10 ms·

Misunderstanding Dunning-Kruger

169 points by imartin2k 7y ago

ncmncm 7y ago
This article was surprisingly OK. About all it omits is that people at the bottom of the scale generally didn't even understand the questions they were asked, so their answers were really all over the place. But the key takeaway -- the D-K effect is about you, much of the time, even if you are expert about some things -- is usually neglected. D-K is about everyone: The more certain you are, the less likely it is you have reason to be.
- smitty1e 7y ago
  Cloud computing has been a DK bulldozer. Time and again the symptoms of the problem I'm troubleshooting have correlated with some prior experience, triggering a prediction, which has been wrong. And I've actually passed multiple cloud certifications, too. IT is just complicated.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    My initial hypothesis on bug fixes are normally wrong. However proving/disproving them tends to help immensely in finding the real problem.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    My DK assumption/bias is that people who tout their “multiple cloud certifications” are likely more wrong than average engineers. Would be interesting to find out how wrong I actually here...
    - smitty1e 7y ago
      Well, those AWS Associate certs ain't beanbag. However, if you haven't had the service blow up in your face a few times, you'd better have a photographic memory to pass those certs.
- smsm42 7y ago
  But, judging from the graph in the article, the top quartile actually under-estimates their ability? Only lower 3 quartiles overestimate it, so for experts it doesn't seem to be true? Unless, of course, I misunderstand DK effect completely and am not aware of it...
  - jeremyjh 7y ago
    It’s true for experts outside of their field of expertise.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      It's true for experts (above ~70th percentile) in their area of expertise, too, just in the opposite way as it is true for people below that level.
  - ChrisSD 7y ago
    Yes, the point is that in your area of expertise you are likely to be more humble relative to your actual ability (but not too far off, on average). However outside of your specific area(s) of expertise your confidence in your ability is likely to far exceed your actual ability (on average). So experts are still susceptible to DK effect for areas that lie outside their expertise. Even (or perhaps especially) if they think their expertise gives them special insight into another field.
    - jacobmoe 7y ago
      This makes sense to me. If you're an expert you are comparing yourself to other experts in your field. On the other hand, if you know anything about a topic but only interact with people who know nothing at all about it, you would rate yourself highly. For example, I read a lot about modern physics but am not a physicist. I would give myself an above average understanding but would likely fail an exam.
  - rjvs 7y ago
    The more you know, the more you know that you don't know...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > the D-K effect is about you, much of the time, even if you are expert about some things It's as much about you and the things you are an expert about as anything else; D-K isn't just a low-ability effect.
  - ncmncm 7y ago
    No, people under-rating their expertise is a garden-variety variation on reversion to the mean. D-K, if it means anything, is an effect on top of that.
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > No, people under-rating their expertise is a garden-variety variation on reversion to the mean. Reversion to the mean would be underperforming past elite performance, not underestimating actual performance. And it would draw toward the mean, not the ~70th percentile.
eterm 7y ago
My pet peeve is people thinking that D-K is a negative correlation of ability and perceived ability, when it's actually a weaker correlation than it 'should' be.
- DalekBaldwin 7y ago
  And due to scale-end effects, you should expect to compute a weaker correlation from a naive calibration analysis. If you are at the zeroth percentile, you can only overestimate your performance; if you are at the hundredth, you can only underestimate it. http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/TrentoCourse/Juslin_etal_Naive_Empiricism_Dogmatism_inConfidence_Research.pdf http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/TrentoCourse/Juslin_etal_Nai...
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    But interestingly, D-K isn't a symmetric-about-median effect; which is what you'd expect from scale-end effects alone. The D-K finding was that people tend to estimate themselves closer to roughly the 70th percentile than they actually are.
    - ghaff 7y ago
      But that’s sort of what you’d expect, e.g. most people thinking they’re an above-average driver—but don’t actually think they’re incredibly wicked good. I’d never seen it presented quite this way before but it makes a lot of sense.
    - haberman 7y ago
      70% is the bottom of C grade range. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_Unit...) Honestly I think this can explain a large part of D-K. People just aren't calibrated to imagine getting a 25% let alone a 0% even in something they are truly terrible at.
      - humanrebar 7y ago
tpush 7y ago
See also: https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/
ocschwar 7y ago
Some people have a really inflated view of their understanding of the Dunning Kruger effect.
kromem 7y ago
My takeaway from DK is that the roughly 80% mark is where is the generally ideal balance between self-image and social acceptance, and that's why everyone on either side leans toward that inflection point. Having been on the "exceptional" side of the curve on some things (and verified though both independent testing and testimonials), it was definitely socially isolating until I broadened my perspective and accepted that while I may be past that 80% mark in some things, I was well behind it in many others, and if I could appreciate the skill others have that I do not, I would have a much more enjoyable experience of community than comparing others to myself in the things I was the best at. In general, I think this is a lot of cognitive dissonance & confirmation bias. For everything from politics & religion to what foods or TV shows we like, it's more enjoyable to share our lives with people that enforce our sense of reality. Coming to terms with the fact you suck at something is really unpleasant if you haven't also found the things you are awesome at to balance it out in your self-evaluation. And vice versa, being REALLY awesome at something kind of sucks and makes you feel you can't connect with others (and sometimes they will hate you for outshining them if you shove it in their faces) unless you recognize your own clay feet. It also explains why echo-chambers like the anti-vaxx FB groups are so popular. They are exceptionally (in the standard deviation sense) out-of-touch with reality, which is typically something that is socially isolating, but by coming together, they can have the benefits of community without sacrificing their identity of being smarter than doctors. It's basically like a reverse-MENSA (which has its own issues with being on the wrong side of DK -- IQ tests are one specific measure of a population variance, and doesn't necessarily correlate with things like empathy, open-mindedness, or creative thinking - all things I'd care about having in my social circle moreso than IQ). Interestingly enough, we can see the same effect in purely objectively evaluated ranges. Many of us might be familiar with the threshold for how much income correlates with the maximum happiness (on average, having either less or more correlates with unhappiness). IIRC the latest research puts it at about $100,000 times the square root of the household size. While I don't have the tables in front of me, I'd wager that's roughly the 80th percentile in income. The thing is - that 80% mark is simply the ideal average - but the spread around it is up to us as a society. If we provide better education resources for those struggling in academics, we can get more people closer to the ideal (and likely improve their happiness) without necessarily moving the mean. If we have high marginal tax rates, we can redistribute wealth to close the "spread" around the ideal, which if the research is correct will actually improve happiness for the people on both sides of it. If we actually manage to master our own genes, we can likely do the same for health, innate intelligence, empathy, depression, etc.
ternaryoperator 7y ago
> if you think it only applies to other people (which itself, ironically, is part of the DK effect) then you miss the core lesson I have observed in conversation that invariably if someone brings up Sturgeon's Law [1] either by naming it or quoting it ("90% of everything is crud|shit|garbage"), they invariably place themselves in the 10%. As if awareness of the law somehow insulates the speaker. That seems to be the case with D-K, per this article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
- acqq 7y ago
  Moreover, the original point of Sturgeon was not a simple dismissal of "90% of everything" but his dismissal of any informativeness in somebody's similar claim for anything specific (he wrote about the art forms): "I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms."
- Kaveren 7y ago
  I dislike when people use adages like these (___'s law). They rarely add anything to the conversation and I think a lot of confirmation bias is involved. Moore's Law is an exception to this because it's actually falsifiable and less of an adage.
- taneq 7y ago
  So you're saying 90% of invocations of Sturgeon's Law are crap? Of course, to follow Sturgeon's own line of thought, that doesn't mean the other 10% aren't worth taking note of.
- dahart 7y ago
  The best part of Sturgeon's Law for me was realizing that it's tautological. It's just defining "crud" to be the bottom 90%, which is drawing an arbitrary line between the top and the bottom. It's a fun one in the same way that D/K is in that it just feels true, like it's validating a working theory you already had about the world. But Sturgeon's law can't be false, whereas D/K really is commonly misunderstood and might not even be generally reproducible; it might not even be broadly true at all. D/K is certainly over-generalized and in popular culture applied to situations that are very unlike the experiments in the paper, which were only pretty trivial tasks. The D/K Effect "actually goes away, and even reverses, when the ability tests given to participants are very difficult." 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-...
baxtr 7y ago
I find it noteworthy that the author seems to be extremely confident that he’s right.
- jdsully 7y ago
  And yet the effect could just as easily be predicting that he is still not confident enough.
- dahart 7y ago
  Which, according to the the DK paper makes it more likely that he is in fact right. There is a positive correlation in their results between confidence and ability.
povertyworld 7y ago
How does the Dunning-Kruger effect affect people with imposter syndrome?
- russellbeattie 7y ago
  It just shows that, empirically, most people who think they have imposter syndrome are, in fact, imposters. Most of the time, I suspect that the "I'm not qualified to be here" feeling is simply normal people having a moment of clarity.
  - alkibiades 7y ago
    you can’t say stuff like this in public even though it’s true. it’s hurts too many peoples feels
codingslave 7y ago
I feel like I can't go one day without reading somewhere on the internet where someone mentions the DK effect. If anything, it's a prime example of group think. It sounds clever, and is probably true in a ton of cases, and so people repeat it. Over and over. The same is true of occams razor. These are just ideas, not intellectual vistas.
- ghaff 7y ago
  People love to think they’re really smart and post a Wikipedia link to DK, Occam’s razor, submarine PR, etc. whenever they think it’s vaguely related because they think it makes them look clever. They’re not.
  - mieseratte 7y ago
    Instagram Intellectuals. Some folks want to show off their hot bods, expensive cars, and exotic trips. Others want to show off just how smart they are with a superficial recognition of a pattern, a concept, a thing they know, but not an actual discussion. I'm as guilty as any. How does one learn to "shut up" other than through sheer force of will?
    - grenoire 7y ago
      Practice silence if you are not creating valuable conversation. Pointing out intellectual fallacies ends such discourse, and doesn't accomplish anything but that.
    - Mirioron 7y ago
      Is it actually preferable to shut up though? They say that one of the easiest ways to get a better answer is to be wrong on the internet. Thus if you share what you know, but end up being wrong, then somebody's going to correct you.
      - BuckRogers 7y ago
        Very rarely do people correct you in a way that's instructive. It's usually just mocking after they get you on one tidbit. A large part of that is because those who argue on the internet are usually children or people who know nothing about anything.
forrestthewoods 7y ago
I've always thought Dunning-Kruger is kind of bullshit. (I realize the irony in stating this.) In the study a bunch of people took four tests and then estimated their score RELATIVE TO OTHER TEST TAKERS. That's bullshit! The test takers were 65 Cornell psychology undergraduates. Cornell is a great university. All 65 test takers are probably super smart! In fact, that might have all scored quite similarly. Forcing 65 high performers to estimate their relative score is bullshit. That's impossible! You don't have enough information about the other test takers. I think it would be far more interesting if test takers estimated their absolute score. Whether that score is better or worse than other test takers is irrelevant. But what do I know. I'm probably just incompetent and don't know it.
- robocat 7y ago
  The point of this article was too remind us that just because someone is smart in one area (Cornell psychology undergraduates) doesn't mean they are smart in another (humour was measured in original paper - have you read the DK paper?). The article makes the common mistake of ignoring the other side of the DK effect: the top quartile estimates their skill downwards. I like to say I am showing DK tendencies because I often underestimate my skills ;-)
  - forrestthewoods 7y ago
    My unpopular opinion is that the majority of people who mention Dunning-Kruger or imposter syndrome are primarily just trying to humble brag. Full Duning-Kruger paper is here. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e320/9ca64cbed9a441e55568797cbd3683cf7f8c.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e320/9ca64cbed9a441e5556879... There is some commentary on raw test score estimation. Including this funny line: "Participants in the bottom quartile also overestimated their raw score on the test. On average, they thought they had answered 5.5 problems correctly. In fact, they had answered an average of 0.3 problems correctly" I wonder if the raw DK data is available? The paper includes a small handful of figures. There's quite a few more I'd like to render.
- keithnz 7y ago
  well given the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis I think it's healthy to question psych experiment results. I think you'd want good evidence that this effect can be measured repeatedly and in different contexts.
edoloughlin 7y ago
I highly recommend the author's podcast: The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe [1]. [1] https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ https://www.theskepticsguide.org/
theothermkn 7y ago
> [T]hose who endorse anti-vaccine views were far more likely to estimate that they knew as much as experts or doctors, when in fact their knowledge level was extremely low. > Dunning believes that ability to self-assess is also key to the effect. > As you gain knowledge, this confidence grows. > Specifically, narcissistic personality seems to put DK on steroids. That collection of quotes feeds my suspicion that extreme examples of the DK effect and conspiratorial thinking (For example: vaccine-denial, birtherism, racism as "expertise" on how the outgroup "really is," and so on.) have in common the fact that they give those inflicted a much-needed sense of control over an uncertain universe. Baseball players are known for having superstitious rituals at the mound or the plate, precisely because pitcher and batter are engaged in high-stakes, high-variability activities with unpredictable success rates. Baseball players are hardly traumatized, but imagine if they were playing for their lives, or their senses of self. I wouldn't be surprised if the fractured way that the world is presented to us after the decline of television and the rise of the internet (with its conflicting narratives) hasn't so traumatized a fraction of the population that the only way they can construct their sense of selves as in control enough to not feel permanently precarious is to habitually steer themselves away from even the hint of dissonance by constantly asserting, "I know. I am in control. This is how it is." One of the things having one or a few sources of national news possibly did was to give one the plausible belief that their set of beliefs was tenable, stable, and unchallenged by rivals. From a scared monkey perspective, I wonder if we got lucky with broadcast television, if the perception of unity wasn't necessary. Whereas now we seem to be constantly having to defend our perceived in-group. The point of this ramble is that maybe the psychodynamics of DK are as simple as, 'Feeling confident feels better, and I need that, and I feel rewarded when I engage in thinking that rewards that sense.'
ggm 7y ago
D-K also stands for Dorling-Kindersley, publishers of wonderful photographic books which encourage the D-K effect, which is wanting to buy more. Also, create false sense of understanding of the "aha, thats what a triceratops looks like" form, leading back to this D-K effect
throwaway3627 7y ago
Trump is off the left side of the graph where actual ability is epsilon (~0) while perceived ability is 100.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar.
throwaway3627 7y ago
Another dimension to consider is that some people perform well at some specific things, but not all nonspecific things. And also that performance varies with situation-to-situation and self-perception varies with mood/time. In reality, DK is an overall impression tendency rather than a strict rule... such is the nature of squishy, fungible social "sciences;" reality is messier than a numeric IQ result.
aklemm 7y ago
I assure you my understanding of D-K is well above average.
Aeolun 7y ago
> The best way to summarize the data is to say that the difference between self-assessment and performance increases with lower performance below about the 80th percentile, with slight underestimation of performance for those above the 80th percentile (or a test score of about 70%). It may just be me, but this does not seem like the best way to ‘summarize’ the data for general consumption. The original “dumb people always think they’re smarter than they actually are” that the author takes issue with seems more sensible. We can’t expect everyone to be in the top 20%.
- ramblerman 7y ago
  I agree, not unimportantly the effect is much more pronounced in the bottom group. When someone overestimates their abilities by 20% it is far less drastic than a whopping 500%
  - Thorrez 7y ago
    500%? I don't think you can compare percentiles like that. Let's say someone estimates his percentile to be the 3rd percentile (aka 97% of people are better) and in reality he's in the 1st percentile (99% of people are better). Did he overestimate his ability by 200%? I wouldn't say so, I would say he was very very close. Even at non-extreme percentiles I don't think such a comparison works. For example in some area it might be that people at the 10th percentile know nearly the same amount as people at the 50th percentile. If it's some area that most people know little about. So the abilities of someone at the 10th percentile would be nearly the same as the abilities of someone at the 50th percentile. So overestimating your percentile by a lot is not the same as overestimating your abilities by a lot.
  - raxxorrax 7y ago
    What I see in practice is that the effect is often used to discredit the competency of people like the WP author did. > which itself, ironically, is part of the DK effect I think the effect can help you come to the conclusion many experts in fields come to after a while: The larger your knowledge, the more you are aware of your ignorance. I am sure there is an English idiom that describes it more gracefully. Maybe that is the intersection to the 20%. Enthusiastically pointing out the discrepancy on the other end of the curve is most probably an indicator that you might have fallen "victim" to the effect itself.
zzo38computer 7y ago
Due to Dunning-Kruger, I don't know if I understand Dunning-Kruger so well or not.
chantelles 7y ago
The women were much more likely to turn down the opportunity: only 49 percent of them signed up for the competition, compared with 71 percent of the men. “That was a proxy for whether women might seek out certain opportunities,” Ehrlinger told us. “Because they are less confident in general in their abilities, that led them not to want to pursue future opportunities.” -Dunning and Ehrlinger https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-con...
jeffdavis 7y ago
I wonder if the DK effect is really an implicit narrowing or widening of the population. I would guess thay I'm an above-average sprinter. But that's because I'm assuming there are 2 year olds and 80-year-olds in the population. If you ask a runner, they are likely to compare themselves against other runners and probably not even consider someone like me in the population.
Traster 7y ago
I think what is driving the distinction between what the author is claiming and what WashPo is talking about is that whilst it's true the data suggests people gernerally over-estimate their ability relative to others when they under perform, that's not important. It's not important that the average guy thinks he's smarter than 60% of other people. The important bit is that the idiot thinks he's smarter than average. So there's the DK effect, and there's the interesting part of the DK effect. But in the original article, the line is drawn to Trump. But I don't think taking a statistical pattern and then applying it to the public persona of a reality TV star is a good idea. If we're going to object to anything, I'll object to that first.
breakyerself 7y ago
I see on a regular basis people who have poor levels of understanding on a subject and yet believe they know better than the experts. Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO, etc. I understand this isn't exactly what Dunning Kruger is talking about, but I don't have a better short hand explanation for it.
joker3 7y ago
I think there's a better explanation at 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-..., which also discusses some possible alternative explanations.
godshatter 7y ago
When someone invokes the Dunning-Kruger effect, I often reply asking if they are a trained psychologist and are they sure they are using the term correctly? This never goes over very well.

169 points by imartin2k 7y ago

This article was surprisingly OK. About all it omits is that people at the bottom of the scale generally didn't even understand the questions they were asked, so their answers were really all over the place. But the key takeaway -- the D-K effect is about you, much of the time, even if you are expert about some things -- is usually neglected. D-K is about everyone: The more certain you are, the less likely it is you have reason to be.

smitty1e 7y ago
Cloud computing has been a DK bulldozer. Time and again the symptoms of the problem I'm troubleshooting have correlated with some prior experience, triggering a prediction, which has been wrong. And I've actually passed multiple cloud certifications, too. IT is just complicated.
- jdsully 7y ago
  My initial hypothesis on bug fixes are normally wrong. However proving/disproving them tends to help immensely in finding the real problem.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  My DK assumption/bias is that people who tout their “multiple cloud certifications” are likely more wrong than average engineers. Would be interesting to find out how wrong I actually here...
  - smitty1e 7y ago
    Well, those AWS Associate certs ain't beanbag. However, if you haven't had the service blow up in your face a few times, you'd better have a photographic memory to pass those certs.
smsm42 7y ago
But, judging from the graph in the article, the top quartile actually under-estimates their ability? Only lower 3 quartiles overestimate it, so for experts it doesn't seem to be true? Unless, of course, I misunderstand DK effect completely and am not aware of it...
- jeremyjh 7y ago
  It’s true for experts outside of their field of expertise.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    It's true for experts (above ~70th percentile) in their area of expertise, too, just in the opposite way as it is true for people below that level.
- ChrisSD 7y ago
  Yes, the point is that in your area of expertise you are likely to be more humble relative to your actual ability (but not too far off, on average). However outside of your specific area(s) of expertise your confidence in your ability is likely to far exceed your actual ability (on average). So experts are still susceptible to DK effect for areas that lie outside their expertise. Even (or perhaps especially) if they think their expertise gives them special insight into another field.
  - jacobmoe 7y ago
    This makes sense to me. If you're an expert you are comparing yourself to other experts in your field. On the other hand, if you know anything about a topic but only interact with people who know nothing at all about it, you would rate yourself highly. For example, I read a lot about modern physics but am not a physicist. I would give myself an above average understanding but would likely fail an exam.
- rjvs 7y ago
  The more you know, the more you know that you don't know...
dragonwriter 7y ago
> the D-K effect is about you, much of the time, even if you are expert about some things It's as much about you and the things you are an expert about as anything else; D-K isn't just a low-ability effect.
- ncmncm 7y ago
  No, people under-rating their expertise is a garden-variety variation on reversion to the mean. D-K, if it means anything, is an effect on top of that.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > No, people under-rating their expertise is a garden-variety variation on reversion to the mean. Reversion to the mean would be underperforming past elite performance, not underestimating actual performance. And it would draw toward the mean, not the ~70th percentile.

eterm 7y ago

My pet peeve is people thinking that D-K is a negative correlation of ability and perceived ability, when it's actually a weaker correlation than it 'should' be.

DalekBaldwin 7y ago
And due to scale-end effects, you should expect to compute a weaker correlation from a naive calibration analysis. If you are at the zeroth percentile, you can only overestimate your performance; if you are at the hundredth, you can only underestimate it. http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/TrentoCourse/Juslin_etal_Naive_Empiricism_Dogmatism_inConfidence_Research.pdf http://home.cerge-ei.cz/ortmann/TrentoCourse/Juslin_etal_Nai...
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  But interestingly, D-K isn't a symmetric-about-median effect; which is what you'd expect from scale-end effects alone. The D-K finding was that people tend to estimate themselves closer to roughly the 70th percentile than they actually are.
  - ghaff 7y ago
    But that’s sort of what you’d expect, e.g. most people thinking they’re an above-average driver—but don’t actually think they’re incredibly wicked good. I’d never seen it presented quite this way before but it makes a lot of sense.
  - haberman 7y ago
    70% is the bottom of C grade range. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_the_Unit...) Honestly I think this can explain a large part of D-K. People just aren't calibrated to imagine getting a 25% let alone a 0% even in something they are truly terrible at.
    - humanrebar 7y ago

tpush 7y ago

See also: https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/ https://danluu.com/dunning-kruger/

ocschwar 7y ago

Some people have a really inflated view of their understanding of the Dunning Kruger effect.

kromem 7y ago

My takeaway from DK is that the roughly 80% mark is where is the generally ideal balance between self-image and social acceptance, and that's why everyone on either side leans toward that inflection point. Having been on the "exceptional" side of the curve on some things (and verified though both independent testing and testimonials), it was definitely socially isolating until I broadened my perspective and accepted that while I may be past that 80% mark in some things, I was well behind it in many others, and if I could appreciate the skill others have that I do not, I would have a much more enjoyable experience of community than comparing others to myself in the things I was the best at. In general, I think this is a lot of cognitive dissonance & confirmation bias. For everything from politics & religion to what foods or TV shows we like, it's more enjoyable to share our lives with people that enforce our sense of reality. Coming to terms with the fact you suck at something is really unpleasant if you haven't also found the things you are awesome at to balance it out in your self-evaluation. And vice versa, being REALLY awesome at something kind of sucks and makes you feel you can't connect with others (and sometimes they will hate you for outshining them if you shove it in their faces) unless you recognize your own clay feet. It also explains why echo-chambers like the anti-vaxx FB groups are so popular. They are exceptionally (in the standard deviation sense) out-of-touch with reality, which is typically something that is socially isolating, but by coming together, they can have the benefits of community without sacrificing their identity of being smarter than doctors. It's basically like a reverse-MENSA (which has its own issues with being on the wrong side of DK -- IQ tests are one specific measure of a population variance, and doesn't necessarily correlate with things like empathy, open-mindedness, or creative thinking - all things I'd care about having in my social circle moreso than IQ). Interestingly enough, we can see the same effect in purely objectively evaluated ranges. Many of us might be familiar with the threshold for how much income correlates with the maximum happiness (on average, having either less or more correlates with unhappiness). IIRC the latest research puts it at about $100,000 times the square root of the household size. While I don't have the tables in front of me, I'd wager that's roughly the 80th percentile in income. The thing is - that 80% mark is simply the ideal average - but the spread around it is up to us as a society. If we provide better education resources for those struggling in academics, we can get more people closer to the ideal (and likely improve their happiness) without necessarily moving the mean. If we have high marginal tax rates, we can redistribute wealth to close the "spread" around the ideal, which if the research is correct will actually improve happiness for the people on both sides of it. If we actually manage to master our own genes, we can likely do the same for health, innate intelligence, empathy, depression, etc.

ternaryoperator 7y ago

> if you think it only applies to other people (which itself, ironically, is part of the DK effect) then you miss the core lesson I have observed in conversation that invariably if someone brings up Sturgeon's Law [1] either by naming it or quoting it ("90% of everything is crud|shit|garbage"), they invariably place themselves in the 10%. As if awareness of the law somehow insulates the speaker. That seems to be the case with D-K, per this article. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law

acqq 7y ago
Moreover, the original point of Sturgeon was not a simple dismissal of "90% of everything" but his dismissal of any informativeness in somebody's similar claim for anything specific (he wrote about the art forms): "I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud. Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. is crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other art forms."
Kaveren 7y ago
I dislike when people use adages like these (___'s law). They rarely add anything to the conversation and I think a lot of confirmation bias is involved. Moore's Law is an exception to this because it's actually falsifiable and less of an adage.
taneq 7y ago
So you're saying 90% of invocations of Sturgeon's Law are crap? Of course, to follow Sturgeon's own line of thought, that doesn't mean the other 10% aren't worth taking note of.
dahart 7y ago
The best part of Sturgeon's Law for me was realizing that it's tautological. It's just defining "crud" to be the bottom 90%, which is drawing an arbitrary line between the top and the bottom. It's a fun one in the same way that D/K is in that it just feels true, like it's validating a working theory you already had about the world. But Sturgeon's law can't be false, whereas D/K really is commonly misunderstood and might not even be generally reproducible; it might not even be broadly true at all. D/K is certainly over-generalized and in popular culture applied to situations that are very unlike the experiments in the paper, which were only pretty trivial tasks. The D/K Effect "actually goes away, and even reverses, when the ability tests given to participants are very difficult." 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-...

baxtr 7y ago

I find it noteworthy that the author seems to be extremely confident that he’s right.

jdsully 7y ago
And yet the effect could just as easily be predicting that he is still not confident enough.
dahart 7y ago
Which, according to the the DK paper makes it more likely that he is in fact right. There is a positive correlation in their results between confidence and ability.

povertyworld 7y ago

How does the Dunning-Kruger effect affect people with imposter syndrome?

russellbeattie 7y ago
It just shows that, empirically, most people who think they have imposter syndrome are, in fact, imposters. Most of the time, I suspect that the "I'm not qualified to be here" feeling is simply normal people having a moment of clarity.
- alkibiades 7y ago
  you can’t say stuff like this in public even though it’s true. it’s hurts too many peoples feels

codingslave 7y ago

I feel like I can't go one day without reading somewhere on the internet where someone mentions the DK effect. If anything, it's a prime example of group think. It sounds clever, and is probably true in a ton of cases, and so people repeat it. Over and over. The same is true of occams razor. These are just ideas, not intellectual vistas.

ghaff 7y ago
People love to think they’re really smart and post a Wikipedia link to DK, Occam’s razor, submarine PR, etc. whenever they think it’s vaguely related because they think it makes them look clever. They’re not.
- mieseratte 7y ago
  Instagram Intellectuals. Some folks want to show off their hot bods, expensive cars, and exotic trips. Others want to show off just how smart they are with a superficial recognition of a pattern, a concept, a thing they know, but not an actual discussion. I'm as guilty as any. How does one learn to "shut up" other than through sheer force of will?
  - grenoire 7y ago
    Practice silence if you are not creating valuable conversation. Pointing out intellectual fallacies ends such discourse, and doesn't accomplish anything but that.
  - Mirioron 7y ago
    Is it actually preferable to shut up though? They say that one of the easiest ways to get a better answer is to be wrong on the internet. Thus if you share what you know, but end up being wrong, then somebody's going to correct you.
    - BuckRogers 7y ago
      Very rarely do people correct you in a way that's instructive. It's usually just mocking after they get you on one tidbit. A large part of that is because those who argue on the internet are usually children or people who know nothing about anything.

forrestthewoods 7y ago

I've always thought Dunning-Kruger is kind of bullshit. (I realize the irony in stating this.) In the study a bunch of people took four tests and then estimated their score RELATIVE TO OTHER TEST TAKERS. That's bullshit! The test takers were 65 Cornell psychology undergraduates. Cornell is a great university. All 65 test takers are probably super smart! In fact, that might have all scored quite similarly. Forcing 65 high performers to estimate their relative score is bullshit. That's impossible! You don't have enough information about the other test takers. I think it would be far more interesting if test takers estimated their absolute score. Whether that score is better or worse than other test takers is irrelevant. But what do I know. I'm probably just incompetent and don't know it.

robocat 7y ago
The point of this article was too remind us that just because someone is smart in one area (Cornell psychology undergraduates) doesn't mean they are smart in another (humour was measured in original paper - have you read the DK paper?). The article makes the common mistake of ignoring the other side of the DK effect: the top quartile estimates their skill downwards. I like to say I am showing DK tendencies because I often underestimate my skills ;-)
- forrestthewoods 7y ago
  My unpopular opinion is that the majority of people who mention Dunning-Kruger or imposter syndrome are primarily just trying to humble brag. Full Duning-Kruger paper is here. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e320/9ca64cbed9a441e55568797cbd3683cf7f8c.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/e320/9ca64cbed9a441e5556879... There is some commentary on raw test score estimation. Including this funny line: "Participants in the bottom quartile also overestimated their raw score on the test. On average, they thought they had answered 5.5 problems correctly. In fact, they had answered an average of 0.3 problems correctly" I wonder if the raw DK data is available? The paper includes a small handful of figures. There's quite a few more I'd like to render.
keithnz 7y ago
well given the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis I think it's healthy to question psych experiment results. I think you'd want good evidence that this effect can be measured repeatedly and in different contexts.

edoloughlin 7y ago

I highly recommend the author's podcast: The Skeptics' Guide To The Universe [1]. [1] https://www.theskepticsguide.org/ https://www.theskepticsguide.org/

theothermkn 7y ago

> [T]hose who endorse anti-vaccine views were far more likely to estimate that they knew as much as experts or doctors, when in fact their knowledge level was extremely low. > Dunning believes that ability to self-assess is also key to the effect. > As you gain knowledge, this confidence grows. > Specifically, narcissistic personality seems to put DK on steroids. That collection of quotes feeds my suspicion that extreme examples of the DK effect and conspiratorial thinking (For example: vaccine-denial, birtherism, racism as "expertise" on how the outgroup "really is," and so on.) have in common the fact that they give those inflicted a much-needed sense of control over an uncertain universe. Baseball players are known for having superstitious rituals at the mound or the plate, precisely because pitcher and batter are engaged in high-stakes, high-variability activities with unpredictable success rates. Baseball players are hardly traumatized, but imagine if they were playing for their lives, or their senses of self. I wouldn't be surprised if the fractured way that the world is presented to us after the decline of television and the rise of the internet (with its conflicting narratives) hasn't so traumatized a fraction of the population that the only way they can construct their sense of selves as in control enough to not feel permanently precarious is to habitually steer themselves away from even the hint of dissonance by constantly asserting, "I know. I am in control. This is how it is." One of the things having one or a few sources of national news possibly did was to give one the plausible belief that their set of beliefs was tenable, stable, and unchallenged by rivals. From a scared monkey perspective, I wonder if we got lucky with broadcast television, if the perception of unity wasn't necessary. Whereas now we seem to be constantly having to defend our perceived in-group. The point of this ramble is that maybe the psychodynamics of DK are as simple as, 'Feeling confident feels better, and I need that, and I feel rewarded when I engage in thinking that rewards that sense.'

ggm 7y ago

D-K also stands for Dorling-Kindersley, publishers of wonderful photographic books which encourage the D-K effect, which is wanting to buy more. Also, create false sense of understanding of the "aha, thats what a triceratops looks like" form, leading back to this D-K effect

throwaway3627 7y ago

Trump is off the left side of the graph where actual ability is epsilon (~0) while perceived ability is 100.

dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads into partisan flamewar.

throwaway3627 7y ago

Another dimension to consider is that some people perform well at some specific things, but not all nonspecific things. And also that performance varies with situation-to-situation and self-perception varies with mood/time. In reality, DK is an overall impression tendency rather than a strict rule... such is the nature of squishy, fungible social "sciences;" reality is messier than a numeric IQ result.

aklemm 7y ago

I assure you my understanding of D-K is well above average.

Aeolun 7y ago

> The best way to summarize the data is to say that the difference between self-assessment and performance increases with lower performance below about the 80th percentile, with slight underestimation of performance for those above the 80th percentile (or a test score of about 70%). It may just be me, but this does not seem like the best way to ‘summarize’ the data for general consumption. The original “dumb people always think they’re smarter than they actually are” that the author takes issue with seems more sensible. We can’t expect everyone to be in the top 20%.

ramblerman 7y ago
I agree, not unimportantly the effect is much more pronounced in the bottom group. When someone overestimates their abilities by 20% it is far less drastic than a whopping 500%
- Thorrez 7y ago
  500%? I don't think you can compare percentiles like that. Let's say someone estimates his percentile to be the 3rd percentile (aka 97% of people are better) and in reality he's in the 1st percentile (99% of people are better). Did he overestimate his ability by 200%? I wouldn't say so, I would say he was very very close. Even at non-extreme percentiles I don't think such a comparison works. For example in some area it might be that people at the 10th percentile know nearly the same amount as people at the 50th percentile. If it's some area that most people know little about. So the abilities of someone at the 10th percentile would be nearly the same as the abilities of someone at the 50th percentile. So overestimating your percentile by a lot is not the same as overestimating your abilities by a lot.
- raxxorrax 7y ago
  What I see in practice is that the effect is often used to discredit the competency of people like the WP author did. > which itself, ironically, is part of the DK effect I think the effect can help you come to the conclusion many experts in fields come to after a while: The larger your knowledge, the more you are aware of your ignorance. I am sure there is an English idiom that describes it more gracefully. Maybe that is the intersection to the 20%. Enthusiastically pointing out the discrepancy on the other end of the curve is most probably an indicator that you might have fallen "victim" to the effect itself.

zzo38computer 7y ago

Due to Dunning-Kruger, I don't know if I understand Dunning-Kruger so well or not.

chantelles 7y ago

The women were much more likely to turn down the opportunity: only 49 percent of them signed up for the competition, compared with 71 percent of the men. “That was a proxy for whether women might seek out certain opportunities,” Ehrlinger told us. “Because they are less confident in general in their abilities, that led them not to want to pursue future opportunities.” -Dunning and Ehrlinger https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-confidence-gap/359815/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/05/the-con...

jeffdavis 7y ago

I wonder if the DK effect is really an implicit narrowing or widening of the population. I would guess thay I'm an above-average sprinter. But that's because I'm assuming there are 2 year olds and 80-year-olds in the population. If you ask a runner, they are likely to compare themselves against other runners and probably not even consider someone like me in the population.

Traster 7y ago

I think what is driving the distinction between what the author is claiming and what WashPo is talking about is that whilst it's true the data suggests people gernerally over-estimate their ability relative to others when they under perform, that's not important. It's not important that the average guy thinks he's smarter than 60% of other people. The important bit is that the idiot thinks he's smarter than average. So there's the DK effect, and there's the interesting part of the DK effect. But in the original article, the line is drawn to Trump. But I don't think taking a statistical pattern and then applying it to the public persona of a reality TV star is a good idea. If we're going to object to anything, I'll object to that first.

breakyerself 7y ago

I see on a regular basis people who have poor levels of understanding on a subject and yet believe they know better than the experts. Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers, anti-GMO, etc. I understand this isn't exactly what Dunning Kruger is talking about, but I don't have a better short hand explanation for it.

joker3 7y ago

I think there's a better explanation at 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-..., which also discusses some possible alternative explanations.

godshatter 7y ago

When someone invokes the Dunning-Kruger effect, I often reply asking if they are a trained psychologist and are they sure they are using the term correctly? This never goes over very well.