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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 b
by 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 agoIf 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 agoAlright, 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.
- notacoward 7y agoAlso, I've heard that one of Dunning or Kruger has objected to the way the term/concept is commonly used. How ironic is that? AIUI they originally proposed that people at many levels underestimate how much they still don't know. It wasn't limited to people who believe they've jumped all the way from the novice end to the expert end, which is the more common usage.