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How to get a clue where on the curve of Dunning-Kruger effect you are? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] mojo_raisin 7 points 7 months ago (3 children)

The basic effect Dunning-Kruger is about is real and apparent everywhere. The specific formulation as stated from that pair may have some errors but throwing away the idea due to poor science isn't smart.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/

To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.

First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers.

So, the experiment with completely fake data disproves Dunning-Kruger? How is this science?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (2 children)

If random numbers result in the same observable phenomenon, then the phenomenon is a property of mathematics and not cognition

[–] mojo_raisin 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Ah gotcha, I wasn't quite understanding that.

I still personally believe that the basic effect described by Dunning-Kruger does in fact exist on some level. If it's not due to cognition, that seems to imply that essentially everyone at every intelligence level accurately estimates their own intelligence, that would be weird.

Dunning-Kruger became popular because it gave a name to an apparent phenomena.

[–] tomalley8342 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

That article (or rather, the article linked in that article) doesn't contradict your intuition, just a specific interpretation of that intuition. The randomly generated data puts everyone around 50%, which is indeed what you would expect from randomly uniformly generated data. So the similarity that the generated data presents is supposed to imply the conclusion that "everyone thinks they're about average, so their judgement is no better than randomly guessing (assuming that the guesses are uniformly distributed)", which is a subtle difference from "dumb people think they're smart" - the latter attributes some sort of "flawed reasoning" to one's self-judgement, while the former specifically asserts that there is absolutely no relevant self-judgement going on.

edit: You would also be correct that this doesn't disprove the previous explanation, it just offers an alternative explanation for the observed effect. The fact that data matches up with a generated model definitely does not prove that it is not actually caused by something else, which is one of the criticisms of that viewpoint. It is obviously easier to rigorously demonstrate a statistical explanation than a psychological explanation of course, due to the nature of the two different fields.