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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?

#31

Post by cjslep »

BubRoss wrote: post #24
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…

I could say the same thing about people who talk about radiation without mentioning what part of the frequency spectrum they are referring to.

Exactly, such people who do know would clearly understand my comments are around the allocations of 5G in the tetrahertz range, where the gap is shrinking, instead of uncharitably mischaracterizing my statements in the worst possible light (5G allocations elsewhere in the spectrum).

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

#32

Post by professionalguy »

In data engineering, I think your responses to the 'entity resolution' problem are a good Dunning Kurger style litmus test.

If you don't know, entity resolution is the process of matching unique rows in two or more databases. Are these the same movies? Are these the same person?

Novice DE: Oh easy, just merge on the name.

Intermediate DE: OH GOD NO.

Expert DE: That's complicated, but I have a plan.

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

#33

Post by cjslep »

mhh__ wrote: post #18
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

Studies have repeatedly shown non-ionizing radiation has no long term health effects.

As material science closes the tetrahertz gap, the longitudinal studies, by their very definition, take time to complete (longitudinal studies = exposing animals or individuals at lower doses for much longer periods of times).

It's natural for an undisciplined mind to assume they're also non-ionizing. But it is a mark of a disciplined scientific mind to be cautious and instead not extrapolate outside the existing dataset.

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

#35

Post by wikiman »

jawns wrote: post #28

Dunning-Kruger separating mid- and senior-level devs: JUNIOR DEV: My code is simple and easy to understand. MID-LEVEL DEV: My code is subtle, clever, innovative, expressive, hyper-optimized, and ingenious. SENIOR DEV: My code is simple and easy to understand. -- Source: John Arundel, https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/1219174978748370945 But take that for what it's worth: https://twitter.com/bitfield/status/11847410…

At one job we actually had to give up on take-home challenges basically because a good, humble junior was indistinguishable from a good, clearly-thinking senior

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

#36

Post by igou »

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…

It's a shame that saying "I don't know" isn't as culturally acceptable in many orgs. Technology is incredibly vast and entirely designed by humans, more people than you could ever imagine in the enterprise actually have no idea what they are doing.

Whenever I have casual conversations with individuals that have the same skillset as me, outside of the environment where I wear my professional "all knowing" persona - Admitting that you don't understand something sparks incredible conversations.

What's even more incredible, is that every time I've stood up and said "I actually have no idea how X works. It is magic to me." Every single time somebody else in the room that had me completely convinced they had a strong grasp on those concepts will also admit they don't know either.

These answers are also my red flags. But I place more blame on culture than the individual sometimes.

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

#37

Post by bryanrasmussen »

mlady wrote: post #27

In grappling (Brazilian jiu-jitsu), it is very apparent from one sparring round with a person to get a sense for what they know and get a general idea for their skill/belt level. The exact belt is determined by that person's coach by measuring their skill against their personal potential. An analogy to software would be to pair program with a person. You both get a feel for each other's strengths and weaknesses while…

yeah in programming you get a feeling of if someone is really uncomfortable pair programming.

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

#38

Post by elil17 »

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…

Your point as a whole stands, but I think even saying “we don’t have data” misrepresents the situation. We have strong theoretical reasons, from our understandings of physics and biology, to believe that there will be no harmful effects. An expert would reasonably say to someone, either a layman or another expert, “5G is safe.”

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

#39

Post by sillysaurusx »

mlady wrote: post #27

In grappling (Brazilian jiu-jitsu), it is very apparent from one sparring round with a person to get a sense for what they know and get a general idea for their skill/belt level. The exact belt is determined by that person's coach by measuring their skill against their personal potential. An analogy to software would be to pair program with a person. You both get a feel for each other's strengths and weaknesses while…

Has anyone in the world actually delivered effective, large scale software that was primarily pair programmed?

Genuine question. It would be fascinating if there were documented examples.

Note that this is distinct from having a company culture where pair programming is common. I am skeptical that just because you occasionally look over each other’s shoulder and exchange ideas, that the software ends up being fundamentally different from the ground up. It seems unlikely that two people would both decide to rewrite an entire subcomponent of the project from scratch, whereas individuals do that often. And the results turn out better (but only when the person is an effective programmer, otherwise it’s just a mess).

I don’t think you’d learn much from pairing with me. You’d see me sitting, staring at the screen for long periods of time, saying nothing. Or experimenting with pasting various code tweaks into a repl. The final result that makes it into a text editor is the outcome of both processes, and these have long time horizons. Sometimes far longer than someone else could reasonably tolerate.

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

#40

Post by skellera »

professionalguy wrote: post #32

In data engineering, I think your responses to the 'entity resolution' problem are a good Dunning Kurger style litmus test. If you don't know, entity resolution is the process of matching unique rows in two or more databases. Are these the same movies? Are these the same person? Novice DE: Oh easy, just merge on the name. Intermediate DE: OH GOD NO. Expert DE: That's complicated, but I have a plan.

Just curious, is there a standard way to start attacking that problem?
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