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> Collectively, the three critique papers have about 90 times fewer citations than the original Dunning-Kruger article.5 So it appears that most scientists stil
by apienx 5y ago
> Collectively, the three critique papers have about 90 times fewer citations than the original Dunning-Kruger article.5 So it appears that most scientists still think that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a robust aspect of human psychology.6
Critiques cite the work being critiqued (yes, the referenced critiques in TFA cite the Dunning-Kruger study). Also, a 23 year-old paper will inevitably get cited more than 6 year-old papers. But yeah...the inertia in Science is real. That conservatism's a feature, not a bug.
Psychology's probably the discipline with the shortest "half-life of knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge
- nomilk 5y agoThanks for introducing me to the term "half-life of knowledge". > An engineering degree went from having a half life of 35 years in ca. 1930 to about 10 years in 1960. A Delphi Poll showed that the half life of psychology as measured in 2016 ranged from 3.3 to 19 years depending on the specialty, with an average of a little over 7 years. This is very interesting and makes me wonder what it is for tech careers, e.g. web devs, data scientists etc.
- hallway_monitor 5y agoFor javascript developers it's about six months! Kidding aside, it seems you could estimate it by asking, what portion of the knowledge I use did I learn 20 years ago? Then 10, 5, 1. For me it seems to be somewhere around ten years.