Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

raptori.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 77 posts

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#31

Post by duxup »

ben_w wrote: post #18
duxup wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All popular phrases go through that phase where it is recklessly used to the point that you don't know what anyone means by it. At some point it ends up being (for some people) a pejorative that you can read simply as "I don't like it". Dunning-Kruger certainly has reached that point, you have to really dig to figure out if they're just throwing the phrase around or they're applying it in a thoughtful manner. All sor…

Indeed; to me, it seems that pejorative use of the phrase "virtue signalling" is itself an act of virtue signalling. And now the meta-question: did I just…

Yeah there's some thick irony of the sorta public call out aspect of declaring that someone is virtue signalling. To me "virtue signalling" even in it's more strict definition is often so close to just "communication" that I just don't see see the usefulness of the phrase.

I get the idea that it usually implies that the person doing so is being insincere but I honestly think the better way to do that is just say they're being insincere and demonstrate why.

Without showing why they're insincere it seems like it is just an empty phrase.

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#32

Post by somenameforme »

Dunning-Kruger should go the way of the Stanford Prison Experiment. For those who may not know about the latter, it was also largely faked. Guards were coached in how to act, the famous 'Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside. I can't stand another night!' prisoner was a student who wanted to go study (which he was told he was allowed to, but wasn't) and so he faked a mental breakdown, and so on.

Back to Dunning Kruger, it's largely a statistical trick. Wiki actually has a pretty decent section on this [1], alongside some nice examples. The gist of the trick is that the more random a sample is (in other words the more people are unable to accurately self evaluate) the stronger a Dunning-Kruger effect you'd show. The way Dunning-Kruger achieved the really beautiful perfectly linear graph people always reference is by having people self evaluate their ability to... determine a funny joke. And so broken was their test that they had to eliminate one of their 8 professional comedian judges, because he couldn't determine a funny joke, by the standards of their test. And the remaining 7's scores were judged, by the paper itself, as "moderately reliable."

And I suspect this was intentional. The first thing they would have done is to plot a scatter graph of their results. And they would certainly have quickly realized the transform (by bucketing) and the scatter plot tell radically different stories (again the illustrations on Wiki make this more than clear), but only one of them is true!

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#33

Post by westhanover »

2024throwaway wrote: post #20
RobMurray wrote: post #17

Dunning-Kruger has been thoroughly debunked. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020... https://scitechdaily.com/math-professor-debunks-the-dunning-...

> The majority of people can actually gauge their competence and knowledge accurately. I know plenty of C-suite folks who must be in the minority then.

Have you considered that you might not be able to gauge peoples competence and knowledge accurately? Statistically, if you are observing so manly outliers that is likely to be the case. Hope this helps!

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#35

Post by stonedge »

RobMurray wrote: post #17

Dunning-Kruger has been thoroughly debunked. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020... https://scitechdaily.com/math-professor-debunks-the-dunning-...

I don’t want to suggest this person themselves is wrong, but it seems that this is just part of the back and forth among scientists and not in and of itself the correct answer.

Meta: what if this researcher themselves is exhibiting Dunning-Kruger and is overconfident.

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#36

Post by bluish29 »

RobMurray wrote: post #17

Dunning-Kruger has been thoroughly debunked. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020... https://scitechdaily.com/math-professor-debunks-the-dunning-...

In HN, to create a new line, you will need to leave two lines in the editor instead of one. And thanks for the links

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#37

Post by cfr2023 »

I heard David Letterman say within the past decade that on the days he did not feel the show was very good, he couldn't bring himself to even leave the building until it was dark outside, out of shame.

Meanwhile, at home, I would practically be shaking with excitement waiting for the show to start, I so appreciated it.

This tale somewhat suggests that people who perceive themselves as incompetent and inauthentic might spend more of their time striving at work, which could raise the bar, maintain a high standard and eventually breed something resembling confidence.

Or it could just continuously undermine their natural confidence and sense of self-worth and debase them such that they are easy to overwork and manipulate. It can also just feed into fears that invalidate the satisfaction of any jobs well done, leading to burn out and feelings of futility.

People who are overly confident can behave brashly and do damage, while automatically imposing costs on others, in the form of the time it takes to crack through their false beliefs or the duplication of effort it takes to walk back their mistakes.

So, this is kind of a nothing post, basically a lament. It's not clear whether suffers of Impostor Syndrome or Dunning-Kruger type symptoms have an easier path to a more moderate position, but each one seems likely to be rampant in just about any workplace.

Re: Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

#38

Post by duxup »

2024throwaway wrote: post #20
RobMurray wrote: post #17

Dunning-Kruger has been thoroughly debunked. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020... https://scitechdaily.com/math-professor-debunks-the-dunning-...

> The majority of people can actually gauge their competence and knowledge accurately. I know plenty of C-suite folks who must be in the minority then.

I wonder if that's a case where folks in leadership feel like their job is to show confidence, provide direction, and they still maybe know they don't know enough (I mean who does...) and they still make the call (right or wrong).

Perhaps more of a poor leadership thing we observe.

Post reply on HN