The point about feedback is the root of my problem with DK as an idea. In most professions, you have a ton of feedback indicating where you are, often formaliz

The point about feedback is the root of my problem with DK as an idea. In most professions, you have a ton of feedback indicating where you are, often formalized. In martial arts, you wear a belt showing roughly what level you're at, which you earned through tests done by people far senior to you. In the military, you wear your rank, maybe skill badges, and do constant training. In most other jobs, you have a title and get feedback from supervisors and such. The hypothesis of DK seems to require that the person is evaluating their performance entirely on their own, possibly because the authors were evaluating comedic skill, which is a very subjective task and something everyone knows at least a little about. Moreover, it's one where you get bad feedback: good comedy among friends is not the same as comedy that pleases a crowd. But in the professional world, you practice a craft towards a result and are exposed to your peers, the information on how you stack up is pretty objective and coming to you fairly consistently. And I think the cases people attribute to DK are better explained by other mechanisms. In particular, there's a lot of confusion between self-knowledge and knowledge of the complexity of a task. I have done phone screens and asked people stuff like, "how many numbers can be represented with 8 bits." But that's to screen out people who were applying to a job without having a clue what the job entailed. Not understanding a job description is different from not understanding your level of skill. And I see plenty of self knowledge in interviews; if I ask about algorithms and data structures, a common answer is "I haven't looked at that since school." You learn: 1. the person doesn't think that skill is relevant to the job and 2. the person is willing to admit they aren't good at it. I may disagree with the person that the skill is relevant, after all, I asked the question for a reason, but it's not a lack of self-knowledge on the part of the candidate.