Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

- on the distribution

- on whether by 'average' you mean 'mean' (in statistics, arithmetic mean) or 'median' (what value cuts the population in half)

The GP gives an example of people being above average by having two legs. I will take a similar example but in a classroom.

Say students in a classroom take a test scored from 0 (worst) to 20 (best). The result of the test is as follows: forty students get a 11 and ten gets a 1. That makes a mean of (11x40+10)/50 => 9. Hence all forty students are above average. If we plot the number of people per mark this gives a very special (and artificial) distribution since we made it up to make the point that it is possible for most people to be above average. In more realistic scenarios and unless skewed by external factors (bad test, wrong population, cheating) the distribution is often close to being normal, i.e mean and median are approximately the same (hence it's an impossibility to have 80% of people above mean).

Yet what's really interesting in Dunning-Kruger tests is not the actual results of the tests, it is the comparison between one's own assessment and real results, which actually abstracts from distribution problems and 'average' discussions, since each one person is compared to oneself. In the above whacky scenario we could have expected people getting a 1 to evaluate themselves scoring a 8.

If you don't want to read the whole paper, just look at the quartile/percentile graphs in the paper. They speak for themselves.

Yes, many of the issues facing governments are complex and difficult to solve. You seem to be arguing that because it's difficult to learn what course of action is best, we should not even try.

Humility is a good thing, but it is completely absent in popular opinion.

Because the decision affects everybody. Even more so, everybody has a greater stake in the system of decision-making than they do in the decision itself.

Look at it this way: suppose ten people are in a lifeboat stranded on the ocean. There are no supplies, and everybody is starving to death. Logically, killing and eating one of the people would allow the rest to survive. However the group votes not to do that, and they all starve. Later it's discovered that had they lived a few more days they would have been rescued.

Or you could play it the other way: they all unanimously decide to draw straws - the "law of the sea" -- and yet it does no good.

In either case, having consent of those involved is more important than optimizing around one individual's opinion, even if that opinion represents an outcome that's in the best interest of the most people involved.

You don't have to believe me. Play various scenarios out a few times yourself and work through it. And it's not unanimous agreement, not at all. The trick, as the other commenter pointed out, is to create a simple and understandable system where the minority still participates when they lose arguments. (Obviously eating the minority in our example would prevent such participation, which is why only unanimous consent would work, and it would only work in coming up with some selection criteria, not actually applying it.) I think you'll find that people deserve the dignity of being wrong, even when faced with their own death.

I'm also not saying that "we should not even try." Far from it. True learning takes place in a group setting from the bottom-up, in a peer-to-peer fashion. Once critical mass is reached, persuasion is used to convince the majority. That's the way systems of people operate, which is much, much different from the way we might like them to work, or the way a mathematical proof might work.