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”
#2Somebody is still wrong on the internet
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#3I 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 evaluate your performance then against the mistakes you didn't make. Consider a piano player, or figure-skater. You have to know about what figures are difficult to perform to evaluate a performance, and you don't know what the difficult ones are until you have studied and tried to perform them.
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#4"The second option conforms with the Research Methods 101 rule-of-thumb “always assume independence.” Until proven otherwise, we should assume people have no ability to self-assess their performance"
It's not that at all. The assumption should be that everyone is equally good (or bad) at assessing their performance. Not that they have no ability but that the means between groups is the same vs. not the same. That the ability to assess themselves is independent of performance.
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#5I 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 wouldn't do well as a judge who compares the performances of professionals. But comparing novices to professionals seems easy?
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#6I'm not a practicing statistician, so I'm uncertain how to weigh the two arguments here.
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#7It 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, despite playing at least a few hundred hours of it.
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 feel myself further appreciating the depth and complexity of fields I "wrote off" as trivial and uninteresting when I was younger as I get deeper into my own field (and see just how much deeper it is too).
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#8Yeah, this makes sense to me.
Imagine in the Dunning-Kruger chart the second plot (perceived ability) was a horizontal line at 70, which is not true but not far off from the real results. Now imagine I told you "did you know that, regardless of their actual score, everyone thought they got a 70?" That's a surprising fact.
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#9The corollary of Dunning Kruger is that everyone is equally capable and equally capable of assessing their performance. This nicely suits the current social rhetoric but does not match observed reality.
Edit-see below I meant opposite not corollary.
Re: I can't let go of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation”
#10Possibility 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 case.
With the reasonable conclusion: We all suck at guessing how much we know, but the more you know the less you suck until you hit the limits of the framework you are using for quantization of knowledge.