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I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

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Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#101

Post by whatshisface »

boppo1 wrote: post #72
quanto wrote: post #62

The conclusion in the article: > Why so angry? I know I’ve taken this far too personally. I have no illusions that everything I read online should be correct, or about people’s susceptibility to a strong rhetoric cleverly bashing conventional science, even in great communities such as HN. But frankly, for the last few years, the world seems to be accelerating the rate at which it’s going crazy, and it feels to me a l…

What about the replication crisis? It's possible to use rigorously sound statistics to lie (or at least unknowingly spread falsehoods). I can't tell you how many times I've seen headlines or abstracts of studies that seem to contradict ones I've seen previously, and back and forth! Particularly in the social sciences. I recall one study that said all white people are committing environmental racism against all non-wh…

>it's possible to use rigorously sound statistics to lie (or at least unknowingly spread falsehoods).

I don't think this is true. It is possible to put a lot of work into unsound statistics and to make a lot of "noise and fury" about how mathematical you are while failing some basic principle, but I don't think sound statistics can mislead. The replication crisis was caused by scientists not being rigorous and journals not forcing them to be. You absolutely cannot accept publication as a sign of sound techniques except in journal/field combinations that have a deserved reputation.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#102

Post by taeric »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #81
randcraw wrote: post #74

As a novice on DK, it seems to me that, for DK to be 'suprising' (in the parlance of the OP), four phenomena must hold: 1) an incompetent person is poorer than average at self assessment of their skill 2) as a person's competence increases at a skill, their ability to self-assess improves, until they become 'expert' which is defined by underappreciating their own skill (or overappreciating the skill of others) 3) DK…

>it seems to me that, for DK to be 'surprising' (in the parlance of the OP), four phenomena must hold: The surprising things about DK, to me at any rate, is how unvarying it is in application. Under DK people who are poor at something never think wow I really suck at this, or if they do they are such a minuscule part of the population that we can discount them. I've known lots of people who were not good at particula…

There is an easy reframing that works well. People that are "poor" at something don't know enough to know just how good someone can be at something.

And this tracks for most skills. How good are you at tying your shoes? Probably average? Just how good can you get? Probably not that much better, all told. It is a clearly defined goal and likely has a limit on the skill you can build.

What about writing your name? Putting on your clothes? Making your bed? All things that are somewhat bound in just how good you can be.

Now, throw in something like "play the piano." Turns out, the expertise bar is much much higher suddenly. But, it you haven't been trying, how would you know?

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#103

Post by etchalon »

Something I generally keep in mind about articles posted to HN:

A large portion of the HN audience really, really wants to think they're smarter than mostly everyone else, including most experts. Very few are. I'm certainly not.

Articles which "debunk" some commonly held belief, especially those wrapped in what appears to be an understandable, logical, followable argument, are going to be cat nip here.

Articles like this are even stronger cat nip. If a member of the HN audience wants to believe they're mostly smarter than mostly everyone else, that includes other members of the HN audience.

So, whenever I read an article and come away thinking that, having read the article, I'm suddenly smarter than a huge number of experts, especially if, like the original article, it's because I understand "this one simple trick!", I immediately discard that knowledge and forget I read it.

If the article is right, it will be debated and I'll see more articles about it, and it'll generate sufficient echoes in the right caves of the right experts. Once it does, I can change my view then.

I am not a statistician, or a research scientist. I have no idea which author is right. But, my spider sense says that if dozens of scientific papers, written by dozens of people who are, failed to notice their "effect" was just some mathematical oddity, that'd be pretty incredible.

And incredible things require incredible evidence. And a blog post rarely, if ever, meets that standard.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#104

Post by JetAlone »

javajosh wrote: post #29
galaxyLogic wrote: post #3

I think Dunning Krueger makes intuitive sense. When you become skilled in your field you learn from other people in your field, and your assessment of yourself is based on your relation to the skills of those other people. But if you know very little about something, you have no reference point to evaluate yourself against. When you learn something you also learn what are some of the mistakes you can make. You evalua…

>I think Dunning Krueger makes intuitive sense. If human cultures can be characterized as default arrogant or default humble then it stands to reason that arrogant cultures will have a DK effect, and in humble cultures you won't.

Even people conditioned to be humble could have a strong motivation to believe something is true and overestimate their own knowledge/ability in order to stand on what they perceive as evidence. For example a person's depression, religious beliefs, or an over-emphasized belief in DK itself could be a possible reason they have an erroneously deflated opinion of themselves, and simultaneously employ inflated confidence in irrational arguments that demonstrate why they are almost completely worthless at their field. That's pretty much how depression is secretly prideful in a sense: over-estimating our own mental ability to assess our helplessness.

When I did some cognitive behaviour therapy, I un-learned things like "all or nothing thinking" and the expectation that I could accurately predict the outcome of any course of action by modeling future performance off of a past failure.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#105

Post by hgomersall »

obastani wrote: post #45

I feel like this article is severely over-complicating the analysis. Looking at the original blog post [1], their key claim appears to be that "random data produces the same curves as the DK effect, so the DK effect is a statistical artifact". However, by "random data", the original blog means people and their self-assessments are completely independent! In fact, this is exactly what the DK effect is saying -- people…

Yeah, the model is a simple linear model (which I've yet to see written down) with some correlation coefficient which is the unknown. Derive an estimator for that correlation coefficient, being explicit about the assumptions, then we can have a discussion. Until then it's all lots of noise. The raw data would help too.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#106

Post by sn41 »

dahart wrote: post #76
galaxyLogic wrote: post #3

I think Dunning Krueger makes intuitive sense. When you become skilled in your field you learn from other people in your field, and your assessment of yourself is based on your relation to the skills of those other people. But if you know very little about something, you have no reference point to evaluate yourself against. When you learn something you also learn what are some of the mistakes you can make. You evalua…

> I think Dunning Krueger makes intuitive sense. It’s been argued before that this is the only reason that DK gained any notoriety; because it feels right, not because it is right. It’s the “just-world” theory: we want to believe that confident people are overcompensating. Is it actually intuitive though? Consider your own example. Most people who don’t know piano or figure skating are well aware that they don’t know…

> It’s been argued before that this is the only reason that DK gained any notoriety

I'm sorry, but I have to comment on a word in this line: I feel that increasingly, "notoriety" is used when "notability" might be better.

A thief is notorious. A statistical effect is notable, imho.

But I agree with your basic point: I can't skate, much less figure skate. And I am pretty accurately aware of that fact despite my lack of skill.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#107

Post by bryanrasmussen »

taeric wrote: post #102
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it seems to me that, for DK to be 'surprising' (in the parlance of the OP), four phenomena must hold: The surprising things about DK, to me at any rate, is how unvarying it is in application. Under DK people who are poor at something never think wow I really suck at this, or if they do they are such a minuscule part of the population that we can discount them. I've known lots of people who were not good at particula…

There is an easy reframing that works well. People that are "poor" at something don't know enough to know just how good someone can be at something. And this tracks for most skills. How good are you at tying your shoes? Probably average? Just how good can you get? Probably not that much better, all told. It is a clearly defined goal and likely has a limit on the skill you can build. What about writing your name? Putt…

If someone asked me how bad are you at playing the piano, having never tried, I would say I was totally incompetent which I take to mean the worst possible. According to DK I should somehow be worse than that.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#108

Post by taeric »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #107
taeric wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an easy reframing that works well. People that are "poor" at something don't know enough to know just how good someone can be at something. And this tracks for most skills. How good are you at tying your shoes? Probably average? Just how good can you get? Probably not that much better, all told. It is a clearly defined goal and likely has a limit on the skill you can build. What about writing your name? Putt…

If someone asked me how bad are you at playing the piano, having never tried, I would say I was totally incompetent which I take to mean the worst possible. According to DK I should somehow be worse than that.

Sorta. According to DK, your Skill is 0. Your estimate is 0. So.... you were accurate. (That is, you literally couldn't under estimate your skill.)

This obviously complicates the analysis that says poorly skilled don't under estimate to the degree that highly skilled do.

Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”

#109

Post by [deleted] »

jameshart wrote: post #69
marcholagao wrote: post #48

tldr; D+K's experiment was: Assign the numbers 1 thru 10 to ten people. Have each role a 10 sided die. The person assigned a 1 will roll higher than his assigned number 90% of the time. Daniel: >It’s not a “statistical artifact” - that will be your everyday experience living in such a world. You can experience statistical effects. I think a lot of controversy comes from how Dunning and Kruger's paper leads people to…

This is such a bizarre argument. Dunning Krueger is precisely about the surprising result that people are bad at estimating their performance! If you accept the 'D-K is autocorrelation' argument, you don't get to throw out the existence of the D-K effect: you are saying Dunning + Krueger failed to show that humans have any ability to estimate how skilled they are at all . That seems like an even more radical position…

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