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Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

arstechnica.com

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Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#21

Post by saraid216 »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #19
tensor wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is having people agree on bad decisions a good thing? Would it not be better to have governments make the best decisions they can for their people, and also teach the people why these decisions are best? 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…

How is having people agree on bad decisions a good thing? 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…

An excellent book about this topic, which also gives some suggestions on how the majority and minority should actually conduct themselves to make sure this happens, is Danielle Allen's Talking with Strangers.

http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/014665in.html

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#22

Post by lindenr »

gosub wrote: post #14
VMG wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't the typical driver be the mode, not the median?

I'd say it depends. Even "average" can be several different things depending on your definitions. More precise than "average" is "mean", and even better than that is the "arithmetic mean". Typical is typical in its ability to be misunderstood.

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#24

Post by mathattack »

Very important document. At year end, how many employees really believe they're in the bottom 50% of a population? And is it really worth fighting this when measurement of ability is so hard?

Most "Up or Out" firms need to cull people so they are firm, and try to create the appearance of rigor.

Most software firms find this much more difficult. Very few start-ups have formal evaluation processes, which sounds terrible to the MBA crowd, but could just be admitting that it's impossible to really fairly judge people. (Deming would say judge the system anyway)

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#25

Post by michaelochurch »

The D-K results don't actually say that incompetents think they're awesome. It says that, as a group, they tend to estimate themselves as slightly above average. So do the most competent. What this means is that percentile-based self-assessment has no signal, not that unskilled people are preternaturally inclined to think of themselves as excellent.

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#26

Post by anthonyb »

lloeki wrote: post #11
eragnew wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly! Many people seem to have a lot of trouble with what the word 'average' means. It depends on the context!

The 'average' meaning does not depends on context but: - 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 t…

The distribution is the context of an average.

Also, your example makes exactly the same point as the number of legs one, but is much harder to understand. I'm not sure why you used it.

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#27

Post by dredmorbius »

VMG wrote: post #10
glenra wrote: post #4

Always 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.

"Average" is a term which can be claimed by the arithmetic mean (the word you're confusing it with), the median (midpoint value), or mode (most frequently occurring value).

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#28

Post by anamax »

tensor wrote: post #15
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #5

Do 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…

How is having people agree on bad decisions a good thing? Would it not be better to have governments make the best decisions they can for their people, and also teach the people why these decisions are best? 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…

> Would it not be better to have governments make the best decisions they can for their people, and also teach the people why these decisions are best?

Why are you assuming that governments are capable of making good decisions?

I'm serious - name three politicians who you would trust to make important decisions about your life? On the off chance that you're the first who has a list that long, what makes you think that said politicians will be in charge?

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#29

Post by pcopley »

gosub wrote: post #14
VMG wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wouldn't the typical driver be the mode, not the median?

I think in the example above he means mode in that people have 2 legs more often than they have any other number of legs.

Re: Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome

#30

Post by mistercow »

brudgers wrote: post #3
mistercow wrote: post #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 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).

Perhaps, but is that something that that Dunning and Kruger (or anyone, for that matter) has actually demonstrated?
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