The title makes this incomprehensible. The author seemingly defines Dunning-Kruger as the... opposite of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The "Dunning-Kruger Effect" Effect: A reference to Dunning-Kruger Effect is almost certainly incorrect.
LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
91–100 of 308 posts
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember back when I was in secondary school, something commonly heard was "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong". Now, almost 2 decades later, I rarely hear this stance and I see people relying on wikipedia as an authoritative source of truth. i.e, linking to wikipedia instead of the underlying sources. In the same sense, I can see that "Don't trust LLMs" wil…
Wikipedia is usually close enough and most users don't require perfection for their "facts" Ive noticed things like gemini summaries on Google searches are also generally close enough.
Except when they glaringly get things wrong like "character X on show Y said catchphrase Z", and two queries produce two different values of X, one right, one wrong. The more I use gemini summaries for things I know a bit about, the worse my opinion of them..
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#93My opinion: if LLM's speed you up, you're doing it wrong. You have to carefully review and audit every line that comes out of an LLM. You have to spend a lot of time forcing LLM's to prove that the code it wrote is correct. You should be nit-picking everything. Despite, LLM's are useful. I could write the code faster without an LLM, but then I'd have code that wasn't carefully reviewed line-by-line because my coworke…
I start feeling that LLM are hallucinating less than people, no matter the fields, I am at the stage where I trust more code written by an LLM than by a person.
Typically, for the last 2 years, I don't feel that anyone can or bother to read anymore.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#94Speaking of uncertainty, I wish more people would accept their uncertainty with regards to the future of LLMs rather than dash off yet another cocksure article about how LLMs are {X}, and therefore {completely useless}|{world-changing}. Quantity has a quality of its own. The first chess engine to beat Gary Kasparov wasn't fundamentally different than earlier ones--it just had a lot more compute power. The original Go…
Most of HN has probably seen this gem about "thinking meat", but in case you haven't: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#95There’s a gap that LLMs are trying to fill in such cases, which is that there’s too much information that we can possibly hope to make sense of in a lifetime. Just as it’s possible to compute something incorrectly with a calculator, you can definitely be led astray by an LLM, which is why I am surprised that people think these models are good enough to replace humans at work. The only thing which makes sense is to both raise the bar for publishing, and to only take published works seriously. If something isn’t published, then authors should provide code to demonstrate the effect they’re describing.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#96I recently asked a leading GenAI chatbot to help me understand a certain physics concept. As I pressed it on the aspect I was confused about, the bot repeatedly explained, and in our discussion, consistently held firm that I was misunderstanding something, and made guesses about what I was misunderstanding. Eventually I realized and stated my mistake, and the chatbot confirmed and explained the difference between my wrong version and the truth. I looked at some sources and confirmed that the bot was right, and I had misremembered something.
I was quite impressed that it didn't "give in" and validate my wrong idea.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#97Found somewhere on the internet a few days ago: LLMs are Dunning-Kruger as a service.
Edit: it was https://christianheilmann.com/2025/10/30/ai-is-dunning-kruge...
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#98[deleted]
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not entirely convinced that the quality of Wikipedia has improved substantially in the last decade.
Care to provide any counter-examples? Please make it know if you end up using Wikipedia for your source of if Wikipedia's quality has changed
How in the world would you supply a counter-example for "the quality of Wikipedia has/hasn't improved substantially in the last decade"?
I also can't even read the second sentence. I think there are typos there, but there's no mental correction I can do to make it coherent for me.
Re: LLMs are steroids for your Dunning-Kruger
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> "Don't just trust wikipedia, check it's resources, because it's crowdsourced and can be wrong" This comes from decades of teachers misremembering what the rule was, and eventually it morphed into the Wikipedia specific form we see today - the actual rule is that you cannot cite an encyclopaedia in an academic paper. full stop. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia and therefore should not be cited. Wikipedia is the only en…
Both comments are missing the reason that an encyclopedia should not be cited: An encyclopedia does not cite its sources, and does not claim to be a primary source, its potentialymistakes cannot be checked. (Wikipedia has the additional problem that, by default, the version cited is the ever-changing "latest" version, not a fixed and identified version.)
You gave some good context I missed - The (even) more technical (read: pretentious) explanation is that it's a tertiary source. As a general rule of thumb secondary sources are preferred over primary sources, but both are acceptable in the right academic context.
I do understand the "latest version" argument, and it is a weakness, but it's also a double edged sword - it means Wikipedia can also be more up-to-date than (almost) any other source for the information. Thats why I say there's "nothing specifically wrong about Wikipedia either" it can be held in similar regard to other tertiary sources and encyclopaedias - with all the problems that come with those.