3 ms·

> The chart is interesting in that it confirms that everyone perceives themselves to be slightly above average in terms of ability, which of course can't be tru

> The chart is interesting in that it confirms that everyone perceives themselves to be slightly above average in terms of ability, which of course can't be true in practice. No, everyone biases their self-assessments toward a point slightly above the mean. That's not the same as saying everyone thinks they're slightly above average, nor that people's self-assessments have no predictive power whatsoever. The lowest performers still think they're below average, just not as much as they should. The highest performers still think they're considerably above average. But they all have a bias toward (slightly above) the middle. So yes, people are generally correct in the direction that they deviate from that median self-assessment, but that just shows that people's self-assessments aren't completely without basis. Which D-K certainly didn't claim.

t_mann 3y ago
D-K claim a non-monotonic relationship, which simply isn't supported by that data, as you yourself point out: people rank themselves correctly (ordinally). I didn't mean to say that all self-assessments are the same, if that was the misunderstanding. My point is that the self-assessments indeed are meaningful, even more so than D-K claim.
- RevEng 3y ago
  Check the original paper by D-K. Fix only focused on the first plot which has a monotonically increasing trend. The later plots show varying degrees of nonmonotonicity, though sadly they don't include error bars to indicate how statistically significant the differences between groups is.
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
But we don’t know their true ability, only the results on one test. It could be they accurately predicted their ability but because of random chance they did better/worse than their guess. Then you would get the exact data that is observed.
- lokar 3y ago
  I thought they were estimating their performance on the test relative to others. There was no “real world” element.

t_mann 3y ago

D-K claim a non-monotonic relationship, which simply isn't supported by that data, as you yourself point out: people rank themselves correctly (ordinally). I didn't mean to say that all self-assessments are the same, if that was the misunderstanding. My point is that the self-assessments indeed are meaningful, even more so than D-K claim.

RevEng 3y ago
Check the original paper by D-K. Fix only focused on the first plot which has a monotonically increasing trend. The later plots show varying degrees of nonmonotonicity, though sadly they don't include error bars to indicate how statistically significant the differences between groups is.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago

But we don’t know their true ability, only the results on one test. It could be they accurately predicted their ability but because of random chance they did better/worse than their guess. Then you would get the exact data that is observed.

lokar 3y ago
I thought they were estimating their performance on the test relative to others. There was no “real world” element.