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This is such a bizarre argument. Dunning Krueger is precisely about the surprising result that people are bad at estimating their performance! If you accept t

This is such a bizarre argument. Dunning Krueger is precisely about the surprising result that people are bad at estimating their performance! If you accept the 'D-K is autocorrelation' argument, you don't get to throw out the existence of the D-K effect: you are saying Dunning + Krueger failed to show that humans have any ability to estimate how skilled they are at all. That seems like an even more radical position than the D-K thesis.

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slavik81 5y ago
> Dunning Krueger is precisely about the surprising result that people are bad at estimating their performance Isn't DK about estimating your performance relative to the rest of the population? To do that, you need to not only know your own performance but also everyone else's. To me, guessing the performance of others sounds quite difficult.
- notahacker 5y ago
  The implicit hypothesis is that if a test is full of questions you have no idea how to answer, you really ought to have strong priors that you're a below average performer. Tests are generally designed so that people familiar with the relevant material and methodologies can attempt answers; you dont need to know exactly how good other test takers are for it to be reasonable to assume you're in the bottom quartile if you can't. Same as you should have a lot less difficulty than most cyclists estimating whether your time trial was a good one relative to the rest of the field if you struggled to stay on the bike. Of course, there are tests where the bottom quartile find the majority of it easy and have no particular reason to assume that most others found it even easier, and circumstances in which the weak undergrad who can only answer half the questions may reasonably believe that the test is being administered to a general population full of people who won't understand any of the material at all. But in general, it's reasonable to assume that if there's a lot of stuff you don't know, other people will know better.
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slavik81 5y ago

> Dunning Krueger is precisely about the surprising result that people are bad at estimating their performance Isn't DK about estimating your performance relative to the rest of the population? To do that, you need to not only know your own performance but also everyone else's. To me, guessing the performance of others sounds quite difficult.

notahacker 5y ago
The implicit hypothesis is that if a test is full of questions you have no idea how to answer, you really ought to have strong priors that you're a below average performer. Tests are generally designed so that people familiar with the relevant material and methodologies can attempt answers; you dont need to know exactly how good other test takers are for it to be reasonable to assume you're in the bottom quartile if you can't. Same as you should have a lot less difficulty than most cyclists estimating whether your time trial was a good one relative to the rest of the field if you struggled to stay on the bike. Of course, there are tests where the bottom quartile find the majority of it easy and have no particular reason to assume that most others found it even easier, and circumstances in which the weak undergrad who can only answer half the questions may reasonably believe that the test is being administered to a general population full of people who won't understand any of the material at all. But in general, it's reasonable to assume that if there's a lot of stuff you don't know, other people will know better.

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