10 ms·
Unskilled and Unaware of It (1999) [pdf]
- throwacide 9y ago“Adventures in negative vs positive reinforcement experiments via ‘studies’ shown as social media content”
- frozenport 9y ago"Without reading the article"
- milliams 9y agoCould this have a (1999) put on it?
- sctb 9y agoYes, done. Thanks!
- itsmemattchung 9y agoPresumably, the original paper of the dunning kruger effect[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
- justonepost 9y agoHow do you test for humor?
- cldellow 9y agoThe third page of the study explains how they tested for humour. It's kind of fun to propose how they might have tested for each fo the 4 attributes they mention, then check to see how they actually did it.
- quasarj 9y agolol this is the original Dunning-Kruger paper.. why is it news now?
- jcadam 9y agoI believe myself to be a competent programmer. Does this mean I'm incompetent? It's possible; I can't ignore the possibility. There goes my self-confidence again.
- appearsonline 9y ago>Does this mean I'm incompetent? >It's possible; I can't ignore the possibility. Yes you can ignore it, just focus on things that actually matter. While other question their competence, you can actually get stuff done.
- nerfhammer 9y agoThis binary interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect leads to wild exaggeration. The most skilled people were only off by like 10%. The effect is just that people seem to think the curve goes from 0.5 to 0.85 instead of 0.0 to 1.0 but otherwise fit themselves in the same rank-ordered buckets within that.
- dahart 9y agoWhile it is possible, this paper doesn't really make it more likely. Do read the paper if you're worried about it, because it doesn't prove what it claims to. This paper is only valid for what it actually studied: some subjective tasks and some standardized test questions. Ability to get the humor in a joke was one of the 4 tasks. Subsequent papers have shown that this result doesn't apply to highly skilled or complex cognitive tasks like computer programming. In fact, the effect reverses, and highly skilled people are disproportionately better at knowing their competence. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-... This paper also didn't control for a possibly over-confident sample: the subject of the study were all Cornell undergrads, who may be prone to being overconfident, or just acting overconfident. That said, as a programmer, it's always a good idea to be confident about your willingness and attitude while being humble about your skills. Assume your programs have bugs, because they do. I believe the reason my competence is increasing is because I assume all code is wrong, and I take extra time to make sure it does what I expect.
- ericmcer 9y ago
- j_m_b 9y agoPeople value confidence over competency. If you always question things because you known enough to know that you don't know enough, people aren't going to take you very seriously. Better for yourself if you fake it till you make it. At least then you will have opportunities to advance in life. I rather suffer from Dunning-Kruger than impostor syndrome.
- jcadam 9y agoAbsolutely. You've no idea the number of times I've sat in a meeting and watched someone who clearly had no idea WTF he was talking about sway a decision maker because he presented his BS (and also swatted down more knowledgeable dissenters) with extreme confidence.
- marnett 9y agowhat is the best way to combat individuals like this? People that swat down ideas with fallacies of logic, etc.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoLearn what their goals and objectives are and position your solution to go after that. Use tricks like “that’s a great idea, my only concern is that it might fail in X scenario, Y solution is similar but doesn’t suffer from that specific issue. What do you think?”
- ryandrake 9y agoThis is probably the one and only "work scenario" I've seen play out again and again at every company I've ever worked at, without exception. These people are everywhere.
- albertgoeswoof 9y agoI have never seen this... which makes me wonder if I am the one BSing
- orbifold 9y agoThis is a strange way of phrasing the result, since the participants were all from a group of university students their skill distribution in all those fields was probably above average with respect to the overall population (especially since they were Cornell students). So I do not find it that surprising that they assessed themselves higher than warranted because in their experience they probably encountered many more people who had a lower skill level compared to them.
- ballenf 9y agoIn general use, I can't recall the Effect being cited outside attacks on a political adversary or disfavored social group or group member. Basically gives a scientific basis to insulting one's ignorant opponents. Taking the point further, can anyone think of a mechanism by which the paper has a positive effect? The ignorant person who is overly self-confident presumably would be immune from its lessons, while the informed person is not better informed about their domain. How does the knowledge of the paper's findings benefit society? (I ask this because the paper's findings seem to be widely celebrated.) To the extent it makes readers more hesitant to boast or claim superior knowledge, it's a good thing, but I have to think that those predisposed to such boasting will continue rather unfazed. Maybe I'm just too much a pessimist.
- cuckcuckspruce 9y ago>Taking the point further, can anyone think of a mechanism by which the paper has a positive effect? Yes - by reinforcing in people that confidence is disjoint from competence, and that 'trust-but-verify' is the best policy when evaluating people's competence.
- mar77i 9y agoRemember the old greek that knew he knew nothing? You don't sound like him. If you don't approach the issue - unawareness of one's incompetence - with humility, I'm sorry, but there's really one thing you are. You're confident. Now of course. Me pointing this out is moot, or is it? Maybe: I don't claim I knew anything other than what both of us already know, which is what, according to the former greek, actually counts. Or is it?
- cuckcuckspruce 9y agoI'm not claiming competence in anything. All I am doing is saying that when evaluating competence that you should test the thing you are looking for - competence - and not accept confidence as a substitute or proxy for competence.
- praptak 9y agoCounterpoint: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...
- mar77i 9y agoWhat an amazing read! I saw the correlation between actual and perceived ability and thought to myself, yeah, because the further up you go the more you expect the scale to become logarithmically difficult, be it only to imagine (for themselves) that it's even possible they don't get to actually high score (100%). That being said, there might be some statistical magic hidden in the graph, where the group, the further up it goes, does less rely on self-rewarding by guessing a lower score and splitting up into "actual" self-underselling for mimicking, evening out with the ambitious but really good ones.
- Animats 9y ago"Participants were 95 Cornell undergraduates ... from ... courses in psychology". Bad job, "researchers". That's not a suitable pool for studying this. That group has already been filtered for competence. It's a rerun of the old joke of someone asking a drunk why he's looking for his keys near a streetlight when he didn't lose them there. "The light is better here." (In tech, some clueless types do user experience testing on their own staff. Same problem.) Try recruiting some subjects at the unemployment office.
- GunlogAlm 9y agoI think the Dunning–Kruger effect is fairly well established, so I'm not sure why you'd put "researchers" in scare quotes.
- eanzenberg 9y agoNot scare quotes. The impression I got was, they’re not competent so not real researchers.
- ta76567656 9y agoThat's what the phrase "scare quotes" means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scare_quotes
- GunlogAlm 9y agoYes, scare quotes. That is what scare quotes are.
- nostrademons 9y agoThere've been a number of criticisms of Dunning-Kruger in recent years, many focusing on the sample-bias problem that Animats brings up (which is also common to a lot of attempts to reproduce it), and some also mentioning the possibility of floor effects (i.e. if you have a natural statistical variance around some quantity that is close to the bottom of what your test can measure - as if you're unskilled - then your average will be skewed upwards because for most people "there's nowhere to go but up"). Here's a relatively recent literature overview: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a387/04facf73e00523bff8182d9b9fa49c93aa39.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/a387/04facf73e00523bff8182d... tl;dr: It's complicated. Science is hard. Effects similar to Dunning-Kruger's result have been observed in multiple different domains, but because competence usually has a power-law rather than normal distribution, it's hard to say whether observed effects are due to real metacognitive skills or sampling biases. Controlled experiments are also very difficult because "training people up" inevitably results in some fraction of the sample dropping out, which also introduces sample bias.
- javadocmd 9y agoI would be interested in a cross-cultural evaluation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. This study was performed in the US. Is the effect as prominent in Russia? Sweden? China? South Africa? Across racial boundaries? Across class boundaries? I suspect a strong cultural and environmental influence.
- robotresearcher 9y agoThe original study was of 65 undergrad psychologists at Cornell who got extra credit for participation. Probably a relatively narrow pool of personalities even in that region of the US. Anyone know of replications with a wider pool?
- andersonfreitas 9y agoIn this study [1] the experiments were replicated in Hong Kong with 4034 high school students and in US with 95 students. [1] "Why Do People Overestimate or Underestimate Their Abilities? A Cross-Culturally Valid Model of Cognitive and Motivational Processes in Self-Assessment Biases" http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022022116661243 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022022116661243 (paywalled)
- throwaway0U812 9y agohere's the article, for scientific purposes: https://file.io/41t2Gv https://file.io/41t2Gv
- robotresearcher 9y agoExcellent, thanks.
- 77pt77 9y agoEvery time I've witnessed in person the Dunning-Kruger effect being used in real life, the person bringing it up was under its spell...
- justherefortart 9y agoEvery time you say...
- etiam 9y agoRecognized with the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology in 2000. https://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2000 https://www.improbable.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html#ig2000
- faragon 9y agoDunning-Kruger effect explanation should be in every single high school education program. Quoting Bertrand Russell: "The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt" (1933, "The Triumph of Stupidity" essay [1], also discussed in HN [2]). [1] http://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM http://russell-j.com/0583TS.HTM [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10636818 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10636818
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- crispytx 9y agoTL;DR People thought they did well on a test but actually performed poorly relative to their peers! Haha, losers!
- anonu 9y agotldr know thyself
- daveguy 9y agoI've never been more aware of my own dunning kruger effect until I started playing violin. At first I was getting better fast and learning faster! I didn't often record my playing and I should. After 1 year I thought I made significant improvements and could play some songs "pretty good". Into the second and third years I started being able to hear how scritchy and a little out of tune I was in almost every song. I also started listening to recordings of myself and shuddered at the sound. I didn't know how bad I was because I was making such great improvements (from ignorant and being unable to play twinkle twinkle little star). It wasn't until I got mediocre that I could even hear how mediocre I am. I think some of it is the big leap from total ignorance to beginner knowledge. It "feels" like you are getting better quickly and learning fast because you have no reference.