4 ms·
Article seems to be saying “DK doesn’t exist because it always exists”. Which is… absurd? The point of DK is that when you don’t know shit, any non-degenerate
by jakear 5y ago
Article seems to be saying “DK doesn’t exist because it always exists”. Which is… absurd?
The point of DK is that when you don’t know shit, any non-degenerate self assessment will result in overestimating your ability. In short, “there are more natural numbers above smaller natural numbers than bigger ones”. This doesn’t have to do with psychology, and it’s expected that it appears when evaluating random data. That’s a good thing! It means DK exists even when us pesky humans aren’t involved at all, not that DK doesn’t exist at all.
- larwent 5y agoSeems pretty simple. When we create upper and lower boundaries to some score, people with lower scores have more space to overestimate and those with higher scores more space to underestimate, causing the perceived score to trend towards the mean. I think there's both a component of numbers and psychology here. If the dispersion in perceived score caused by inaccuracy is wide enough to touch the bounds, it will force a trend towards the mean. This effect is possibly exacerbated by a tendency of perception to stray from "extremes", so subjects with a score near the edges will trend to the mean more strongly as they are unlikely to rate themselves the very best or very worst.
- ewzimm 5y agoThis seems pretty simple to correct, so I'm skeptical that nobody has done so yet in these experiments. If true, it's an equally interesting oversight as the Monty Hall problem. The basic premise is that the structure of an experiment will naturally nudge randomness in a particular direction, and we need to adjust for that in the analysis. Everyone who does this type of work should know this. In a simplified experiment where we give people a 3 question quiz, those who got 2 questions right have one overestimation option, 3, and two underestimation options, 0 and 1. So it's very easy to adjust for autocorrelation by checking if a large group of 2-scorers underestimate more than twice as often as they overestimate. Then we see how their tendencies compare against 1-scorers and how they deviate from naturally overestimating more than twice as often as underestimating. I haven't reviewed these types of papers, but if nobody made even that basic adjustment in their analysis, how many others have been missed in experiments like this?
- stevage 5y agoIt would be possible to rule out that effect in an experiment.
- 988747 5y agoIt can be ruled out, but most scientists (especially in social sciences) suck at statistics, so they don't know how.
- erikmolin 5y agoI share your sentiment that DK being a statistical phenomenon actually makes the effect more interesting. I also, however, think that you are being too semantically liberal when you insist that this proves the effect exists. The DK effect is a _psychological_ effect, with a whole lot of psychological theories around it's causes. If the cause is statistical, the psychological effect can no longer be said to exist. The stasticial phenomenon exists, surely - but I think it will be very confusing for everyone to re-use the same name.
- cortesoft 5y ago> In short, “there are more natural numbers above smaller natural numbers than bigger ones” I get what you are trying to say, but this isn’t true… every natural number has the same amount of numbers greater and smaller… an infinite number.
- jakear 5y agoNatural numbers are not the same as integers. They’re strictly positive. (Now rate your confidence in making that assertion.)