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> the recent outbreak indicates that severe DKE-19 primarily affects men ages 24–36 working in tech, for reasons unknown to scientists who are unaccountably als

> the recent outbreak indicates that severe DKE-19 primarily affects men ages 24–36 working in tech, for reasons unknown to scientists who are unaccountably also men. Aren't flippant comments of this type also a virulent form of DKE?

MattGaiser 7y ago
It is just a lazy way to rally supporters. Notice that it is the highlighted part they want you to tweet out.
- notacoward 7y ago
  That dismissal seems a bit lazy and flippant too. Plus attribution of motive. Like it or not, there is a grain of truth to the idea that techies (young and old) are particularly prone to this kind of thing. We're rather notorious for it. It's a natural and predictable consequence of having often been the smartest person in the room, able to leap ahead of others who have studied a subject (only slightly) longer. Equating income with intelligence doesn't help either. It takes a while to learn that "opine first, study later" doesn't work so well when dealing with fields equal or superior to our own in technical depth and rigor requiring years of effort to gain expertise, or that it's actively dangerous to indulge such impulses when the stakes are far higher than all but a handful of computer bugs.
  - MattGaiser 7y ago
    I attribute motivation because when it came time to choose one sentence in their article to tweet, that was what they chose. I don't deny there is some truth to it, but it seems perfectly suited for gaining traction through the Twitter mobs...
- cjhopman 7y ago
  > Notice that it is the highlighted part they want you to tweet out. You mean the highlight that medium applies automatically based on user behavior and the author has no part in controlling?
notacoward 7y ago
They might be rude and hurt some people's feelings, but they're not pretending to represent expertise one does not have so they're nothing to do with DKE.
- thu2111 7y ago
  They implicitly are, as they're arguing that these men aren't experts. Judging this would require one of two things: 1. The author can tell what is expertise based on the words spoken, the quality of the material produced. But then they'd need to be an expert themselves. 2. The authors defines expertise purely in terms of credentialism. Someone works at university X and not university Y, therefore they are experts and anyone else isn't. As they mock people who engage in "armchair epidemiology" it's not (1), so it must be (2). But it's that absence of critical thinking that deserves to be flattened. It's an attitude of "don't think just obey" - the exact thing that a university education supposedly trains out of people. Supposedly. It's how Google ends up deleting videos of doctors because they aren't "experts" in health or disease, whilst leaving the pronouncements of people who can write R up.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    If it's not (1) then it's not Dunning-Kruger. Credentialism is a different fallacy (argumentum ad verecundiam). Saying we should flatten the curve for all deficits of critical thinking is reading something into the article that's not actually there, no matter how worthy you or I might believe such an effort is.
    - thu2111 7y ago
      Alright, fair enough. You could argue these writers are implicitly claiming to be meta-experts, that is, they have superior understanding of the nature and location of expertise than other people do, although they don't. But I guess this sort of subjective argument is why I don't like Dunning-Kruger as a concept. Especially given that it's an output of social psychology, a field that started to collapse once outsiders from other fields i.e. non-experts started critically thinking about the content of psychology papers. Seems kind of ironic.
II2II 7y ago
Given that the article is also a parody of itself, I suspect the answer is yes.

MattGaiser 7y ago

It is just a lazy way to rally supporters. Notice that it is the highlighted part they want you to tweet out.

notacoward 7y ago
That dismissal seems a bit lazy and flippant too. Plus attribution of motive. Like it or not, there is a grain of truth to the idea that techies (young and old) are particularly prone to this kind of thing. We're rather notorious for it. It's a natural and predictable consequence of having often been the smartest person in the room, able to leap ahead of others who have studied a subject (only slightly) longer. Equating income with intelligence doesn't help either. It takes a while to learn that "opine first, study later" doesn't work so well when dealing with fields equal or superior to our own in technical depth and rigor requiring years of effort to gain expertise, or that it's actively dangerous to indulge such impulses when the stakes are far higher than all but a handful of computer bugs.
- MattGaiser 7y ago
  I attribute motivation because when it came time to choose one sentence in their article to tweet, that was what they chose. I don't deny there is some truth to it, but it seems perfectly suited for gaining traction through the Twitter mobs...
cjhopman 7y ago
> Notice that it is the highlighted part they want you to tweet out. You mean the highlight that medium applies automatically based on user behavior and the author has no part in controlling?

notacoward 7y ago

They might be rude and hurt some people's feelings, but they're not pretending to represent expertise one does not have so they're nothing to do with DKE.

thu2111 7y ago
They implicitly are, as they're arguing that these men aren't experts. Judging this would require one of two things: 1. The author can tell what is expertise based on the words spoken, the quality of the material produced. But then they'd need to be an expert themselves. 2. The authors defines expertise purely in terms of credentialism. Someone works at university X and not university Y, therefore they are experts and anyone else isn't. As they mock people who engage in "armchair epidemiology" it's not (1), so it must be (2). But it's that absence of critical thinking that deserves to be flattened. It's an attitude of "don't think just obey" - the exact thing that a university education supposedly trains out of people. Supposedly. It's how Google ends up deleting videos of doctors because they aren't "experts" in health or disease, whilst leaving the pronouncements of people who can write R up.
- notacoward 7y ago
  If it's not (1) then it's not Dunning-Kruger. Credentialism is a different fallacy (argumentum ad verecundiam). Saying we should flatten the curve for all deficits of critical thinking is reading something into the article that's not actually there, no matter how worthy you or I might believe such an effort is.
  - thu2111 7y ago
    Alright, fair enough. You could argue these writers are implicitly claiming to be meta-experts, that is, they have superior understanding of the nature and location of expertise than other people do, although they don't. But I guess this sort of subjective argument is why I don't like Dunning-Kruger as a concept. Especially given that it's an output of social psychology, a field that started to collapse once outsiders from other fields i.e. non-experts started critically thinking about the content of psychology papers. Seems kind of ironic.

II2II 7y ago

Given that the article is also a parody of itself, I suspect the answer is yes.