13 ms·
What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)
- taylorius 6y agoDoes the Dunning-Kruger effect apply to people's knowledge of the Dunning-Kruger effect?
- buescher 6y agoHow would you know if you were competent to determine that?
- indymike 6y agoThe only safe answer: I don't feel I have the requisite experience to discuss this topic at an expert level.
- bena 6y agoMaybe psychology in general. But yeah, since it's a broadly applicable principle, it should apply to itself. In that people who don't understand the Dunning-Kruger principle believe they understand it better than they do.
- bitshiftfaced 6y agoDoesn't seem to be any discussion of Nuhfer's findings, which showed that you could recreate the effect with just random data. The bias comes from the process of manipulating normalized data: https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/ https://scholarcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/
- antman 6y agoThat implies that Dunning and Kruger percieved their work as better than it was.
- titzer 6y ago...due directly to a lack of understanding of statistics. But that just proves it. It's a Catch-22 !?
- luu 6y ago> Doesn't seem to be any discussion of Nuhfer's findings . . . That's an interesting result, but I think it would be pretty surprising if your link was discussed since your link is from 2017 and the post is from 2010 and doesn't appear to have a recent update.
- bitshiftfaced 6y agoThat explains it.
- jvanderbot 6y agoThis sounds like a confirmation. "Our results further confirm that experts are more proficient in self-assessing their abilities than novices and that women, in general, self-assess more accurately than men. The validity of interpretations of data depends strongly upon how carefully the researchers consider the numeracy that underlies graphical presentations and conclusions. Our results indicate that carefully measured self-assessments provide valid, measurable and valuable information about proficiency"
- bitshiftfaced 6y agoConfirmation would be if they found that those who were less competent tended to overestimate their abilities when compared to those who were more competent. They found that this was not true. Instead, they found that people tend to overestimate their abilities with the same likelihood as when underestimating.
- porb121 6y agoNo, it's not a confirmation. Experts have a tighter distribution of self-assessment - when they miss, they miss by less. However, non-experts and experts alike overrate and underrate their competency with about equal frequency. Because of ceiling and floor effects (it's hard to massively underrate yourself when you're already in the bottom decile of actual competency, and vice versa), non-experts have a mean self-assessment higher than their actual competency, but that doesn't mean that non-experts as a group tend to overrate themselves.
- jstanley 6y ago> non-experts have a mean self-assessment higher than their actual competency, but that doesn't mean that non-experts as a group tend to overrate themselves. Doesn't it mean exactly that? It doesn't matter if it's caused by ceiling and floor effects, the end result is that the less competent tend to overrate themselves.
- smallnamespace 6y agoThat's not quite true, the article's section on regression to the mean[1] largely covers the same territory as Nuhfer's article (although Nuhfer never uses that precise phrase). Random noise is a primary reason that we see regression to the mean in most contexts (the exception being actual deterministic factors, such as seasonality, the restoring force of a spring, etc.) The chain of reasoning goes like: Random noise (Nuhfer) -> can cause regression to mean (covered in the article) -> calls into question the Dunning-Kruger effect [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#Conceptual_background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean#Con...
- dysrend 6y agoIt makes it the Dunning-Kruger paradox, which would force a lot of people to eat a lot of crow.
- tjs8rj 6y agoThe abstract mentions women self-assess more accurately than men. As a man and thinking about my own mindset with self assessment, I wonder if the definition of “self-assessment” itself might differ between men and women on average. For myself, if you ask me to do a task in a discipline I know little about, I might assess myself as being capable of doing so even without the prior experience, because I figure “I can figure it out reasonably well on the fly”. This is a convoluted way of saying men may just be overconfident, but importantly not because we assume we k ow everything, but because we are more confident we can learn it even if we don’t know it. Maybe me writing all this while self-assessing myself is yet more male self-assessment hubris...
- colineartheta 6y agoNo offense, but this mostly just reads as very sexist. >...we are more confident we can learn it even if we don’t know it. I’m confident women can learn things they aren’t familiar with, and as quickly as a man can. Your whole comment reeks of bias, actually.
- kortilla 6y agoRead it again. The comment you are mindlessly bashing is talking about men having more confidence in the ability to learn on the fly, not having more ability to learn on the fly.
- colineartheta 6y agoI’m not mindlessly bashing anything, I’m speaking up about mindless sexism. You should read it again from the perspective that men and and women are equal, and that “men having more confidence” is a damaging psychology to have (sexist).
- cutemonster 6y ago> from the perspective that men and and women are equal Do you mean "identical"? I wonder what makes you think that men and women would function precisely the same? (Apart from physical things) People can be different, but still be equal (as in equality)
- T-A 6y agoPresumably because the post is from 2010, and Nuhfer's article is from 2017.
- gnabgib 6y agoPosted so many times: - 3 months ago 68 comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25551624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25551624] - Jan 2020 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21984435 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21984435] - May 2018 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069386 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17069386] - Aug 2015, 25 comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145480 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10145480] - Jul 2010, 23 comments [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498136] - Jul 2010 [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494732 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494732] - Often referenced in other high-repost DK posts like "Dunning-Kruger and other memes" and "Wikipedia: Dunning–Kruger Effect"
- internetslave 6y agoWhat’s the name for the effect of people always bringing up the dunning kruger effect like it’s the answer to everything? I can’t go a day without reading about it Seems like this and bloom filters. Constantly on HN. Both mostly useless
- burnished 6y agoWhat if its that thing where when you learn about something it seems like its suddenly everywhere, except it was always there, you're just noticing it now?
- ctcherry 6y agoThe Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon
- Trufa 6y agoBaader–Meinhof phenomenon :)
- alasdair_ 6y agoI keep seeing references to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon all over the place lately...
- reducesuffering 6y agoI'm losing track of all the references to scientist named phenomena: Baader-Meinhof, Dunning-Kruger, Gell-Mann Amnesia, etc.
- seattle_spring 6y agoThere's gotta be a scientist-named phenomena for that.
- yesenadam 6y agoIt seems the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon wasn't named by or after scientists, if that's what you meant. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army_Faction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
- omgwtfbyobbq 6y agosanj, can you add the year to the title?
- notretarded 6y agoNo
- sanj 6y agoI don't believe I can; I don't see it on the UX. @dang?
- sharker8 6y agoDunning-Kruger is Impostor Syndrome's evil twin. And it's impossible to know which one you may suffer from!
- throwawaytemp27 6y agoThat’s not correct. Dunning-Kruger also accounts for competent people underestimating their competence (like impostor syndrome).
- bluetwo 6y agoSo there is a Dunning-Kruger effect on the Dunning-Kruger effect? How meta.
- nicolashahn 6y agoI don't need to read this, I already know all about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- slt2021 6y agopeople downvote you, but your post is exactly on point!
- fab1an 6y agoI've always suspected that obsessive interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect is following an inverse curve of the effect itself :) Graph: https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1253647480966852610 https://twitter.com/fabianstelzer/status/1253647480966852610
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jumanjisama 6y agoRelated: This is an interview with David Dunning of Dunning-Kruger Effect. I find it highly entertaining and would recommend listening just for a few minutes in case it tickles your interest too. I've listed a couple of sources of the same podcast, just in case. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-dunning-on-the-dunning-kruger-effect/id730188152?i=1000469068116 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-dunning-on-the-d... https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmJsb29tYmVyZy5mbS9CTE04ODY0NDAzMjg4/episode/MjU2NGE1OTAtNmI3NS0xMWVhLTgxZjEtOGZjZWFmOGM5ZGU2 https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLmJsb29tYmV...
- maxerickson 6y agoThe lesson I take from Dunning-Kruger is that self evaluation is hard.
- chiefalchemist 6y agoIt's hard to know what you don't know. Let's say, objectively you know 10 of 100 "facts" of Discipline X. But given you're a novice you believe the universe of X is say only 50 "facts." Naturally, from where you stand your 10 now doubled in value. So I would think the problem isn't the overestimation or overvalue per se. 10 is still 10. It's that you've underestimated the size of the X universe thus making your perception of the piece of pie feel bigger than it really is. If that makes sense. The key is to be aware that there are things you don't yet know, and not let your ignorance get the best of you.
- maxerickson 6y agoIn short, "The lesson I take from Dunning-Kruger is that self evaluation is hard."
- dahart 6y agoThe participants in the study didn’t self-evaluate directly, they self-ranked, against the other participants (all Cornell undergrads volunteering for extra credit). There’s a very important difference there, because self-ranking requires knowledge of other people’s skills. Do note that the DK paper found a positive correlation between confidence and skill. Most people here and elsewhere seem to believe the DK effect shows a negative correlation. Also note that the skills people were self-ranking were all easy. Ability to get a joke was one of the 4 tasks. How would you rank your own ability to get a joke against those around you? The question barely makes sense. I think it’s a big mistake to take any lesson from the DK paper other than sometimes people see what they want to.
- maxerickson 6y ago(I went and skimmed back over it) In most of the studies, they had the participants estimate how they'd do relative to others and also how they would score. Not the first one, but the rest of them. For confidence, the positive correlation doesn't help with the problem where someone with low end confidence estimates similarly to someone with higher confidence but is much more wrong.
- ncmncm 6y ago"Most citations of D-K are examples of D-K." Really most of what people think is D-K is just statistics analogous to reversion to the mean: people assume they are typical, so less-skilled people naturally guess they are better, and higher-skilled guess they are less. If D-K means anything, it has to be a variance on top of this effect. Such an effect does seem to appear, where the very least skilled imagine there is no deep skill to learn.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Really most of what people think is D-K is just statistics analogous to reversion to the mean: people assume they are typical, so less-skilled people naturally guess they are better, and higher-skilled guess they are less. If it were just that, people would rate themselves closer to the median than they actually are, but D-K found the people rated themselves closer to the 70th percentile than they are.
- cryptica 6y agoNow I understand why so many among the woke elite pretend to have impostor syndrome. It's to virtue signal which side of the Dunning-Kruger partition they're on. I don't believe that the Dunning-Kruger effect is very significant these days because our modern society is full of: 1. Extremely talented, hard working people who have achieved nothing because they never got very lucky. 2. Lazy idiots who have achieved a lot because they got extremely lucky. In contradiction with the Dunning-Kruger effect, people in group #1 are less likely to feel impostor syndrome because they're been working hard for a long time and they've made an impression and received excellent, honest feedback wherever they've worked over many years and delivered excellent results by all accounts. Their past employers are praising them, ex-colleagues want to work with them, etc... this gives them confidence in their ability in spite of a lack of financial success. In our modern age, skill does not guarantee financial success because skill has limited utility value in our dysfunctional economy built on unsound money printing and asymmetric playing fields... Everyone wants to work with a genius, but genius has limited financial value. Reckless foolishness can often yield higher returns if the game is played enough times. Also in contradiction with the Dunning-Kruger effect, people in group #2 are bound to feel like impostors because they are impostors. All their confidence is derived from their financial success. They've never delivered any lasting, meaningful results which can be attributed to their work... and they've never received any praise from any intelligent person until they became rich (then suddenly, the smart bastards all line up to give praise)... The incentives in this case aren't conducive to honest feedback. All the ingredients to feeling like an impostor are there and even with their limited intellect and underdeveloped primal ego; deep down, they can sense that something is not quite right.
- emodendroket 6y agoI appreciate the careful write-up, but all it is at this point in a typical discussion is a smug way to insult someone.
- BallCramp 6y agoI can't even read the words "Dunning-Kruger" without getting Reddit flashbacks. That and "whataboutism".
- ltbarcly3 6y agoDunning Kruger, while it does have a precise meaning and was experimentally discovered, in common usage of the term it is just a way to say someone else is dumb without using words like 'dumb'. Not only are they dumb, they're so dumb they are too dumb to know they are dumb! Not only are they soooo dumb, I'm very smart, so smart I use words to talk like smart people, with big special words that are from science. Plus, I bet I underestimate my own skill level. How humble! I've never seen someone cast themselves as the one that might be overestimating their ability.
- NateEag 6y agoA friend of mine and I do this regularly.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dahart 6y ago> they're so dumb they are too dumb to know they are dumb! It’s really too bad Dunning & Kruger’s data didn’t show anyone being too dumb to know it, nor did it even show anyone being dumb at all. So maybe the meaning isn’t as precise as you think? All the participant scores were relative to their peer group (no way to know if they were dumb or smart), and all the participants were Ivy League college kids. That doesn’t mean there were no dummies in the group, but it is certainly not a random sample of the population. > I’ve never seen someone cast themselves as the one that might be overestimating their ability. The DK paper shows a positive correlation between confidence and skill. While I have seen people suggest they might be overestimating (in social situations where doing that might add credibility), if you believe in the DK effect and trust their data, then saying out loud that you’re overestimating your ability is the same as saying you think you might be dumber than you are, right?
- ltbarcly3 6y agoYou overestimated how well you understood my comment. I was commenting on the irony of how people bring up dunning kruger to insult other people. Why bother going to the effort trying to correct someone without bothering to take 30 seconds to even read their comment?
- Wilem82 6y agoThe entire DKE paper is trash, as most papers are in psychology.
- leshokunin 6y agoI feel like the results of this research are pretty obvious. /s
- DoreenMichele 6y agoAn explanation I am not seeing: People may self-report opinions of their own performance that they feel are socially acceptable or socially protective of themselves. So it reverts to the mean because it remains within The Overton Window so to speak. If your objective performance falls far outside the norm, even if you know it and are confident this is true, people may not accept that fact and trying to insist on getting credit for it won't get you credit. It will get push-back. It will get denial. It may even result in harassment. If your objective performance is poor, you may be subconsciously hoping to influence the outcome positively. Most forms of assessment aren't entirely objective. To whatever degree you can protect yourself from negative social consequences by suggesting to other people that your performance was within some acceptable and expected norm, it is in your best interest to do so. People who habitually do this kind of thing at work or in other socially meaningful settings may be unable to turn that habit off for purposes of a psychological study. They may not even be consciously aware of it. It's just a thing they do without really planning it. It's what they have always done. For easy tasks, it may have the most impact to fudge a little and say "My performance is sort of normal-ish. Nothing to see here. Move along." whether you perform abnormally well or abysmally. Those are tasks most likely to not matter so much, not have high stakes, be easily done by just about anyone and so on. In other words, if you suck at taking out the trash, probably anyone in the office can gather up the trash and take it out. It's not likely to be a firing offense. They will just have someone else do it who doesn't drop everything everywhere all the time and never bother you about your failure to be good at it. But if they hired you for your PhD in mathematics, your understanding of complex math actually matters. You aren't readily replaceable. Trying to fudge about how well you understand it and claim greater ability than you have is something people will take great offense at. Being a little modest about it can help you keep your job while reducing expectations. There can be a lot of benefits to managing the expectations of other people who know you can do something that's hard but don't understand the conditions under which you can pull that off, how much prep time you need, etc. It is actively problematic for everyone to think you can do (amazing thing) anytime and all the time with no lead time and no recovery time. That's a great recipe for burn out and other disasters.
- exporectomy 6y ago> It may even result in harassment. Haha, I don't know why, but as soon as I read that sentence, I thought "Is this Doreen Michele?" and checked your username and it was! Something unique about your writing. I used to have a lot of these kinds of concerns about how I'm perceived and in hindsight it held me back and I regret things I didn't do because of it. Now I have achieved things that are clearly respectable and I don't feel any need to prove myself. Instead, I'm happy to look like a fool. I also have modest enough ambitions that I don't need to worry about the consequences of people's perceptions for things like promotions or other opportunities. I create my own opportunities.
- grzm 6y ago(2010)
- Borrible 6y agoSo the Dunning-Kruger effect, most often used as a sophisticated form of ad hominem to discredit some idiot on the other side of the interweb and give himself intellectual gloss, has now degenerated as scientific knowledge to the point where it can be used as an indicator of itself, right? At the risk of replecating myself and getting a crisis, everybody with a brain like mine could have seen that coming. Sigh...
- Borrible 6y agoAnd still no sarcasm detector built into HN crowd AI... :-)
- mewse 6y agoI always worry about self-assessment data. Especially when an experimenter or other participants are in the room or otherwise observing or interacting with the participant during the self-assessment. The results of Dunning-Kruger-adjacent experiments always present their results as measuring "How people think they perform" against "How they actually perform", when they seem to actually be measuring "How people tell other people they perform" against "How they actually perform". Which seems to me like it's a slightly different thing? It seems like the pop-sci "those people are too stupid to know how stupid they are" interpretation isn't the only plausible interpretation, anyway.
- chmod600 6y agoDoes the affect account for considering different populations? For instance, maybe skilled people tend to compare themselves to other skilled people, while unskilled people compare themselves to the general population?
- cutemonster 6y agoGood point (I think). This could slightly be a DK effect in that such unskilled people maybe were unaware that there were talented experts they could compare themselves with instead?
- benohear 6y agoI wonder to what extent people are substituting their estimated score with their estimated relative position. Let's say a 50% score at a test puts you in the 1. percentile and 70% in the 99th. I would actually expect people to estimate their relative position roughly in line with their results.
- jokoon 6y agoIt's funny, if you pretend you have impostor syndrome, it can also come from a dunning kruger effect. Or vice versa.
- Iv 6y agoMy freelance life is a constant oscillation between impostor and DK. The trick is to match the phases when I think I am the new Da Vinci with the phase when I negotiate my rates and the phases where I think I am barely good enough to work at a sandwich shop with the actual dev. Not the greatest for mental health, though. Now I am glad that I am working with very competent but also nice and supportive colleagues. It really is a blast to be able to have some bad days without feeling you should quit and buy a farm in the Larzac instead.
- tpoacher 6y agoIt's an interesting and well written article, but I found myself disagreeing with the interpretation of every other point in the article.
- emmelaich 6y ago(2010)
- edh649 6y agoThis is an excellent podcast around the Dunning-Kruger effect, how we can all be afflicted by it, and what it actually means. Setup around a (true) airline hijacking. https://timharford.com/2021/03/cautionary-tales-the-dunning-kruger-hijack/ https://timharford.com/2021/03/cautionary-tales-the-dunning-...