51–60 of 308 posts
I think the main point of this post is correct -- just because you can find the effect in random noise, doesn't mean it's not real phenomenon that happens in real life. But it's missing a nuance there: if an effect can be replicated with random noise, then it's not a psychological effect (e.g. something that you would explain as a human bias), but a statistical effect. E.g. regression towards the mean is a real effec…
I think the main point of this post is correct -- just because you can find the effect in random noise, doesn't mean it's not real phenomenon that happens in real life. But it's missing a nuance there: if an effect can be replicated with random noise, then it's not a psychological effect (e.g. something that you would explain as a human bias), but a statistical effect. E.g. regression towards the mean is a real effec…
This isn't true either. Statistical dependence does not determine or uniquely identify causal interpretation or system structure. See Judea Pearl's works (e.g. The Book of Why) for more on this.
People lacking the ability to self-assess is interesting psychologically. People can learn from experience in many other contexts. People can judge their relative position versus other people in many contexts. Why would they be so bad at this particular task? There could be a psychological underpinning.
Even if it turns out we have useless noise-emitting fluff in the place that would produce self-awareness of skill, that would be a psychological cause of a psychological effect. Not the ones that Dunning and Kruger believed they were seeing, but still.
Now, if you asked frogs for a self-assessment of skill, I would expect that data would not show any psychological effects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that most people who talk a lot about DK believe that they are the experts in one field or another. It serves mostly as a way of reassuring themselves of their own superiority. The message (for them) basically amounts to "other people's claim to knowledge is just further proof that they don't know anything."
> I think that most people who talk a lot about DK believe that they are the experts in one field or another. I recall that either Dunning or Kruger once made a remark to that effect. That rather than an indictment of stupid people, it would be better to view it as a warning to those who consider themselves the smart ones.
> Again, my main point is that there’s nothing inherently flawed with the analysis and plots presented in the original paper. I find the use of quartiles suspicious, personally. It's very nearly the ecological fallacy[1]. > I’m not going to start reviewing and comparing signal-to-noise ratios in Dunning-Kruger replications DK has been under fire for a while now, nearly as long as the paper has existed[2]. At present,…
Do they have to encourage replication? If others can't replicate it entirely on their own without "encouragement". Then it isn't useful at all and the original experiment can be safely ignored as irrelevant to humanity, along with any "prestige" associated with it.
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 because I don't know that many other people.
There's also: If you take 1 class in piano 30 years ago and can only play 1 simple song, that might put you in the 90th percentile worldwide just because most people can't play at all. But you might be at the 10th percentile amongst people who've taken at least 1 class. So doing a global ranking can be very difficult if you aren't exactly sure what the denominator set looks like.
So I think it's an artifact of using "ranking" as an axis. If the metric was, "predict the percentage of questions you got correct" vs. "predict your ranking", maybe people would be more accurate because it wouldn't involve estimating the denominator set.
Possibility 3 backed up by all the same data: The less you know, the more random your guess at your own knowledge is. The actual value is low and less than zero isn't an option, so this drags the average up consistently. The more you know, the more accurate your guess of your knowledge is. Especially as you hit the limits of the test, this noise can only drag the average down, but less dramatically than the other cas…
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…
It seems like the people who want to disprove Dunning-Kruger are falling victim to it. I honestly think people take it way too seriously and apply it too generally. Quantifying "good" is hard if you don't know much about the field you're quantifying. Getting deep into a particular field is humbling -- Tetris seems relatively simple, but there are people who could fill a book with things _I_ don't know about it, despi…
> Is there an answer to that humility gained by being an expert in one field being translated to better self-assessment in other fields? I think that often the opposite is true: people who become experts in one domain often assume that they are automatically experts in completely unrelated fields. I suspect that this is the cause of "Nobel disease": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
"there's nothing more annoying than a physicist encountering a new subject"