Its at least partially a statistical trick. People of lower competence rate themselves closer to the middle, but people with high competence also do this.
I also find it hilarious how virtually everyone acts like an expert in diagnosing dunning-krueger. Like looking at a graph for a second and then repeating an academic mystification and 5-10 word snippet repeated ad nauseum is pretty fucking ironic given the subject
No no you see, because I have heard of the Dunning-Krüger effect on no fewer than two separate occasioms, I am a master at recognizing it in people no matter where they fall on its spectrum. You just don’t understand because your overexposure to the concept has dulled your natural instincts, unlike me. /s
As far as I can tell, we all have this, even people who are experts, it’s just in different domains that those of their expertise.
Today?
It has been a fad for some time.
Ironically mostly used by people who think they’re smart bcs they’ve heard of it.Knowledge doesn’t just diffuse into everyone’s minds when it hits a fad threshold. There’s still a point where one first learns about it. Shocking, I know.
I find that folks that just keep their mouths shut, do their jobs quietly, competently and correctly are far better to have on your team than the loudmouth know-it-all.
Bonus is that when the former does open their mouth you know you should be paying attention.
I think they call it “quiet competence”.
All too common I’ve seen those loudmouths promoted, and the quiet competent are then talked down to about something they know far more about. Then they leave.
Middle management doesn’t understand a skillset unless someone tells them directly they are skilled, it’s a culture of failure.
I wish I had this but I’m in the between both of those people and incompetent
A mindset I just fell into as a much younger man for reasons I no longer remember was assuming everyone knew more than I did and did things the way they did them for a reason. And I should learn what that reason is before I go proposing changes.
That mindset has never steered me wrong. Even when I change something someone else put in place what I come up with is a better solution for taking the time to understand why the previous person did it the way that they did.
This principle is sometimes called “Chesterton’s Fence” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton’s_fence)
So much anger I see in the world is directed at policies, laws, procedures, whatever, that make perfect sense if one understands the background.
Sucks, but we can’t all understand everything. I try, but I ain’t that smart, and certainly can’t be that experienced.
I had a soccer coach from age 7-18. Same guy, brilliant dude, Dean of law at a very large state school. He told me at 12 to never talk to the other kids at the summer camps (competition) about what i was working on. “Just go out and do it and shut your mouth about it. That’s how you impress on the field.”
It’s stuck with me since then.
The more I’ve learned about email while writing my own email server, the more I’ve realized I knew basically nothing about email when I started. Now, I’m at least somewhat knowledgeable, but god damn it’s so fucking complicated. Even something as seemingly straightforward as email has such a deep complexity that it takes years of study to even approach being an expert.
The single most useful thing I’ve learned doing this is that you should never assume you know a lot about a topic. There are a. always more things to learn, and b. always people who know more than you.
Why did you think email was simple? Every sysadmin knows this is the most difficult system, so we outsource it whenever possible
Well, maybe physical printers are worse. Both should be outsourced. They’re both a PIA
I never thought email was simple. I thought it was straightforward. It’s not. It doesn’t matter if you follow the RFCs, you won’t have a working email server unless you listen to what the experts say.
For example, there are no RFCs about an IP address’ reputation, but that’s a real thing. When you sign up with your ISP, they’re not giving you a brand new IP address. Someone has used it before. They might have trashed its reputation, and there’s very little you can do about that. Then your emails will probably be blocked or delivered to the spam folder.
This is, of course, a perfect example of D-K in action. This dude is writing his own email server, FFS, and he characterizes himself as, “at least somewhat knowledgeable”.
I’ve read a bunch of the old RFC’s for email services years ago, when you needed some of that info in order to do interesting things with sendmail. I figure that might have put me in the top 20% of programmers/admins/techies back in the day. But to actually consider writing an email server - no way. That’s a different level of “at least somewhat knowledgeable” .
The 500 mile email comes to mind.
https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Next. Level. Troubleshooting.
Oh man, that’s such a good debugging story. I really like the can’t print on Tuesday bug too:
I have long said the only truly stupid people in the world are those who think that have nothing left to learn.
“All I know is that I know nothing”, Socrates.
With time I came to understand this as meaning that there’s always far more left to learn than one could possibly know.
Maybe not the original meaning (the whole Cave Allegory apparently comes from him via Plato, so maybe it’s about how the World is not really what we perceive), but it kinda fits.
I like that line. I’m stealing it. Might paraphrase to fit the situation.
I did technical trainings, and I always used to say that the only stupid question is the one you don’t ask.
Running your own email server is a dark and lonely road that can only lead to crippling insanity. We can thank Google for that.
I’m definitely aware. I run an email service at https://port87.com/. Google is absolutely awful to deal with.
“I’ll just validate email addresses with a bit of regex. How hard could that be?”
Right!? Fun fact, this is a perfectly valid email address:
"Pooper Scooper 💩"@[69.69.69.69]
In many collectivistic societirs, humility is a virtue.
Job before that was like this. No one will believe me.
Family run, small business, run by well-off, conservative Southern Baptists. Sound like hell?
Admitting you made a mistake was a fucking virtue. You weren’t forgiven, your mistake was ignored, except for everyone teaming up to figure a way to not let it happen again. No names, nothing said, let’s figure it out.
I’ve never worked such a culture. My next job paid double. Fucked a thing up right off the bat, no big deal, was never trusted again. I could go on about that job, but on paper, it would sound like heaven. Had so much PTO I didn’t bother tracking it, WFH, dev company.
I’d crawl on my hands and knees to get my office back with the Southern conservatives. And no one, not once, asked me about my beliefs or asked me to church.
Used to work in a place like this earlier in my career. It was a multinational, but not in the US. I transferred to another unit within the company completely different culture. It’s a place by place kind of deal.
The world needs more humble geniuses. We’re few and far between nowadays.
The world has plenty. They just aren’t on social media.
I think you missed my sarcasm.
Well, they were right; not a genius because they are on social media.
I don’t think DK is really about intelligence but more on how averages work. I don’t know, I don’t have a degree in statistics just a basic biochem one.
We see what you did there
Don’t discount yourself, I bet a lot of your education and research had to deal with statistics and deriving information from data. You’re practically using statistics
Isn’t it more that people who are given a test will tend to think that the test was easy when they score well (when they actually scored well because they’re an expert) and people will think a test is hard when they aren’t familiar with the subject (nobody could’ve answered these question!) .
So it’s more that experts and non-experts both assume their knowledge level is more average than it actually is. Not as fun as “dummies think they’re smart and smarties think they’re dumb.” We all just tend to think we’re average and most people are at a similar level of expertise to ourselves.
I think the “dumbies” and “smarties” part comes to play when people decide or not to open their big fat mouths and share their “great knowledge” in a domain they have barelly learned about, especially when they’re dismissing expert opinions with their “great knowledge”.
So whilst being in that very special point of the Dunning-Krugger Effect isn’t really a metric of smarts (we’re all there in at least a few domains), the likelihood of actually dismissing the opinion of domain experts when one’s knowledge in that expert domain is at that point of the curve, is probably positvelly correlate with dumbness.
Lol flat earthers
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
— Isaac Asimov
And it’s been disproven
Could you elaborate? From what I read, Dunning and Kruger did find a real phenomenon where people with limited competence in a domain overestimate their ability, but they did not suggest these individuals thought they were smarter than experts; and one theory holds that it is a statistical truism, which still means it exists.
They’re probably talking about this. It’s been too long since I read it so I won’t be discussing it, but I’ll share a paragraph so folks don’t have to click the link to see the gist. https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/
The Dunning-Kruger effect also emerges from data in which it shouldn’t. For instance, if you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology.1 It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation.
No, no, no, I am an econometrician, this Blair Fix person is an ‘enthusiast of economics’ who actually doesn’t know how statistics or data modelling works.
Their whole blog post boils down to them not liking the format the graph is presented in.
I can assure you this a common way to visualize this kind of a data set.
When this Blair person presents their own ‘test’ later in the post, they are literally making shit up, they did not perform any test, they just generated random noise and then went ‘see it kinda looks the same!’
Were they serious about this … analysis approach, they would have compared their random noise to the actual dunning krueger data set and then done actual statistical tests to see if the dk set was statistically significantly different than a battery of say 1000 runs of their statistical noise generation, and to what extent it was.
They did not do this, at all.
They then cite papers from no name colleges no one has ever heard of that basically just argue that a histogram is ‘the right way to present this’, even though that completely destroys any visual concept of differentiating between where ones actual ability level is vs where one estimates it to be, that just flattens it to ‘look at this psuedo normal distribution of how many people are wrong by how much’, again with no reference to their actual competency level as a factor in to what degree they overestimate themselves.
You’ve fallen for a random shit poster who shit posts on a blog instead of tiktok or instagram or reddit or WSJ/WaPo Op-Eds.
You have been bamboozeled not by lies, not by damned lies, but by an idiot attempting to do statistics.
…
If you wanted to maybe better visually portray the DK data, you coukd have the original graph, and then another graph, a bar graph, that shows the % difference between actual and perceived competency for each quartile.
And that would look like this:
(I am doing the digital equivalent of a napkin drawing here, from a phone, this is broadly accurate, but not precise.)
The lowest competency quartile believes they score at about 55th percentile when they actually score at about 10th percentile, so they overestimate themselves by about 450%.
2nd quartile; actual score is about 35 ptile, estimated score is 60 ptile, so they overestimate themselves by about 70%.
3rd quartile; actual score is about 60 ptile, estimated score is about 70 ptile, so they overestimate themselves by about 17%.
4th quartile; actual score is about 85 ptile, estimated score is about 70 ptile, so they overestimate_themselves by about negative 20%
So, there you go, you have a bar chart with 4 bars.
1st is 45 units tall,
2nd is 7,
3rd is 1.7,
4th is -2, going under the x axis.
Vertical height represents the magnitude of overestimation of a quartile’s actual competency.
That is to say, the dumbest 25% of people think they are 4.5x more competent than they actually are, in terms of comparing themselves to all people broadly, whereas the smartest 25% of people actually think they are 0.8x as competent as they actually are.
This effect at the top quartile is roughly otherwise known as ‘impostor syndrome’, another thing that is well studied and definitely real.
But the main thing that should be visually striking from this kind of presentation is that dumb people, that bottom quartile, are literally in another order of magnitude of overestimating their abilities, they are in fact so wildly off that the rest of the graph is basically just noise around the x axis in comparison, they are in fact so stupid that they have no idea how stupid they are.
For a real world example case of this, go visit the Oval Office.
You’ve fallen for a random shit poster who shit posts on a blog instead of tiktok or instagram or reddit or WSJ/WaPo Op-Eds.
You have been bamboozeled not by lies, not by damned lies, but by an idiot attempting to do statistics.
I thought I made it clear I didn’t necessarily agree with it, but I guess I wasn’t. I’m not saying this article is correct, just that it’s likely what they were thinking of when they said it was “disproved” since it made the rounds a few years ago.
Sure, fine, but this is exactly, precisely how misinformation spreads.
People who lack the sufficient knowledge set to evaluate a complex and technical claim present what appears to a layman to be a plausible idea as being roughly equivalent to the ideas that actual experts have, another brand name worth considering in the free market of ideas, more or less just another neutral option, with no strong feelings either way.
This is (unintentionally) subversive, because it elevates a ludicrous notion to a degree of plausibility that it absolutely does not deserve.
I do not mean to attack you as a person or say that you should feel bad or anything like that, I am simply here to be the counterforce, to try to explain how and why this is very silly.
Part of doing that effectively is crafting an engaging narrative.
Making punny jokes and being a bit vitriolic is engaging for other readers; again, not meant to attack or demean you as a person, but meant to mock this specific notion/idea/“theory”.
After all, at the end of the day, we could stand to be a little more capable of intellectual humility, eh?
There’s absolutely no problem with being wrong sometimes, understanding when why and how one can be or is wrong is how people learn, which should be celebrated, imo.
I dont understand. The additional experiment data is fairly convincing, but the random data example doesnt seem to disprove the effect in itself. With random data you are going to get a predicted score of 50 for every group, which is what is shown, but this seems to still indicate that, if this is really what people predicted, that low skill people are overestimating their ability. Obviously random data would exhibit the effect; why should it not?
Edit: i think i get it. The random data doesnt show that the low performers dont underestimate and the high performers dont overestimate on average, but this is the natural result if everyone has no idea how they performed. Thus my question above is exactly what they are trying to say; if everyone predicts randomly (everyone equally bad at predicting) the effect arises. So there might be no relashionship between performance prediction and performance
Like I said after my semicolon (
;), that it’s a statistical truism doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect#Statistical_and_better-than-average_effect One can prove that this effect will always exist for statistical reasons? That’s good to know, that not-so-competent people are more prone to overestimating.I’m not making an argument, just saying this is likely the thing they’re thinking of.
What happens is people have the Dunning Kruger effect on the Dunning Kruger effect itself. People call it up far too often and misuse the label
Yeah, as far as I know, it hasn’t been disproven. Its scope has narrowed and is more nuanced. And it has made its way into the public lexicon like PTSD, OCD, ADHD, etc. so it gets thrown around a lot.
That is not the same thing as being disproven though.
Thats like saying ‘trauma bonding’ isn’t real…
…because most idiots on TikTok incorrectly think it means bonds generated through shared struggles.
As opposed to what it actually means, which is basically when someone normalizes being traumatized in an abusive relationship with someone who is very manipulative by way of this other person generally offering only negative reinforcement nearly all of the time, with tiny morsels of occasional positive reinforcement handed out only after absurd feats from the ‘trauma bonded’ person.
I never said it’s not real, in fact if you reread my statement it makes no sense if ones premise was that it doesn’t exist.
I know, I am just providing an example of another thing that is misunderstood but not ‘false’.
They fun part here is how they performed a cognitive distortion in a discussion that is based on a theory about a specific type of cognitive distortion.
Our minds seem to default to cognitive distortions. Turtles all the way down. That’s why the concepts around cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) should be a subject covered through a students education.
Teaching people to spot “fake news” has become popular it it’s a sliver of a much larger issue. It’s almost certainly one of The Great Filters we need to overcome if we ever want to make out of this solar system.
Moveis with space travel typically suffer from a sense of ridiculousness that can be tied back to the portrayed society being based on the same cognitive errors of today.
I 100% agree that CBT should basically just be taught in schools as part of a kind of fundamental ‘how to be a human with thoughts and feelings’ class, lol, before moving onto ‘how to do critical analysis’ and 'how do you know what you “know” ’ class.
Our brains literally are heuristic-driven hallucination generators.
We need to make an effort to understand how they function and why and where they often break down, and how to manage their troublesome quirks…
… otherwise we will just revert to impulsive superstition in an incressingly overwhelmingly complex world, which will then guarantee our being forced into draconian social structures to more brutally manage our unexamined foolishness.
Our hardware has advanced beyond the default configs of our wetware, and Sagan’s nightmare is becoming more and more realized every single day.
I’ve often heard it’s misunderstood and used in inappropriate situations, but it’s still a real phenomenon.
Like laypeople tossing around “OCD” when they shouldn’t. Absolutely real, but not in the same way that it’s commonly used.
I don’t think it actually has.
I did a little digging on this, and there was one study that just threw some random numbers together and claimed it disproved it, but it doesn’t seem to be widely regarded as a silver bullet to the DKE.
It’s been demonstrated that it’s mostly an illusion, and yet it’s hard to escape the observation that many people who haven’t studied it in detail understand the concept much less well than they think they do.
Came here to say this.
It is psychologically satisfying to believe DK, but ultimately just because you like the sound of it, doesn’t make it true.
Ive always joked that the biggest case of DK is people believing they understand and can identify cases of DK despite having no psychology education. This makes for a fun paradox.
This is about as stupid as claiming you’d need to be educated in psychology to identify a Freudian slip
Identifying a psychological issue involving a disconnect between education and confidence is hardly on the same level as a freudian slip.
Identifying a psychological issue involving a person’s philosophical intention and the context of linguistical expression is hardly on the same level as the DK effect.
Welcome to the internet
People with low competence fail to understand their limits, and people who are competent can identify theirs.
Nevertheless, low performers’ self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.
Ok, but what if I am smart enough to know I’m not?
One can be never too smart not to know their limits.
The point is a smart person knows his or her limits. It is safer to be conservative and underestimate.
Are you smart enough to know you are smarter than you think you are?
If so, according to the dk effect, you are smarter than you think you should be, based on what you think you are.
Exactly!
Are you smart enough to know you are smarter than you think you are?
Probably not haha
