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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”

#111

Post by etchalon »

cortesoft wrote: post #59
MichaelBurge wrote: post #56

The plot to me always read "People estimate themselves at 60-70% percentile - above average, but not the best". And then given this broad prior, people do place themselves accurately(because the plot is increasing). So it seems people are bad at doing global rankings. If I tried to rank myself amongst all programmers worldwide, that seems really hard and I could see myself picking some "safe" above-average value just…

This is exactly my conclusion, and it seems obvious... just look at the self assessment line - pretty much everyone thinks they are slightly above average. Once you know that everyone thinks they are above average, you already know how it will play out... the bottom quartile will have the biggest gap between actual skill and estimated skill.

What's that line about half of all people being below average…

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

#112

Post by kybernetikos »

Would it be possible to understand the results differently? It looks to me that the data could be explained by the participants moderating their self assessment away from extremes or perhaps towards the population mean which is arguably not an unreasonable thing to do if your knowledge of the population mean is better than your knowledge of your own performance.

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

#113

Post by atoav »

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…

The issue here has not much to do with the replication crisis. It has to do with the fact that most people who use bits of information to make their point more convincing don't care whether that information is true or not. They are not seeking to convince the other side of the issue, they are seeking to convince other believers.

It is literally like this:

- someone makes a point that questions your believe

- you google a phrase that would come in studies that proof otherwise

- you take the first thing that looks promising, and fly over the first page, and paraphrase a good bit in a way that makes your point

- you publish it as part of a post, youtube video or whatever

- danger averted

Bad studies play into this, but even if the studies are good, or bad studies that have been retracted the same thing happens. James Wakefield who originally published the "combined vaccines cause autism study" after patenting a non-combined measles vaccine had his study retracted by the lancet soon after publication. He lost his status as a doctor etc. And you will still find people who use his study as a source.

Of course studies whose outcome collide with our believe systems are always harder to trust than those who validate it — but this is why you look at the methods used and other indicators that might make that study bogus.

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

#114

Post by heavyset_go »

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…

I think what contributes to this phenomenon are both second-option bias[1] and motivated reasoning, at least with respect to those who choose to believe in the poor analyses.

[1] https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Second-option_bias

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

#115

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#116

Post by c1ccccc1 »

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…

It still seems to me like "The DK Effect is Autocorrelation" is basically correct. The important thing isn't whether or not independence should be the null hypothesis, because calling something a "null hypothesis" is just an arbitrary label that doesn't affect reality. The important thing is that what we can actually conclude from the Dunning-Kruger paper is a lot less than popular presentations of the concept claim. In particular, "more skilled people are better at predicting their own performance" is really not supported by the paper, since that's not true of random data, which has everyone being equally terrible at predicting their own performance. If the random data can reproduce that graph, then the graph can't be proof that more skilled people are also better predictors.

Anyway, "The DK Effect is Autocorrelation" definitely seems to be both statistically literate, and a good faith criticism of the Dunning-Kruger paper. In light of that, calling it "anti-scientific" seems unfair, since criticism and debate are an important part of science.

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

#117

Post by stagas »

sumanthvepa wrote: post #65

I read about DK and I was absolutely convinced that the effect was real. Then I read the article about DK being mere autocorrelation and I came away absolutely convinced that DK was bullshit. Then I read this article and I'm absolutely convinced that the 'DK is autocorrelation' hypothesis is utter BS. Sigh. There are lies, damned lies and statistics... :-)

Me too. I believe the effect contains a logical recursion that is impossible to escape from. Maybe the randomness variable in it? It looks as if all validations and refutations of it are always going to appear logical. I don't know what to call it or compare it with but it feels this must be documented as being a prime example of its category.

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

#118

Post by seoaeu »

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…

> And this tracks for most skills. How good are you at tying your shoes? Probably average?

In fact, this is pretty much what the Dunning-Kruger graphs look like. The article shows the one for humor which has the bottom quartile participants answer "eh, about average" while the top quarter of participants realize they're better than average, but estimate roughly 75-percentile rather than 87.5-percentile.

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

#119

Post by hef19898 »

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…

>> figure skating, or law

Thinking about all the "INAL" answers and the obviously wrong "legal" advice and opinion on legal topics you can come across on HN on a daily basis, I think law is good example of people overestimating their knowledge.

Replace figure skating with any other sports, so, and try having discussions about, e.g, a defeat of any soccer team. All of a sudden everyone just became a soccer coach. And everyone is able to critique individual player's performance and skill and technique. If anything, this proofs the DK effect rather well.

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

#120

Post by hef19898 »

nighthawk454 wrote: post #75
dataflow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds kind of similar to [1]: > After two months in the bakery, you learned how to “see” clean. > Code is the same way. [1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2005/05/11/making-wrong-code-...

Thanks for linking that, I really liked this part: > OK, so far I’ve mentioned three levels of achievement as a programmer: > 1. You don’t know clean from unclean. > 2. You have a superficial idea of cleanliness, mostly at the level of conformance to coding conventions. > 3. You start to smell subtle hints of uncleanliness beneath the surface and they bug you enough to reach out and fix the code. > There’s an even hi…

This rings so true! I have no idea about programming, in Supply Chain and logistics I do see the same thing so. And the most frustrating people to work with are those stuck at > 2. without realizing it.
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