Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
arstechnica.com
Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#2>How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions.
Yikes, that's a stretch. Dunning and Kruger's work tells us nothing about our ability to assess others' competence; just our ability to assess our own. This idea of trying to apply that to arrive at "how do we know which experts to listen to?" is really reaching.
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#3>How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way to figure out the answers to any of these questions. Yikes, that's a stretch. Dunning and Kruger's work tells us nothing about our ability to assess others' competence; just our ability to as…
It's turtles all the way down. Incompetence includes over-estimating our ability to evaluate experts (e.g. acting upon or ignoring legal advice from web forums).
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#4Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers.
The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in the population has an above-average number of legs.
Similarly: The number of car accidents the average driver causes per year is fractionally more than zero, so if you caused no accidents last year you were "an above average driver". Some measurable attributes just happen to be "chunky" in that way - they don't follow a normal distribution.
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#5Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to?
I must confess to bailing out here.
The purpose of democratic government is the consent of the governed, not to find the best experts to make the best decisions. People have to agree on stuff, and that means people who don't understand issues have to agree on them anyway. That's much more important than intelligence and competence. In fact, I'd argue for many of the complexities of the modern nation-state, nobody knows what they are doing in many areas, not even people who have paid lots of money to be trained on these issues. Simply because we can imagine that there is some sort of hierarchy of intelligence and competence in a certain field does not mean that there actually is one. Every generation, no matter how ignorant, has always had a somewhat ordered list of intelligentsia. Many times they have had little to do with how much is known and much more to do with how well somebody is respected by their peers.
Humility is a good thing.
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#6Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to listen to? I must confess to bailing out here. The purpose of democratic government is the consent of the governed , not to find the best experts to make the best decisions. People have to agree on stuff, and that means people who don't understand issues have to agree on them anyway. That's much more important t…
Another way to think of it: democracy is a way to convince the losing side in a political dispute to back down (at least temporarily). This has benefits whether or not the decision was right when the drawbacks of escalating a dispute (rebellion, civil war, etc) outweigh the original issue.
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#7Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers. The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in t…
Exactly! Many people seem to have a lot of trouble with what the word 'average' means. It depends on the context!
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#8Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers. The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in t…
The article talks about the measurement of skill. The number of accidents that a driver has caused in the past year is not a good measurement of skill. Essentially the difference you bring up is whether something can be expected to fit a normal distribution (where the average is by definition in the middle). It's a reasonable assumption that skill will fit a normal distribution, but the number of accidents caused in the past year is much more likely to fit a Poisson distribution.
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#9Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers. The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in t…
But see, these aren't even reasonable measures. In the case of legs, there is a hard upper bound which changes the useful definition of average away from the mean. This is a fairly intuitive thing.
Similarly with driving, a terrible measure is number of accidents per year/number of drivers that year. It just makes no sense, because it doesn't take into account the person's entire driving record. An intuitive measure might be how many accidents that person has been in total compared to the average number of accidents a driver has been in (of course, this makes people who have been hit by someone blowing a stop sign bad drivers, even though they had no major input to the accident... again intuitive, having this conversation with someone not well versed in stats will have this exception outed pretty quickly).
Basically both of these measures being considered reasonable suggests people who think this don't really have the wherewithal (knowledge or expertise) of legs or accidents to properly assess what makes sense.
Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome
#10Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as above-average drivers is not a delusion; it happens to be true given quite reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most people are above average drivers. The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly everybody in t…
Most people might be better than the average driver, but not better than the typical (median) driver (same goes for legs).
I'd say that the typical is a better reference point than the average, since the counter-intuitive effects you describe disappear, and the reference point "1,9999995 legs / person" is pretty useless.