141–150 of 192 posts
Damn, I remember I worked through the whole damn thing some years ago when I read this article for the first time, and it didn't hold up to it's claim. I was actually contemplating to do a write-up, but it wasn't really important to me so I didn't. Seeing the same article re-appear on HN for the second time now I really wish that I did. Unfortunately I've forgotten the details by now.
The reason people find the DK effect persuasive is that everyone has run into this many times in their own lives. Like with an idiot boss who thinks he knows your job better than you do, or an article by someone that gets things completely wrong about a topic that you yourself know very well, through personal experience or extensive study. And we have all been dismayed about the impact such people can have, like thro…
Maybe the problem is that DK isn't about individuals, but about topics? I.e. perhaps everyone exhibits the phenomenon about topics they are most ignorant about. (and I am ignorant about DK, so...)
and a rather ironic one at that.
The #Dunning-Kruger Effect is #Autocorrelation https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe the problem is that DK isn't about individuals, but about topics? I.e. perhaps everyone exhibits the phenomenon about topics they are most ignorant about. (and I am ignorant about DK, so...)
No, I think it's about people - about us. About you, me, all of us.
publishing auto-correlation is not a 'data artefact', but a mistake. and a rather ironic one at that. The #Dunning-Kruger Effect is #Autocorrelation https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's annoying they didn't plot the new and old "perceived" curves on the same figure, but if you pay attention to the y-axis, there is a very big difference. In the old plot, the bottom quartile has about a 50 percentage point margin between actual and perceived performance while the new one is 30 percentage points, which is a 50% difference between the old and new curve. The second quartile has 3x more margin in the…
So what does that change? If there's no error bars on the graphs you can't discuss significant differences easily. And if they do differ, plotting differences will yield the U shape curve.
The reason people find the DK effect persuasive is that everyone has run into this many times in their own lives. Like with an idiot boss who thinks he knows your job better than you do, or an article by someone that gets things completely wrong about a topic that you yourself know very well, through personal experience or extensive study. And we have all been dismayed about the impact such people can have, like thro…
Maybe the problem is that DK isn't about individuals, but about topics? I.e. perhaps everyone exhibits the phenomenon about topics they are most ignorant about. (and I am ignorant about DK, so...)
It says if your expertise level is different from the average, then you judge the "average competency" differently. So if you have above-average expertise. Folks who had above-average education tended to overestimate what average education looks like (and vice versa).
I notice it when I use LLM. Things that I know well, I can spit LLM slopiness. On other things, LLM output reads like 'expert'.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which is exactly what the Dunner-Kruger effect is . Knowledgeable people statistically underestimating their knowledge and non-knowledgeable people overestimating their knowledge.
It that’s the whole point that it’s just a mirage and is the same with random data. The people on the low end can’t underestimate their results as much and the people on the upper end can’t overestimate their results as much. That will come out of any correlation that is not perfectly correlated, which is why the article talks about it being replicable with random data. An interesting graph that would demonstrate a n…
But even if it is entirely caused by normal distribution variance, that doesn't make it a mirage, it gives you a reason.
The strict academic definition hasn’t followed the colloquial usage for a long time. Maybe ever: If a specific novice is over-confident and out of their depth, we say “Dunning-Kruger” If a specific is under-confident and performing better than their self-estimate, that’s not commonly considered Dunning Kruger, in the colloquial use. It’s called imposter syndrome, or not labeled at all. The researchers aren’t really d…
I think people overlook the natural experience of Dunning-Kruger we all have. You think you are good at chess because you win against your neighbour, then eventually a class mate absolutely embarrasses you multiple times and you realize there is a whole world you don't know, and before now you didn't know that world existed. Then you eventually beat your classmate before getting whomped by the beginner in the chess c…
In this case, it would be something like: Most people who are earnestly interested in a subject are so inclined to look upward (at the world elite) or to their side (at their own competition) that they tend to forget how much of humanity is increasingly left beneath them. We perceive everything we have already learned as "the easy stuff," the stuff we will never learn as "black magic," and the stuff we are currently learning as "getting interesting." But these labels are always relative.