The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real • Hacker News Board

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#51

Post by arithma » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

We all at least are dumber than we'd like to be. Nobody would refuse a pill that would make them smarter. Sorry for off-topic, but this has been gnawing at me lately, feels like something is a miss about my cognition, only very subtle, nothing to go for any kind of practitioner. Is there any route actually for giving the good old fat bucket a rattle to make it work back at original capacity? Have you ever tried anything?

I know this is off-topic, if it annoys anyone, I could take it somewhere else, but thought people interested in this article might have experimented or self-reflected.

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#52

Post by scotty79 » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

kkwteh wrote: post #15

The supposed smoking gun in the article is that if we plot random values for perceived and actual ability we get a chart that looks a lot like the chart in the original study. I don't see how you make the leap from there to saying that the Dunning-Kruger effect is probably not real. The headline is totally overblown if you ask me.

If you claim that you have meaningful pattern in the data, but someone replicates your pattern with meaningless data then it's perfectly valid to argue that your pattern doesn't come from the data but rather from how you chose to process the data.

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#53

Post by glangdale » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

Isinlor wrote: post #14

Does this article actually contains explanation of what was wrong with the original study? Maybe I don't know how to read with understanding, but to me this article makes only two points: 1. The effect was about all people, not just dumb people. 2. The same graph can be obtained "by random". Point 1. makes sense, but 2. is left unexplained. There is a lot of words, but no content. Almost as if GPT-3 was writing it :)…

Point 2 also had me scratching my head. The supposed evidence for it (that graph) is statistical mystery meat.

If the two metrics (confidence and ability) were independent in a simulation, you'd expect to see a more-or-less flat line on confidence if you sorted by ability. So the model clearly insists on some sort of association between them, no? If the association is weak, you get a cross-over. Big deal.

Also, the graphs don't really look all that similar - especially when you consider the fact that the line on which the associated variable have been sorted by quantile is always going to be ascending (duh).

Tufte says "to clarify, add data" - one thing that neither the chart from the original study nor the simulated one respects. Surely we'd learn more from also being able to eyeball a scatterplot.

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#54

Post by tyu2 » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:56 PM UTC

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #50

elmo2you wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why your response got down voted. Maybe some rather specific people got their panties in a twist. Either way, what you said is something Bertrand Russel (certainly not best known for being a dumb man) once worded like this: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt." .. and just for good measure, here is another one o…

Someone said "if you wouldn't attack yourself in street fight don't do it verbally", but for the sake of good British joke I will say following: So, down-voting my answer is confirming my statement. I do not know much about subject but I confidently claimed 100% effect, therefore confirming what I said :) It is like that brain melting sentence "If I say that I am lying, am I lying?" If I claim that Dunning-Kruger Eff…

> I do not know much about subject but I confidently claimed 100% effect, therefore confirming what I said :)

Well, that's not a Dunning-Kruger Effect either, but maybe a confirmation bias mixed with survivorship bias.

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#55

Post by NiceWayToDoIT » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:58 PM UTC

Shacklz wrote: post #48

Not sure if the Dunning-Kruger effect can be applied to everything (such as: humour, grammar, etc., as listed in the article), but I think pretty much everyone who has played any kind of video game (Dota, LoL, Star Craft, CS:GO, etc.) in a competitive "try-hard" environment for long enough will assure you that the Dunning-Krueger effect is indeed real. "It's not my fault for losing this; I am clearly better than the…

Same goes for IT projects, junior developers usually have a significant confidence when facing new problem (task estimation). Their confidence sometimes comes from limited ability to see all the path that may go wrong, on the other hand senior developers although have considerable experience, sometime overthink solution because of the past experiences, and often they leave extra space for so called "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns".

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#56

Post by NiceWayToDoIT » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

tyu2 wrote: post #54

NiceWayToDoIT wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone said "if you wouldn't attack yourself in street fight don't do it verbally", but for the sake of good British joke I will say following: So, down-voting my answer is confirming my statement. I do not know much about subject but I confidently claimed 100% effect, therefore confirming what I said :) It is like that brain melting sentence "If I say that I am lying, am I lying?" If I claim that Dunning-Kruger Eff…

> I do not know much about subject but I confidently claimed 100% effect, therefore confirming what I said :) Well, that's not a Dunning-Kruger Effect either, but maybe a confirmation bias mixed with survivorship bias.

Pffffffffff *amn it ... I can not be right about being wrong in a proper way ...

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#57

Post by jdsalaro » Sat, Dec 26, 2020, 11:59 PM UTC

emerged wrote: post #9

lr4444lr wrote: post #8

Personally speaking, it just struck me as odd that - outside of some rare exceptions - that someone could be so dumb that he'd actually be ignorant of his ineptitude. This is different than misrepresenting your ability. Lots of people do that for lots of reasons, but for someone to be so sheerly ignorant as is often given in the case examples struck me as someone who will sooner rather than later learn painful lesson…

The people I know who fall into this category construct an elaborate world view where they are the constant victim of all the idiots and jerks of the world. Everything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault, not their own ignorance and bad choices.

You might find this study interesting:

"Researchers identify a new personality construct that describes the tendency to see oneself as a victim"

https://www.psypost.org/2020/12/researchers-identify-a-new-p...

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#58

Post by djohnston » Sun, Dec 27, 2020, 12:03 AM UTC

There wasn't an actual explanation as to WHY it wouldn't be real. They show the original plot, then another plot generated with random data that looks like a dampened version of the original effect.

Then there are like 10 paragraphs on either side of these two pictures, which don't do a lot to support these critical plots. I am left unsatisfied!

> "The above Dunning-Kruger graph was created by Patrick McKnight using computer-generated results for both self-assessment and performance. The numbers were random. There was no bias in the coding that would lead these fictitious students to guess they had done really well when their actual score was very low. And yet we can see that the two lines look eerily similar to those of Dunning and Kruger’s seminal experiment. A similar simulation was done by Dr. Phillip Ackerman and colleagues three years after the original Dunning-Kruger paper, and the results were similar."

OK, so you removed the brain, and made some models that produce somewhat similar results. What if your models just modeled the brain? How does this refute the original?

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#59

Post by virtualritz » Sun, Dec 27, 2020, 12:04 AM UTC

>[...] both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency.

Looking at these graphs there is maybe some curious conclusion to be made about the symmetry with imposter syndrome.

If we believe to have 'average' (2nd/3d quartile) knowledge about a subject, there are three possibilities:

1. We are correct in this assumption.

2. We are victims of Dunning-Kruger and know less than we believe we do.

3. We are victims of imposter syndrome and know more than we believe we do.

Re: The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real

#60

Post by TimTheTinker » Sun, Dec 27, 2020, 12:17 AM UTC

I think there are excellent intuitive arguments in favor of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

One is that university students often talk about how suddenly ignorant they feel once they start taking classes with depth of content — and the Ph.D. students who say the feeling only increases the deeper you go.