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What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

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Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#81

Post by DonHopkins »

burnished wrote: post #13
internetslave wrote: post #6

What’s the name for the effect of people always bringing up the dunning kruger effect like it’s the answer to everything? I can’t go a day without reading about it Seems like this and bloom filters. Constantly on HN. Both mostly useless

What if its that thing where when you learn about something it seems like its suddenly everywhere, except it was always there, you're just noticing it now?

The Plate of Shrimp Effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vRJ5cCP0ZPE&ab_channel=Movie...

The more you drive, the less intelligent you are.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#82

Post by T-A »

bitshiftfaced wrote: post #3

Doesn't seem to be any discussion of Nuhfer's findings, which showed that you could recreate the effect with just random data. The bias comes from the process of manipulating normalized data: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/

Presumably because the post is from 2010, and Nuhfer's article is from 2017.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#83

Post by maxerickson »

dahart wrote: post #56
maxerickson wrote: post #31

The lesson I take from Dunning-Kruger is that self evaluation is hard.

The participants in the study didn’t self-evaluate directly, they self-ranked, against the other participants (all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra credit). There’s a very important difference there, because self-ranking requires knowledge of other people’s skills. Do note that the DK paper found a positive correlation between confidence and skill. Most people here and elsewhere seem to believe the DK effect…

(I went and skimmed back over it) In most of the studies, they had the participants estimate how they'd do relative to others and also how they would score. Not the first one, but the rest of them.

For confidence, the positive correlation doesn't help with the problem where someone with low end confidence estimates similarly to someone with higher confidence but is much more wrong.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#84

Post by nsonha »

watwut wrote: post #69
tjs8rj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abstract mentions women self-assess more accurately than men. As a man and thinking about my own mindset with self assessment, I wonder if the definition of “self-assessment” itself might differ between men and women on average. For myself, if you ask me to do a task in a discipline I know little about, I might assess myself as being capable of doing so even without the prior experience, because I figure “I can f…

No, it is not different definition. Women think they can learn things too. However, if you ask them how good they are in something or whether they already know it, they are more likely to provide accurate answer. Also true story: if I am solving a problem and ask dude whether he knows the solution, he says yes I do, takes away my keyboard, starts googling and then refuses to return keyboard back, it is serious wtf an…

As a man I did the take away keyboard thing many times in the past. In SOME of the instances the people asked for help were incompetent. Regardless, I think a better approach should be spending time helping them do it themselves instead.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#85

Post by etripe »

finjo wrote: post #70
tjs8rj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The abstract mentions women self-assess more accurately than men. As a man and thinking about my own mindset with self assessment, I wonder if the definition of “self-assessment” itself might differ between men and women on average. For myself, if you ask me to do a task in a discipline I know little about, I might assess myself as being capable of doing so even without the prior experience, because I figure “I can f…

I don't know how they conducted the experiment, but they mention something about a science assessment. If you ask about math and science, men are going to believe they're more competent than they actually are because they've been socialized to believe they're better at it. If they asked about cooking or cleaning, you'd probably get the opposite reaction. Of course men aren't inherently better at math nor are women be…

> men are going to believe they're more competent ... because they've been socialized to believe they're better at it.

That's one of the central dogmatic feminist talking points that are just spouted off uncritically, along with other things men are supposedly socialised for, like wage negotiation and preferences for violence, taking up space and technical subject matter. Included is the starting position that women and men are the same and if women are perceived to be behind, it's because something was done to them irrespective of their own agency and accountability as individuals and adults. It's a conspiracy theory, and an infantilising one at that.

In social sciences, this becomes social and/or (modern) historical determinism, leaning heavily towards assuming everything's a construct and caused by historical precedent, ignoring biology (other animals, hormones, sexual attraction, evolution), long-term history and global invariability of gender roles. Sure, that's a feel good narrative, but is it a rational stance supported by evidence?

> If they asked about cooking or cleaning, you'd probably get the opposite reaction.

If this is about socialisation, the simpler explanation is that men are socialised to project confidence, because that's what romantically/sexually rewarded. The link towards granular, per-topic confidence is more tenuous and requires you accept a lot of feminist baggage at face value or provide an alternate explanation.

> Of course men aren't inherently better at math nor are women better at cleaning.

No, but perhaps they are more interested in maths by virtue of the topic itself, or due to ancillary effects like future status and wages, like women are more interested in nesting than men. Similarly, men are generally more drawn to the concepts of service and duty than women are, which is why vastly more men work logistics, manufacturing, law enforcement, fire departments and the military.

Personally, I find feminist axioms to be a very poor predictor of reality because they fail to account for mating strategies, personal choice, responsibility and preference - which is ironic for a movement that was initially about women's choices in the reproductive sphere.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#86

Post by dahart »

ltbarcly3 wrote: post #79
dahart wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're so dumb they are too dumb to know they are dumb! It’s really too bad Dunning & Kruger’s data didn’t show anyone being too dumb to know it, nor did it even show anyone being dumb at all. So maybe the meaning isn’t as precise as you think? All the participant scores were relative to their peer group (no way to know if they were dumb or smart), and all the participants were Ivy League college kids. That doesn’…

You overestimated how well you understood my comment. I was commenting on the irony of how people bring up dunning kruger to insult other people. Why bother going to the effort trying to correct someone without bothering to take 30 seconds to even read their comment?

Relax friend, I did read your comment before replying and I was agreeing with you that it's ironic. I guess I did misunderstand your statement about precise meaning, but what exactly makes you think I was trying to insult you? I wasn't, and I apologize for giving that impression.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#87

Post by watwut »

nsonha wrote: post #84
watwut wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it is not different definition. Women think they can learn things too. However, if you ask them how good they are in something or whether they already know it, they are more likely to provide accurate answer. Also true story: if I am solving a problem and ask dude whether he knows the solution, he says yes I do, takes away my keyboard, starts googling and then refuses to return keyboard back, it is serious wtf an…

As a man I did the take away keyboard thing many times in the past. In SOME of the instances the people asked for help were incompetent. Regardless, I think a better approach should be spending time helping them do it themselves instead.

In that particular situation, saying "no I don't know" would be only acceptable behavior, imo.

If I am asking for my keyboard back, I should not have to physicality touch or fight you to get it back. Regardless of what you think about me.

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#88

Post by dahart »

maxerickson wrote: post #83
dahart wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The participants in the study didn’t self-evaluate directly, they self-ranked, against the other participants (all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra credit). There’s a very important difference there, because self-ranking requires knowledge of other people’s skills. Do note that the DK paper found a positive correlation between confidence and skill. Most people here and elsewhere seem to believe the DK effect…

(I went and skimmed back over it) In most of the studies, they had the participants estimate how they'd do relative to others and also how they would score. Not the first one, but the rest of them. For confidence, the positive correlation doesn't help with the problem where someone with low end confidence estimates similarly to someone with higher confidence but is much more wrong.

Agreed, the positive correlation makes the results harder to judge, and specifically it means that one cannot reliably use confidence to predict skill, other than higher confidence is generally associated with higher skill. It's unfortunate how many people cite DK to erroneously justify linking confidence with lack of skill. Based on the paper, the only thing we can say about skill by looking at confidence is that more confident people are statistically likely to be more skilled.

You are right, they did mention self-evaluation of score. "Lest one think these results reflect erroneous peer assessment rather then erroneous self-assessment, participants in the bottom quartile also overestimated the number of test items they had gotten right by nearly 50%."

But the results and conclusions of all the studies are focusing on the rankings and not the scores. It's difficult to even understand what the absolute range of scores is, and of course we don't see the actual questions they asked, so we don't know what the scores mean.

Figures 2 and 3 say to me that zero people in the study knew how well they ranked or what their score was, the survey data is basically flat with noise. This could be explained by questions that are hard to understand, or by participants guessing at the answers. They didn't propose those explanations though, they wax on and on about how people who underperform overestimate their abilities.

How do we know the participants even tried to answer correctly? They were all undergrads getting extra credit (which suggests they needed extra credit and were within the range of grades where it might help to get extra credit... consider what that means relative to skill: it's a narrow range of students not getting an F nor getting an A.) And they were getting extra credit just for being there, not for answering correctly. What if they were lazy? What if they were told their answers didn't matter? Why should we assume they didn't answer randomly? Even if they did try, the participants were all Ivy League undergrads who have been told they're among the elite and made it through a highly selective process of admission. Of course they rate & rank themselves highly. 100% of the participants were in a single college psych class, there were no uneducated people, no morons, and nobody who actually had meaningful "deficits in metacognitive skill" relative to the general population. Why is the set of people used in this study not considered an invalidating confounding factor for the results?

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#89

Post by colineartheta »

kortilla wrote: post #65
colineartheta wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this mostly just reads as very sexist. >...we are more confident we can learn it even if we don’t know it. I’m confident women can learn things they aren’t familiar with, and as quickly as a man can. Your whole comment reeks of bias, actually.

Read it again. The comment you are mindlessly bashing is talking about men having more confidence in the ability to learn on the fly, not having more ability to learn on the fly.

I’m not mindlessly bashing anything, I’m speaking up about mindless sexism. You should read it again from the perspective that men and and women are equal, and that “men having more confidence” is a damaging psychology to have (sexist).

Re: What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

#90

Post by colineartheta »

d3ckard wrote: post #63
colineartheta wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No offense, but this mostly just reads as very sexist. >...we are more confident we can learn it even if we don’t know it. I’m confident women can learn things they aren’t familiar with, and as quickly as a man can. Your whole comment reeks of bias, actually.

He didn’t say they can’t learn things, he said they are less confident. He actually used the word “hubris” while describing men. Stop making it into sexism, it’s the opposite if anything.

How is it the opposite? His claim is that women lack confidence, something I’m confident is false. Even giving the benefit of the doubt - that men are simply “more confident” - is sexist and frankly untrue, which is what I said originally. It’s people like you, and him, that make it difficult for women to with these damaging, blanket assumptions that you just take to be true.
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