18 ms·

Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)

243 points by ikeboy 10y ago

tikhonj 10y ago
The type system question is different from the psychological examples: the problem is not people misinterpreting evidence, but that reliable empirical evidence simply does not exist. Papers on the matter are sparse, completely uneven and full of methodological issues. Personally, I'd argue that "statically typed" vs "dynamically typed" does not even make sense as a single question. There's more difference between Haskell and Java than between Java and Python, and an experiment comparing two identical languages with and without static typing won't tell us much beyond those two languages. (I recall seeing at least one paper that did this; it's probably worth reading, but not for making broader conclusions.) Moreover, there simply isn't a compelling way to measure most of the things that programmers actually care about like expressiveness, productivity or safety. Existing measures (like counting bugs, lines of code over time, experiments on small tasks often performed by students... etc) are limited, full of confounding variables and quite indirect in measuring what people actually care about. I've looked through various studies and experiments in software engineering and while some are compelling, many are little more than dressed-up anecdotes or "experience reports". It's especially hard to study these things in the contexts that matter. What we care about is experienced programmers who've used specific technologies for years applying them in teams, at scale. What's easy to experiment on is people who've just learned something using it on tiny tasks. Observational studies that aim at the broader industry context are interesting but hard to generalize because of confounding variables and difficulty of measurement. In the absence of this sort of evidence, people have to make decisions somehow, and it's not surprising that they overstate their confidence. We see this in pretty much everything else that doesn't have a strong empirical basis like questions around organizing workplaces, teams and processes. Just look at opinions people have about open offices, specific agile processes or interview procedures! Another side to the question is that languages inevitably have a strong aesthetic component, and talking about aesthetics is difficult. But you're certainly not going to convince anyone on aesthetic matters with an experiment or observational study, any more than you can expect to accomplish anything like that in the art world!
thomasahle 10y ago
All the income happiness data seems to stop shortly after 64k. Hardly evidence that there is no plateau.
- costein 10y ago
  If you click on the link "is robust across every country studied, too", there is data up to and above 500k for the US.
mevile 10y ago
> The pop-sci version of Dunning-Kruger is that, the less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know. Author's take on Dunning-Kruger is a strawman. I haven't seen that version be a "meme". I also dislike this single word rejection, the calling it a "meme", of how people talk about DK, it's like name calling or something. Unwarranted and arrogant dismissal. It's one thing to be wrong, it's another to be wrong and then also haughty about it. I feel like most people that I've seen bring DK up understand what the implications of it are. My favorite thing I've read about it is that the less you are competent in something the less you are able to gauge competence in that something. > In two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci conception of Dunning-Kruger. A plausible explanation of why perceived skill is compressed, especially at the low end, is that few people want to rate themselves as below average or as the absolute best. In one sentence he's declaring someone else's opinion on it as pop-sci than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some charts. I did like seeing that people with more skill saw themselves as better than people with less skill, but conjecture on what people want to think of themselves? That's pop-sci.
- ikeboy 10y ago
  Re strawman: I saw someone making a very similar point to the one this post critiques, which reminded me of this post and prompted me to post it. It's definitely out there as something people believe. See e.g. this comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 Edit: or this one http://orig04.deviantart.net/6527/f/2012/283/9/7/dunning_kruger_effect_by_addattack-d5hg2e4.png http://orig04.deviantart.net/6527/f/2012/283/9/7/dunning_kru...
  - mannykannot 10y ago
    The SMBC comic does not actually claim to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect.
    - ikeboy 10y ago
      No, but it makes the same claim that the post here says is popular and wrong.
stepvhen 10y ago
I like to think SMBC[1] presents a more accurate graph of confidence vs knowledge, but I don't know enough to really speak about it. [1]: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475
- duaneb 10y ago
  Quantifying the subtleties of knowledge as experience increases is difficult. For instance, one might understand the details but not compositional complexities. Or vice versa. But comparing the two situations is difficult and inextricably contextual.
dahart 10y ago
John Oliver did an awesome bit recently on scientific studies and how popular conceptions of them, especially media portrayals, completely distort the results. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw
cowpig 10y ago
> Apparently, there’s a dollar value which not only makes you happy, it makes you as happy as it is possible for humans to be. > If people rebound from both bad events and good, how is it that making more money causes people to be happier? I saw graphs that proved happiness causes money. What did you see? disclaimer: I am trying to be snide on the internet. What I mean to say is that I was confused by the use of the word "cause".
- dgacmu 10y ago
  I see graphs that proved that being born into a financially well-off family with access to good education might have something to do with factors involved in the graph. (Appreciated your humor. Am attempting a mildly humorous speculation about a plausible cause for both factors. It's probably less humorous than I think it is, but as someone lacking skill in humor, I overestimate my own hilarity.)
jpatokal 10y ago
"The less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know." I think that's an exaggeration and understood by most people to be one. What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. This is perfectly in line with eg. Urban Dictionary's definition[1]: "A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruger%20effect http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruge... [1] Chosen intentionally because this is a "popular" source, not an academic one.
- deleted 10y ago
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- jurjenh 10y ago
  The way I've come to see it is "The less you know about a subject, the less you think you don't know." In other words, you have no solid grasp on the field and so cannot make an effective guess at your ability in the field - so go for middle of the road and that's possibly your best statistical guess...
  - jwdunne 10y ago
    In a way, it's pretty intuitive. Beginners are looking down the rabbit hole and think "well I've got this far so it can't go that much deeper can it"? They've got a CRUD app up and running and doing stuff - I remember I felt pretty invincible at that point. A prime example from experience: "oh I know development. I use PHP includes all the time". The biggest humbling exercise I do is to think back 6 months, 1 year and so on. I remember how much I thought I knew and what I produced (some stuff I'm still maintaining too, which is humbling in of itself). Realising how much I've learned between those times and realising I've barely made a dent both shows me how little I know and lights the " I must learn more" fire.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    While on the other end of the scale: "The more you know about the subject, the more you don't know." Which explains the upper-quintiles topping out at at 70th percentile mean self-rating.
danbruc 10y ago
The static typing example seems weird to me. I did not read the entire linked summary but only the first five and last three papers discussed there and they mostly hint at at least some positive effect for static typing but the author of the summary essentially just dismisses the results for various reasons. I am not saying that all the judgments in the summary are necessarily wrong but overall that summary seems a pretty strange basis for saying that static typing is worth nothing. And the author of the submission is also the author of the summary.
- tikhonj 10y ago
  The conclusion I mead from that summary is not about the value of static typing one way or another but just that the empirical evidence on the matter is unclear and uniformly weak. Perhaps this is just a matter of will and funding, but I suspect it's because the underlying question is poorly specified and—like most human issues—extremely hard to study. To me, it's not obvious that asking about static typing in isolation from other parts of language design is meaningful at all.
  - danbruc 10y ago
    It is of course only anecdotal evidence but I know no developers using dynamically and statically typed languages that would deny the benefits of static typing per se. It's just a matter of fact that you get rid of a certain class of bugs that you have to otherwise cover with (unit) testing. There are of course drawbacks. If your language of choice does not offer type inference you have to write some additional boilerplate code but that may be countered to some extend by good tools with autocomplete and the like. You usually also get better refactoring tools with static typing. Then again it is sometimes harder to make something work because the type system is to restrictive and some duck typing would be really handy. It is a bit of a trade-off, some bugs go away, some code is harder to write. I guess that is what you are hinting at with looking at static typing in isolation. Nonetheless I still have to see a developer who confidently and unconditionally prefers dynamic typing over static typing, but maybe that is just some bias because of the places I work.
    - 10y ago
tommynicholas 10y ago
Dan Ariely and his team has done some great work on the "happiness" meme, and they generally support the popular notion that there are massively diminishing returns to accruing wealth. Yes, (as this post shows) happiness does continue to increase as you accrue wealth, but there are other things that you can do - including giving money AWAY - whose returns on happiness and satisfaction do not diminish. The point is, if you take a long view on life and what to focus on, getting to a certain level of financial stability should take a high priority, but becoming incredibly wealthy should not.
coverband 10y ago
Is this a clever ruse to test whether we'll read the cited sources? ;^)
ywecur 10y ago
I'm curious as to why nobody here has yet to comment on OPs claims about "Hedonic Adaptation". I've been told by various sources that this is the way the brain works, even in my recent biology class where the teacher would say that "dopamine sensitivity" was to blame. It seems like a really big deal to me if he's right, and could really change your outlook on life.
mwfunk 10y ago
The idea that there's an inverse relationship between how much someone thinks they know about a subject and how much they actually know is pretty timeless. When people refer to Dunning-Kruger I take it to mean shorthand for that phenomena rather than a reference to results from a specific study done in 1999. I may be misremembering, but when I first saw references to it on Slashdot, etc., it was from people reacting in amusement that someone was able to quantify and measure what seemed like such a commonly experienced aspect of human behavior. If someone had done an academic study on the increased likelihood of friends having scheduling and availability issues around weekends in which one friend was moving to a new house but was too cheap to get movers despite having plenty of money to do so, it would've gotten a similar response. :) Since then, it's just been convenient having a name ("Dunning-Kruger", that is) for a concept that was widely understood but didn't have shorthand for referring to it. I'm not surprised that the study itself wasn't definitive and airtight.
musesum 10y ago
D-K is one of my favorite patterns. This is the first time I've seen these charts. Some questions about methodology: The x-axis shows quartile, not score results. If the range was between 80 and 90%, then all participants were accurate in assessing their ability as "above average". [EDIT] I doubt that's the case, but would rather see scores. How was the self declared expertise in "humor" judged? That seems pretty subjective. Maybe the subject is hilarious to his or her friends. Did the subject know what the examiner's definition of "logical reasoning" is? Was that street logic or discrete structures? What if the subject was able to glance at the test questions? Only then answer the question as it pertains to the test. How would the results change? Grammar is idiomatic. In some places "over yonder" is contextually concise. Other grammatical forms may never occur. How is self-assessment over tacit expertise judged? Maybe another glance at the test? Maybe Dunning-Kruger shows that there is a disconnect in how examiner and subject interpret a question? Maybe, it is a matter of saving face in saying that you're above average? Maybe, because the subjects are college students, that they actually are above average? Or maybe, these are above average participants that aren't quite sure of the question, so they say that they're above average?
- deleted 10y ago
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dkarapetyan 10y ago
But type systems do help. You don't have to go far to notice the shortcomings of any large enough project written in python, ruby, javascript, etc. Whereas a project of equivalent scale written in c#, typescript, java, dart, etc. is much easier to maintain and debug. So given enough discipline and enough good programmers I agree that there isn't much difference but in practice this is not the case and having the compiler double check your work helps a lot.
ternaryoperator 10y ago
This article touches on one of the highest-payback practices I've developed over the last few years: going to the original sources. I am constantly rewarded by this; typically finding out that the downstream analysis misunderstood some aspect, latched on to only a fraction of the whole story, or willfully misrepresented by speculating on absent data or by inserting a plausible narrative for items that fit a private agenda.
- nabla9 10y ago
  It's very scary. Almost every time I check some thing in the news or public opinion, it's either wrong, misinterpreted or too simplified. Often it's just people talking from their ass. It's amazing how we can word as a society.
  - kbart 10y ago
    "Almost every time I check some thing in the news or public opinion, it's either wrong, misinterpreted or too simplified" I'd attribute that to the decline of real (read professional) journalism, not an actual decline of society. People have been talking from their asses probably for as long as they can speak, but Internet allowed them to bypass usual bullshit meters.
    - pkroll 10y ago
      You only remember the journalism being better because you remember the good stuff and forget just how much crap there was in a newspaper from 30 years back. The Internet surely allows more to be published and by anyone, but generally "journalism" in the past was just as focused on "how to we sensationalize something to sell papers" as current "news" is on "how do we get more views with no effort?"
    - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
      It may be worth reading "The Chief", a bio of William Randolph Hearst then. Follow that with outright political slander in newspapers in the 19th Century. Even Walter Cronkite might oughta not said what he did w.r.t. Vietnam. More time to pull out would have saved lives, and many, many people have felt very badly about that. That one is complicated. No doubt that the sheer quantity of "news" has dragged more muck off the bottom of the barrel, but the good old days weren't so good.
MPSimmons 10y ago
This article had more assumptions in it than examples of assumptions it was complaining about.
59nadir 10y ago
I love that the people who come into the comments to argue about the benefits of static typing seem to have totally missed the point that the post argues that you need evidence, not just beliefs.
- p_l 10y ago
  And they seem to continue to false axiom of assuming "static" == "strong" and "dynamic" == "weak". FFS, some people should finally learn.
  - dang 10y ago
    > FFS, some people should finally learn I realize you were commenting in a neighborhood with a whole lot of broken windows, but please don't do this here.
- deleted 10y ago
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- sklogic 10y ago
  Empirical evidence is nearly impossible in this area. On the other hand, we have a solid theory, not some "beliefs". If you want to dismiss the entire PL theory, you have to try really hard to justify such a stupid move first. The problem is, most of the dynamic proponents know next to nothing about the PL theory anyway.
  - 59nadir 10y ago
    > Empirical evidence is nearly impossible in this area. Then stop arguing as if you have evidence. It's really that simple. Present something that is not derived from opinion and speculation and make this an argument that is not subjective. For what it's worth, I prefer static, strong type systems and I was recently dreaming out loud about strong, static typing in erlang with a colleague. I don't confuse my opinion and speculation in what's good and not with fact, though, which is the big difference. > If you want to dismiss the entire PL theory, you have to try really hard to justify such a stupid move first. It's a fact that there exists no definite proof of the objective superiority of static, strong typing. I don't need to "dismiss the entire PL theory" (what a silly thing to even say; not all PL theory is concerned with types). You've come exactly 0.0% closer to showing any kind of evidence, empirical or not, and have only speculated more (on the value of static, strong type systems and of the skill and knowledge of people who disagree with you).
dahart 10y ago
Something I didn't realize before is that, meme or not, Dunning-Kruger tested perception vs skill on basic tasks, things that if someone asked me I might easily mistake my own ability, since it's something I'd feel like I should know how to do. Ability to recognize humor isn't what I'd even call a skilled subject matter, and it's not something we learn in school or normally get exposed to graded metrics or comparisons against other people. These aren't highly skilled subjects like Geophysics or Law or Electrical Engineering or Art History. I'd be willing to bet it's a lot easier to both self-identify lack of ability and admit lack of ability in a subject the more skilled it is.
sklogic 10y ago
Was ok up until type systems. Please stop citing this pathetic "empirical study" already, it's totally unscientific.
- lolc 10y ago
  If that one is not, are there any scientific studies then? Strongly typed languages require of me to do more work upfront, to satisfy their type checker. They must necessarily reject programs that would work correctly. In this process a lot of mistakes are eliminated, and this gives me more confidence that the result will work. I like that way of working. But does it produce more robust code? Is it more productive? It feels like it, but that doesn't mean it's true.
  - sklogic 10y ago
    Given a huge skill gap and inability to factor out methodology differences, I cannot see how such a study can be done at all. Anecdotes are the best we have. Far better than a pseudoscience with agenda.
    - lolc 10y ago
      Science can be analyzed for how pseudo it is, anecdotes cannot.
      - sklogic 10y ago
        Anecdotes are case studies. In social sciences, for example, it's often the only thing you have. Do not dismiss this kind of evidence when you do not have any other options.
        lolc 10y ago
        Not all anecdotes are case studies, but all case studies are anecdotal evidence. The effect of type systems is probably not that big. Otherwise the proponents of type systems would have had an easy time proving it.
mlvljr 10y ago
C'mon, "Dunning-Kruger" by itself sounds awesome enough to refer to occassionally :) Another example would be Hofstadter's law, btw.
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mwexler 10y ago
Here's a link to the original paper. http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/...
Camillo 10y ago
Starting in the 70s, there was a whole self-esteem movement in America, with books and seminars and articles and very public debates. Experts built careers on it. Educational policies were changed according to it. Maybe you were born after it had become the new normal and are completely unaware of it, but this reply chain is getting annoying. Stop posting for five minutes and look it up.
- dang 10y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Note how much better it would be with just the first paragraph. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994296 and marked it off-topic.
irrational 10y ago
One thing I never see in the income/happiness studies is - Is this just for a single person, or is it for a family? And if for a family, then what size is that family? I can see being happy earning 75k/year and being single, but not so much if I have eight other family members to support with that same salary. Is there some sort of "number of people being supported on this income" adjustment to the income/happiness studies?
- cjlars 10y ago
  At least one study uses household income [1]. The effect isn't adjusted for family size in any way I can see. Do note that the linked study differentiates between 'enjoyment of life' which they estimate starts to plateau around $75k / household and 'life satisfaction' which keeps going up with earnings [2]. That difference may explain much of the supposed controversy as outlined in the original post. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full#T2 http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full#T2 [2] http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/07/02/money-can-buy-satisfaction-if-not-happiness/ http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/07/02/money-can-buy-satisfa...

243 points by ikeboy 10y ago

The type system question is different from the psychological examples: the problem is not people misinterpreting evidence, but that reliable empirical evidence simply does not exist. Papers on the matter are sparse, completely uneven and full of methodological issues. Personally, I'd argue that "statically typed" vs "dynamically typed" does not even make sense as a single question. There's more difference between Haskell and Java than between Java and Python, and an experiment comparing two identical languages with and without static typing won't tell us much beyond those two languages. (I recall seeing at least one paper that did this; it's probably worth reading, but not for making broader conclusions.) Moreover, there simply isn't a compelling way to measure most of the things that programmers actually care about like expressiveness, productivity or safety. Existing measures (like counting bugs, lines of code over time, experiments on small tasks often performed by students... etc) are limited, full of confounding variables and quite indirect in measuring what people actually care about. I've looked through various studies and experiments in software engineering and while some are compelling, many are little more than dressed-up anecdotes or "experience reports". It's especially hard to study these things in the contexts that matter. What we care about is experienced programmers who've used specific technologies for years applying them in teams, at scale. What's easy to experiment on is people who've just learned something using it on tiny tasks. Observational studies that aim at the broader industry context are interesting but hard to generalize because of confounding variables and difficulty of measurement. In the absence of this sort of evidence, people have to make decisions somehow, and it's not surprising that they overstate their confidence. We see this in pretty much everything else that doesn't have a strong empirical basis like questions around organizing workplaces, teams and processes. Just look at opinions people have about open offices, specific agile processes or interview procedures! Another side to the question is that languages inevitably have a strong aesthetic component, and talking about aesthetics is difficult. But you're certainly not going to convince anyone on aesthetic matters with an experiment or observational study, any more than you can expect to accomplish anything like that in the art world!

thomasahle 10y ago

All the income happiness data seems to stop shortly after 64k. Hardly evidence that there is no plateau.

costein 10y ago
If you click on the link "is robust across every country studied, too", there is data up to and above 500k for the US.

mevile 10y ago

> The pop-sci version of Dunning-Kruger is that, the less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know. Author's take on Dunning-Kruger is a strawman. I haven't seen that version be a "meme". I also dislike this single word rejection, the calling it a "meme", of how people talk about DK, it's like name calling or something. Unwarranted and arrogant dismissal. It's one thing to be wrong, it's another to be wrong and then also haughty about it. I feel like most people that I've seen bring DK up understand what the implications of it are. My favorite thing I've read about it is that the less you are competent in something the less you are able to gauge competence in that something. > In two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci conception of Dunning-Kruger. A plausible explanation of why perceived skill is compressed, especially at the low end, is that few people want to rate themselves as below average or as the absolute best. In one sentence he's declaring someone else's opinion on it as pop-sci than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some charts. I did like seeing that people with more skill saw themselves as better than people with less skill, but conjecture on what people want to think of themselves? That's pop-sci.

ikeboy 10y ago
Re strawman: I saw someone making a very similar point to the one this post critiques, which reminded me of this post and prompted me to post it. It's definitely out there as something people believe. See e.g. this comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 Edit: or this one http://orig04.deviantart.net/6527/f/2012/283/9/7/dunning_kruger_effect_by_addattack-d5hg2e4.png http://orig04.deviantart.net/6527/f/2012/283/9/7/dunning_kru...
- mannykannot 10y ago
  The SMBC comic does not actually claim to illustrate the Dunning-Kruger effect.
  - ikeboy 10y ago
    No, but it makes the same claim that the post here says is popular and wrong.

stepvhen 10y ago

I like to think SMBC[1] presents a more accurate graph of confidence vs knowledge, but I don't know enough to really speak about it. [1]: http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475 http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475

duaneb 10y ago
Quantifying the subtleties of knowledge as experience increases is difficult. For instance, one might understand the details but not compositional complexities. Or vice versa. But comparing the two situations is difficult and inextricably contextual.

dahart 10y ago

John Oliver did an awesome bit recently on scientific studies and how popular conceptions of them, especially media portrayals, completely distort the results. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Rnq1NpHdmw

cowpig 10y ago

> Apparently, there’s a dollar value which not only makes you happy, it makes you as happy as it is possible for humans to be. > If people rebound from both bad events and good, how is it that making more money causes people to be happier? I saw graphs that proved happiness causes money. What did you see? disclaimer: I am trying to be snide on the internet. What I mean to say is that I was confused by the use of the word "cause".

dgacmu 10y ago
I see graphs that proved that being born into a financially well-off family with access to good education might have something to do with factors involved in the graph. (Appreciated your humor. Am attempting a mildly humorous speculation about a plausible cause for both factors. It's probably less humorous than I think it is, but as someone lacking skill in humor, I overestimate my own hilarity.)

jpatokal 10y ago

"The less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know." I think that's an exaggeration and understood by most people to be one. What is, however, absolutely clear from the original study is that incompetent people have a highly inflated assessment on their own abilities: in all four experiments (!), the people with actual 10% abilities rated themselves at 50-70%. This is perfectly in line with eg. Urban Dictionary's definition[1]: "A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do." http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruger%20effect http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Dunning-Kruge... [1] Chosen intentionally because this is a "popular" source, not an academic one.

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jurjenh 10y ago
The way I've come to see it is "The less you know about a subject, the less you think you don't know." In other words, you have no solid grasp on the field and so cannot make an effective guess at your ability in the field - so go for middle of the road and that's possibly your best statistical guess...
- jwdunne 10y ago
  In a way, it's pretty intuitive. Beginners are looking down the rabbit hole and think "well I've got this far so it can't go that much deeper can it"? They've got a CRUD app up and running and doing stuff - I remember I felt pretty invincible at that point. A prime example from experience: "oh I know development. I use PHP includes all the time". The biggest humbling exercise I do is to think back 6 months, 1 year and so on. I remember how much I thought I knew and what I produced (some stuff I'm still maintaining too, which is humbling in of itself). Realising how much I've learned between those times and realising I've barely made a dent both shows me how little I know and lights the " I must learn more" fire.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  While on the other end of the scale: "The more you know about the subject, the more you don't know." Which explains the upper-quintiles topping out at at 70th percentile mean self-rating.

danbruc 10y ago

The static typing example seems weird to me. I did not read the entire linked summary but only the first five and last three papers discussed there and they mostly hint at at least some positive effect for static typing but the author of the summary essentially just dismisses the results for various reasons. I am not saying that all the judgments in the summary are necessarily wrong but overall that summary seems a pretty strange basis for saying that static typing is worth nothing. And the author of the submission is also the author of the summary.

tikhonj 10y ago
The conclusion I mead from that summary is not about the value of static typing one way or another but just that the empirical evidence on the matter is unclear and uniformly weak. Perhaps this is just a matter of will and funding, but I suspect it's because the underlying question is poorly specified and—like most human issues—extremely hard to study. To me, it's not obvious that asking about static typing in isolation from other parts of language design is meaningful at all.
- danbruc 10y ago
  It is of course only anecdotal evidence but I know no developers using dynamically and statically typed languages that would deny the benefits of static typing per se. It's just a matter of fact that you get rid of a certain class of bugs that you have to otherwise cover with (unit) testing. There are of course drawbacks. If your language of choice does not offer type inference you have to write some additional boilerplate code but that may be countered to some extend by good tools with autocomplete and the like. You usually also get better refactoring tools with static typing. Then again it is sometimes harder to make something work because the type system is to restrictive and some duck typing would be really handy. It is a bit of a trade-off, some bugs go away, some code is harder to write. I guess that is what you are hinting at with looking at static typing in isolation. Nonetheless I still have to see a developer who confidently and unconditionally prefers dynamic typing over static typing, but maybe that is just some bias because of the places I work.
  - 10y ago

tommynicholas 10y ago

Dan Ariely and his team has done some great work on the "happiness" meme, and they generally support the popular notion that there are massively diminishing returns to accruing wealth. Yes, (as this post shows) happiness does continue to increase as you accrue wealth, but there are other things that you can do - including giving money AWAY - whose returns on happiness and satisfaction do not diminish. The point is, if you take a long view on life and what to focus on, getting to a certain level of financial stability should take a high priority, but becoming incredibly wealthy should not.

coverband 10y ago

Is this a clever ruse to test whether we'll read the cited sources? ;^)

ywecur 10y ago

I'm curious as to why nobody here has yet to comment on OPs claims about "Hedonic Adaptation". I've been told by various sources that this is the way the brain works, even in my recent biology class where the teacher would say that "dopamine sensitivity" was to blame. It seems like a really big deal to me if he's right, and could really change your outlook on life.

mwfunk 10y ago

The idea that there's an inverse relationship between how much someone thinks they know about a subject and how much they actually know is pretty timeless. When people refer to Dunning-Kruger I take it to mean shorthand for that phenomena rather than a reference to results from a specific study done in 1999. I may be misremembering, but when I first saw references to it on Slashdot, etc., it was from people reacting in amusement that someone was able to quantify and measure what seemed like such a commonly experienced aspect of human behavior. If someone had done an academic study on the increased likelihood of friends having scheduling and availability issues around weekends in which one friend was moving to a new house but was too cheap to get movers despite having plenty of money to do so, it would've gotten a similar response. :) Since then, it's just been convenient having a name ("Dunning-Kruger", that is) for a concept that was widely understood but didn't have shorthand for referring to it. I'm not surprised that the study itself wasn't definitive and airtight.

musesum 10y ago

D-K is one of my favorite patterns. This is the first time I've seen these charts. Some questions about methodology: The x-axis shows quartile, not score results. If the range was between 80 and 90%, then all participants were accurate in assessing their ability as "above average". [EDIT] I doubt that's the case, but would rather see scores. How was the self declared expertise in "humor" judged? That seems pretty subjective. Maybe the subject is hilarious to his or her friends. Did the subject know what the examiner's definition of "logical reasoning" is? Was that street logic or discrete structures? What if the subject was able to glance at the test questions? Only then answer the question as it pertains to the test. How would the results change? Grammar is idiomatic. In some places "over yonder" is contextually concise. Other grammatical forms may never occur. How is self-assessment over tacit expertise judged? Maybe another glance at the test? Maybe Dunning-Kruger shows that there is a disconnect in how examiner and subject interpret a question? Maybe, it is a matter of saving face in saying that you're above average? Maybe, because the subjects are college students, that they actually are above average? Or maybe, these are above average participants that aren't quite sure of the question, so they say that they're above average?

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dkarapetyan 10y ago

But type systems do help. You don't have to go far to notice the shortcomings of any large enough project written in python, ruby, javascript, etc. Whereas a project of equivalent scale written in c#, typescript, java, dart, etc. is much easier to maintain and debug. So given enough discipline and enough good programmers I agree that there isn't much difference but in practice this is not the case and having the compiler double check your work helps a lot.

ternaryoperator 10y ago

This article touches on one of the highest-payback practices I've developed over the last few years: going to the original sources. I am constantly rewarded by this; typically finding out that the downstream analysis misunderstood some aspect, latched on to only a fraction of the whole story, or willfully misrepresented by speculating on absent data or by inserting a plausible narrative for items that fit a private agenda.

nabla9 10y ago
It's very scary. Almost every time I check some thing in the news or public opinion, it's either wrong, misinterpreted or too simplified. Often it's just people talking from their ass. It's amazing how we can word as a society.
- kbart 10y ago
  "Almost every time I check some thing in the news or public opinion, it's either wrong, misinterpreted or too simplified" I'd attribute that to the decline of real (read professional) journalism, not an actual decline of society. People have been talking from their asses probably for as long as they can speak, but Internet allowed them to bypass usual bullshit meters.
  - pkroll 10y ago
    You only remember the journalism being better because you remember the good stuff and forget just how much crap there was in a newspaper from 30 years back. The Internet surely allows more to be published and by anyone, but generally "journalism" in the past was just as focused on "how to we sensationalize something to sell papers" as current "news" is on "how do we get more views with no effort?"
  - ArkyBeagle 10y ago
    It may be worth reading "The Chief", a bio of William Randolph Hearst then. Follow that with outright political slander in newspapers in the 19th Century. Even Walter Cronkite might oughta not said what he did w.r.t. Vietnam. More time to pull out would have saved lives, and many, many people have felt very badly about that. That one is complicated. No doubt that the sheer quantity of "news" has dragged more muck off the bottom of the barrel, but the good old days weren't so good.

MPSimmons 10y ago

This article had more assumptions in it than examples of assumptions it was complaining about.

59nadir 10y ago

I love that the people who come into the comments to argue about the benefits of static typing seem to have totally missed the point that the post argues that you need evidence, not just beliefs.

p_l 10y ago
And they seem to continue to false axiom of assuming "static" == "strong" and "dynamic" == "weak". FFS, some people should finally learn.
- dang 10y ago
  > FFS, some people should finally learn I realize you were commenting in a neighborhood with a whole lot of broken windows, but please don't do this here.
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sklogic 10y ago
Empirical evidence is nearly impossible in this area. On the other hand, we have a solid theory, not some "beliefs". If you want to dismiss the entire PL theory, you have to try really hard to justify such a stupid move first. The problem is, most of the dynamic proponents know next to nothing about the PL theory anyway.
- 59nadir 10y ago
  > Empirical evidence is nearly impossible in this area. Then stop arguing as if you have evidence. It's really that simple. Present something that is not derived from opinion and speculation and make this an argument that is not subjective. For what it's worth, I prefer static, strong type systems and I was recently dreaming out loud about strong, static typing in erlang with a colleague. I don't confuse my opinion and speculation in what's good and not with fact, though, which is the big difference. > If you want to dismiss the entire PL theory, you have to try really hard to justify such a stupid move first. It's a fact that there exists no definite proof of the objective superiority of static, strong typing. I don't need to "dismiss the entire PL theory" (what a silly thing to even say; not all PL theory is concerned with types). You've come exactly 0.0% closer to showing any kind of evidence, empirical or not, and have only speculated more (on the value of static, strong type systems and of the skill and knowledge of people who disagree with you).

dahart 10y ago

Something I didn't realize before is that, meme or not, Dunning-Kruger tested perception vs skill on basic tasks, things that if someone asked me I might easily mistake my own ability, since it's something I'd feel like I should know how to do. Ability to recognize humor isn't what I'd even call a skilled subject matter, and it's not something we learn in school or normally get exposed to graded metrics or comparisons against other people. These aren't highly skilled subjects like Geophysics or Law or Electrical Engineering or Art History. I'd be willing to bet it's a lot easier to both self-identify lack of ability and admit lack of ability in a subject the more skilled it is.

sklogic 10y ago

Was ok up until type systems. Please stop citing this pathetic "empirical study" already, it's totally unscientific.

lolc 10y ago
If that one is not, are there any scientific studies then? Strongly typed languages require of me to do more work upfront, to satisfy their type checker. They must necessarily reject programs that would work correctly. In this process a lot of mistakes are eliminated, and this gives me more confidence that the result will work. I like that way of working. But does it produce more robust code? Is it more productive? It feels like it, but that doesn't mean it's true.
- sklogic 10y ago
  Given a huge skill gap and inability to factor out methodology differences, I cannot see how such a study can be done at all. Anecdotes are the best we have. Far better than a pseudoscience with agenda.
  - lolc 10y ago
    Science can be analyzed for how pseudo it is, anecdotes cannot.
    - sklogic 10y ago
      Anecdotes are case studies. In social sciences, for example, it's often the only thing you have. Do not dismiss this kind of evidence when you do not have any other options.
      - lolc 10y ago
        Not all anecdotes are case studies, but all case studies are anecdotal evidence. The effect of type systems is probably not that big. Otherwise the proponents of type systems would have had an easy time proving it.

mlvljr 10y ago

C'mon, "Dunning-Kruger" by itself sounds awesome enough to refer to occassionally :) Another example would be Hofstadter's law, btw.

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mwexler 10y ago

Here's a link to the original paper. http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/p7536_readings/kruger_dunning.pdf http://psych.colorado.edu/~vanboven/teaching/p7536_heurbias/...

Camillo 10y ago

Starting in the 70s, there was a whole self-esteem movement in America, with books and seminars and articles and very public debates. Experts built careers on it. Educational policies were changed according to it. Maybe you were born after it had become the new normal and are completely unaware of it, but this reply chain is getting annoying. Stop posting for five minutes and look it up.

dang 10y ago
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively, or not at all. Note how much better it would be with just the first paragraph. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994296 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11994296 and marked it off-topic.

irrational 10y ago

One thing I never see in the income/happiness studies is - Is this just for a single person, or is it for a family? And if for a family, then what size is that family? I can see being happy earning 75k/year and being single, but not so much if I have eight other family members to support with that same salary. Is there some sort of "number of people being supported on this income" adjustment to the income/happiness studies?

cjlars 10y ago
At least one study uses household income [1]. The effect isn't adjusted for family size in any way I can see. Do note that the linked study differentiates between 'enjoyment of life' which they estimate starts to plateau around $75k / household and 'life satisfaction' which keeps going up with earnings [2]. That difference may explain much of the supposed controversy as outlined in the original post. [1] http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full#T2 http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489.full#T2 [2] http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/07/02/money-can-buy-satisfaction-if-not-happiness/ http://blogs.wsj.com/wealth/2010/07/02/money-can-buy-satisfa...