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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”

#81

Post by bryanrasmussen »

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 particular things and did not rate themselves as competent at it, although truth is they might have claimed competence if asked by someone they didn't want to be honest with.

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

#82

Post by legalcorrection »

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…

Most social science is shoddy, fake, or otherwise misleading (i.e. it proves nothing meaningful despite the claims of the researchers). If you believed every social science study you heard about, you'd be more wrong about the world than if you disbelieved them all.

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

#83

Post by bryanrasmussen »

skybrian wrote: post #5
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 that's assuming more ignorance than even an unskilled person has. If you had never listened to a professional play piano before then you'd have no idea what level of performance is possible. Similarly, if you had never seen skilled skaters perform on TV. But we have done these things, so it's obvious that they're doing something that's very difficult. Maybe you don't fully appreciate the skill, though. You wo…

>Similarly, if you had never seen skilled skaters perform on TV.

then, as a person who has lived in the world and has the normal physical skills of such you probably think "whoa, how in the heck did they do that" when you finally see it.

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

#84

Post by quanto »

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…

A replication crisis indeed exists. All the more reason to analyze rigorously. Poor analyses (and borderline name-calling) in the original article do not help with the crisis.

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

#85

Post by 8note »

The open question this raises to me is why a DK=true set of data would show up with the same graph as a uniformly random set

What I'm really missing is a plot of the data without the aggregation. I find it very strange that X is broken down into quartiles but Y isn't, and when in quartiles, people estimated their skills relative to each other quite well: the line still goes up, and from bottom to top, would be a perfect X to X corelation

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

#86

Post by darawk »

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…

Let's not forget though that a great deal of "science" is in fact trash[1]. The problem isn't really people being anti-science or pro-science. The problem is science being done poorly, whether by scientists in the credentialed sense, or amateurs.

There is no pat "trust science more" or "trust amateurs less" answer here. The actual answer is that if you want to understand research, you need to actually understand mathematical statistics and the philosophy of statistics fairly deeply. There just isn't any way around it.

1. https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...

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

#87

Post by obastani »

8note wrote: post #85

The open question this raises to me is why a DK=true set of data would show up with the same graph as a uniformly random set What I'm really missing is a plot of the data without the aggregation. I find it very strange that X is broken down into quartiles but Y isn't, and when in quartiles, people estimated their skills relative to each other quite well: the line still goes up, and from bottom to top, would be a perf…

Uniformly random data means that someone’s perception of their ability is uncorrelated with their actual ability, which is exactly what DK=true is saying!

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

#88

Post by juancn »

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…

It's also intuitive if you think about error in self assessment. Skill is asymptotic to some upper bound. The closer to the asymptote (higher skill), then most likely the error in estimation is under it, since it cannot be above it.

Conversely it cannot also be under zero, so error is most likely going to be above the actual skill line (over estimation, since it's clamped below it).

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

#89

Post by quanto »

darawk wrote: post #86
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…

Let's not forget though that a great deal of "science" is in fact trash[1]. The problem isn't really people being anti-science or pro-science. The problem is science being done poorly, whether by scientists in the credentialed sense, or amateurs. There is no pat "trust science more" or "trust amateurs less" answer here. The actual answer is that if you want to understand research, you need to actually understand math…

Completely agreed. While I strongly believe in citizen science and people's right (and perhaps obligation) to critique established science, there is just so much poor analyses done by people to criticize some scientific findings they do not approve, motivated emotionally or otherwise. This phenomenon does not bring us closer to finding scientific facts or resolving the replication crisis. People should learn some basic analytic tools first.

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

#90

Post by russdill »

darawk wrote: post #86
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…

Let's not forget though that a great deal of "science" is in fact trash[1]. The problem isn't really people being anti-science or pro-science. The problem is science being done poorly, whether by scientists in the credentialed sense, or amateurs. There is no pat "trust science more" or "trust amateurs less" answer here. The actual answer is that if you want to understand research, you need to actually understand math…

I think there's two extremes here. One is the issue covered well above. There is a great deal of junk science that gets published. That is a problem and it does erode trust. But in some ways it's also how the sausage gets made, there's going to be room for things to get published they later gets refuted. People rightly so have distrust for results coming out in fields they don't have good knowledge in. Without becoming an expert yourself it's very difficult to know who or what to trust.

On the other end there's distrust of broad scientific consensus across different professions, countries, etc. It's the distrust at these levels that is the increasing problem we are facing today.

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