting where I can barely understand some people's accents and I'd rather just clarify some points in writing later where I don't have to rely on my memory."

>"I have no clue whatsoever"

Or it really is going fine and I don't want to spend forever going into technical details the person asking isn't even going to understand and get interrogated on anything that doesn't sound like it's going perfectly, when everything is under control on my end.

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#12

Post by sk5t »

beefield wrote: post #5

Don't know about questions, but there are couple of answers I have learned to be serious red flags: 1. Yes, I understand. (with no further elaboration or clarifying questions) 2. It's okay/good/going well (again, with no further elaboration when asking how something is going/set up etc) First one typically translates to something between "I have a completely unfounded illusion of understanding" and "I have no clue bu…

#2 might alternately be symptomatic of not wanting to chat with you on the matter, no?

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#14

Post by kody »

I'll let you know when I no longer feel like the chaff!

It'd probably be similar to beefield's. Present a problem with a clear success condition and see how resourceful they are in solving it. A failure would be solving the wrong problem, making excuses (or "the problem is not solvable"), confidently talking in abstractions that don't concretely pertain to the problem, or failure to ask a question/say "I don't know".

I don't know that there's a technical question or problem I could ask to make a call on whether or not they know their stuff.

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#15

Post by paulcole »

"Do you think you can write your own blog posts?"

Everyone thinks they can but almost nobody actually will. I'm not a particularly good writer, but I can do what most people can't/won't, actually follow through on writing something month after month after month.

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#16

Post by aaron-santos »

jakevoytko wrote: post #9

In software engineering, I think "unconditional faith in a single technique or technology" is a good sign of overconfidence in one's knowledge or ability. This certainly applied to me when I was younger. Engineers who go all-in on a specific technique will have really inconsistent results: some projects will go amazing because the technique was the best option. Some projects won't go so great because the technique wa…

I've seen that so many times, but also its opposite too: willingness to drop the stack when a relatively minor problem pops up. Navigating through both of these takes experience and keen observation.

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#17

Post by latencyloser »

jaymicha wrote: post #13

Tell me about an opinion you hold on some piece of technology (framework, language, design pattern, etc.), one you have a fair amount of conviction about and hold pretty strongly. Now tell me how you arrived at that opinion and conviction.

Depending on what opinion they pull out, I might tweak that and suggest: "What's the argument against that opinion?"

From what I've seen, a lot of people can rattle off reasons they've heard for why a particular thing is done, but have not deeply considered the opposite side of that opinion and what its benefits may be. Ymmv.

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#18

Post by mhh__ »

cjslep wrote: post #7

When people plain-language declare things as "safe" or "unsafe" it's clear they don't have a background in technical risk assessment. When people call 5G "safe" or "unsafe", it's clear they don't know about radiation effects on human health. The correct answer is "we don't have data". Edit: The fact that people would rather make fun of me and imagine me as an "non-ionizing radiation tin foil hatter" (I am not, non-io…

Well yeah but have you considered that if you put a mouse in a slowly oscillating catastrophic magnetic field you get a usually statistically insignificant outcome!! Wake up sheeple

Re: Ask HN: What would the Dunning-Kruger “test” be for your field?

#19

Post by MereInterest »

In physics, especially anything remotely related to quantum physics, whether somebody focuses on measurable quantities or not. If somebody has a new measurement technique, something that gives better precision than before, great. If somebody has a new theoretical model that applies to cases that previous models didn't, great. If somebody has a new theoretical model that gives different results than current models, that is great because new experiments can determine between them.

If somebody has a new model that gives the exact same predictions as a current model, lauds it as being obviously the truth, and dismisses all other models as falsehood, then it can be dismissed. This applies to all various interpretations of quantum physics, since they all yield the same measurable predictions.

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