5 ms·

These VC's: they suffer from Reverse Imposter Syndrome (tm), commonly found in "elite" institutions, as I outlined in here: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p

• uoaei 3y ago
  That's just called Dunning-Kruger and is a well-studied phenomenon. You see it all over HN too, for instance, people coming up with a "new" idea, writing a blog post about it, and self-promoting as if they've contributed something novel.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • corwinstephen 3y ago
    Zing
  • Conscat 3y ago
    I suppose that the Dunning Kruger effect is "well studied" in that there have been many attempts to study it, which so far cannot find reproducible results, and suggest that it isn't a real psychological phenomenon.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      Those studies, which do consistently show significant effects despite your citation-unladen claim, explore averages across a general population and seek to explain society-wide phenomena through the lens of "average" humans. This implies an assumption of homogeneity within the general population. Such tests will of course be underpowered compared to case studies in specific circumstances, particularly those involving self-selection and a cohort-level cultural bias toward "I'm smart and need to pick things up quickly for my day job which means that skill is equally accurate and transferrable to everything I read about".
    • Kye 3y ago
      It's an example of wikigenesis. It didn't exist before someone created a Wikipedia entry naming something based on some studies. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect&oldid=19392452 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dunning%E2%80%93K... It started as a syndrome. I don't think it would survive Wikipedia's modern standards if it hadn't generated its own support by existing in a different era.
      • AlbertCory 3y ago
        > wikigenesis I like it. Better than "reification."
        • deleted 3y ago
          [deleted]
    • garbagecoder 3y ago
      Look, I understand there's a lot of trouble in psychology in general and there has been some reproduction issues with that one. But the truth is, we all know instances of the guy who thinks he knows everything just because he's good at something else and just thinks everything people went through to get where they are was a mistake. Whether or not this is a psychological thing in reality, it's something most of us have experienced and that's the name people know it by.
      • verall 3y ago
        > we all know instances of the guy who thinks he knows everything just because he's good at something else That's _not_ Dunning-Kruger
        • garbagecoder 3y ago
          Again, I'm not saying that's what it SHOULD be called, I'm saying it's a useful term for something we experience. At some point the wrong definition becomes the correct one, that's most etymologies. It's why people say "and I" as an object and don't know what question begging is or whatever. It just doesn't matter in the long run.
        • uoaei 3y ago
          No, but the behavior expressed by adopting such an attitude is. Yours is a nitpick that is probably worth mentioning but doesn't really change the analysis.
          • garbagecoder 3y ago
            We just need a name for that now. Replyguy? Ackshually guy? Sounds too memey. The Nelson-Poindexter Effect?
      • ravi-delia 3y ago
        That's not even what the original study claimed to find though! It caught on because it seems so intuitive, yes, but the specific curve of confidence vs. skill doesn't seem to look like that at all.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    If you actually read the article, it's not exactly the same.
    • uoaei 3y ago
      Cynically angling for click-throughs by trying to redefine words or introduce trivial distinctions is another classic move.
      • AlbertCory 3y ago
        Nothing you'd ever do, Mr. I'm The Expert and You All Should Show Respect?
        • uoaei 3y ago
          Look, Bob, I don't have a personal vendetta against you. I do find value in clarifying things that are obscured by pomp and rhetoric. What's more, I don't appreciate muddied conversations, particularly when the motivation for the introduction of such mud is purely self-serving, especially in monetary terms. It seems obvious to me that Substack assesses your quality as a writer by checking on click-throughs from various sources and I would wager good money that they pay out differently depending on the behavior of the users who follow those links, either algorithmically in realtime or whenever it comes time to renegotiate terms. It's not even 2+2 here, Bob. PS: morality is more than just "would someone else do it". Don't make me start quoting cliches typically reserved for 5 year olds.
          • AlbertCory 3y ago
            My Substack is free, so nix to that. Maybe you should try writing something people like to read. Come back and tell us how it went.
            • uoaei 3y ago
              Is free, perhaps. But that could be for many reasons, including that you haven't yet convinced Substack to monetize your offerings. Isn't that how it always is when publishing on platforms you don't own? That you must prove your worth to get the paying gig?
  • stbede 3y ago
    The Dunning-Kruger effect is not well established. It often doesn't reproduce. Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution. Suppose I give an exam to 30 people, and the results are normally distributed around a score of 70 with a low of 40 and a high of 97. The bottom of the distribution may accurately predict that they scored about 40 on the exam, but if you ask them how they performed relative to their peers, they will believe that they are about average and guess that a sizable portion of the class performed worse than them. Alternatively, if you ask the top performer who scored a 97, they will say that they think they scored about 97, but they will think maybe a few other people scored higher and maybe that the average was in the high 80s. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that people are actually pretty good at accessing their own knowledge without being a good judge of how knowledgeable others are.
    • bumby 3y ago
      >Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution. Put differently, isn’t this saying it’s a misattribution of confidence? In the context of the original claim about investing, that seems very relevant.
  • 8note 3y ago
    Those blog posts, and especially a bunch of blog posts kinda at the same time on the same topic are fantastic though. Fantastic to learn from in terms of seeing lots of varying opinions with different arguments
• garbagecoder 3y ago
  I enjoyed reading that. It was a huge climbdown for me when I went to college. In high school, I was in the top 25 of my class of almost 1000 and I never broke a sweat. I never developed study habits because I didn't need them. One semester my junior year, my friend and I just spent one week in early November doing the entire semester's work, some late, some early. The rest of the time I could spend doing dumb shit and also hacking away on my computers. I did so well I got into a college where I was annoyingly average. By the time I developed some semblance of study habits and realistic sense of my abilities, it was too late to get my GPA much above 3 (this was before grade inflation was much of a thing). In graduate school I finally got my shit together and learned to just work, but I wasn't in as elite of an environment anymore thanks to my performance in undergrad. I had wanted my whole life to be away from the normies in high school and once I got there, I didn't love it. It was humiliating. But that was good for me. Realizing you're 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 10,000 instead of 1 in a million is probably much more realistic. And also annoyingly, this is exactly what testing when I was like 7 years old told me, but the illusion of being in an exurban high school made me think otherwise. Now I read we are shaped more and more and more by our experiences at around age 18. That's the music you hang on to and even, I read this week, the politicians we hang on to. I love to think I'm different, but I really am part of Generation Clinton. I really am not 1 in a million or 1 in 100,000 even. I think a lot of the kinds of people drawn to tech had similar experiences in their formative years. You see a lot of posts here with ideas about reforming education, but schools need to get everyone through, not just the 1 in 10,000 or even 1 in 100 types. In the US, you don't get sorted like that until about age 18 when you're already having a lot of defining experiences. So my interpretation of what you're writing is that people just get used to being the smartest guy in the room. Some may like being around others like that, but if they're honest I bet most people don't. They should! The lamest possible source turned me around on this. I was listening to Howard Stern (not my parents, not my friends, not my teachers) rant about how when he did his movie he found the movie people interested in building stars up, but his background in radio was all about burning people down and recycling them. I decided I liked building people up more. The karma didn't take long to pay me back. When you're anonymous on the Internet, nobody knows if you're full of shit or really pack the gear, so we see a lot of bullshit words to add the kind of credibility you might see from a resume.
  • 3y ago
• anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I just started reading your article, and am down to "What If You Really Are a Fraud?". I think the more interesting thing is not people who have delusions of competency, but people who feel they have "imposter syndrome", but are actually imposters (not just newbies who are still learning), and convince themselves that they aren't after finding out about imposter syndrome. I don't know how much this happens, but in areas such as education I think it could happen, as the criteria for most tertiary, and some secondary, educators isn't competency in teaching, but competency in a subject. And teaching effectively, especially to a large class, is quite hard.
  • wcarss 3y ago
    > people who feel they have "imposter syndrome", but are actually imposters (not just newbies who are still learning), and convince themselves that they aren't after finding out about imposter syndrome. I could be one of those. But the thing is: a) one can rarely tell. And b) one way to look at imposter syndrome isn't that everyone is actually great while feeling terrible; it's that most people are quietly struggling in a lot of ways, which they see in themselves, but which are hidden from others. We could mostly be (and likely are) mediocre. So I can be struggling for real, and be a real "impostor", and be doing fine relative to the average population of my peers, all at once. I see many ways I'm struggling with things my peers seem to breeze through, but I might not see the ways I'm succeeding where they're quietly struggling themselves, and vice versa.
    • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Completely agree. You have a very healthy way of looking at this personally, and this is the larger lesson people need to take in. "Imposter syndrome" is more a rule of thumb to not be too hard on yourself. The bigger, and more difficult lesson, is to recognize what needs improvement, what you can improve, and what you can't, in yourself and other. May you find your proper niche!
    • bloaf 3y ago
      There was a lovely comic years ago, entitled "the foolproof way" which captures this feeling. https://www.deviantart.com/eldahast/art/Foolproof-way-155527782 https://www.deviantart.com/eldahast/art/Foolproof-way-155527...
• btilly 3y ago
  That's so good I submitted it as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36331178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36331178 in the hopes that more people would wind up reading it.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    well, thank you, sir. I did actually Submit that when I wrote it. Getting to the front page is kinda a crapshoot, of course.