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Dunning-Kruger and Other Memes
- lucio 12y agolooks like a troll article to me.
- notacoward 12y agoThe author only thinks his understanding of Dunning-Kruger is better than average. No, seriously. As others have pointed out, the meme is not that actual ability and self-assessment are negatively correlated. It's just that ignorant people don't know how ignorant they are - i.e. that those at the low end of the scale overestimate their position relative to the maximum. That version is very well supported by the graphs the OP cites. He has scratched the iceberg of skepticism and now thinks he's enough of an expert to tell the rest of us that we're Doing It Wrong.
- logicallee 12y ago"Blogger misunderstands Dunning-Kruger, while demonstrating it dramatically"
- deciplex 12y agoHe, ah, also only shows three graphs in his post despite referring to four. He just shows one of them twice. This whole article is just a bag of fail.
- gd1 12y agoHmm, as he kind of points out, there is a difference between knowing your ability in something is poor and being willing to admit it to a stranger. The usual meme of Dunning-Kruger tends to refer to people who are oblivious to their own incompetence. But there are valid reasons for the perceived score compression. I'd wager the people in the bottom quartile of grammar performance are well aware that their grammar isn't very good, they just weren't willing to write 20 on the paper (out of shame) and went for 60 instead.
- philh 12y agoSo would you predict that people offered $100 for an accurate self-assessment would be well calibrated?
- philh 12y ago> the meme is not that actual ability and self-assessment are negatively correlated I don't think there's a single DK meme, but I do think that this is a common DK meme. Somewhat-serious suggestion: maybe people who actually understand DK, have a tendency to underestimate how well they understand it relative to everyone else, and so assume that everyone else understands it about as well as they do.
- msandford 12y agoI think it's hilarious that everyone piling onto this guy from being "so wrong" about Dunning-Kruger have a huge blind spot. Maybe they don't understand it as well as they think so, either. If it's possible that he's super-wrong, it's also entirely possible that they are too.
- army 12y agoI've definitely heard the negatively correlated variant of the meme. I'm not sure it's the predominant one or always explicitly expressed, but it's out there.
- anonymoushn 12y agoI see the "actual ability and self-assessment are negatively correlated" version of the meme a majority of the time. Maybe I just hang out on the wrong parts of the internet?
- RogerL 12y agoPeople roll out either depending on the situation. It is hand waving, not reasoning. IOW, you can explain anything away by taking one of the two sides of this argument. "You think you are good? Ha, no, dunning. Oh, you are not sure you are good? Ha, wrong, you must be great" type stuff. While these effects exist in large populations, you can't really use them to reason about any specific instance.
- drzaiusapelord 12y agoThis. I work with a support guy like this. He has, at best, a hobbyist's understanding of the technology we use. He tries to paint himself in meetings as this expert who often tries to correct us and says completely mind-numbing things. When discussing a fairly complex Drupal roll-out, "Oh, why even bother with this open source stuff? We can make an access database on the network shares and give people access to it! I hear it can do web now!" I've sat him down and patiently explained to him why we do these things, how they are common and best practices, etc and he just makes frowny face like I'm the one talking crazy and he doesn't seem to learn as he brings up the same suggestions over and over. Last week he was adament that a dedicated linux server for our Asterisk PBX was overkill and that WindowsXP running some windows freeware pbx on any old desktop would be better because PBXs need so little power and XP is a super lean OS. At my previous job where I worked and managed a few young-ish support and jr devs, I came accross a lot of the same attitudes. The funny thing is that two or three years in, they tend to shed those attitudes (at least the smart ones do). They realize that this stuff is a lot bigger than the limited experience they've gotten in school or in their hobbyist projects. Suddenly the "lets toss out everything and do it my way" motor-mouting gets turned down a notch or two, especially after I let them do things "their way" once in a while only to have it explode in their faces. Hell, 90% of managing young techies is controlling their D-K until they mature into imposter syndrome. Then you have to manage that, which is a million times easier to deal because you're not being know-it-all'd to death in every meeting. D-K is real. The graphs he points out literally supports it. Personally, I'm getting sick of this kind of uber-skeptic mentality that's popular here and on reddit. I think there's something ego gratifying for the INTJ male about being this loud-mouth contrarian who tells everyone they're wrong. Especially if its against some popular wisdom and if the argument is unusually pedantic and trivial.
- dang 12y ago> He has scratched the iceberg of skepticism and now thinks he's enough of an expert to tell the rest of us that we're Doing It Wrong. This sort of gratuitous negativity isn't appropriate in a Hacker News comment. It is unnecessary to make your point and pollutes the atmosphere for all of us. Please don't do that.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- circlefavshape 12y agoIn "Income & Happiness" you're missing that there are two complementary definitions of happiness - "satisfaction" and "affect". Satisfaction, or how you feel about your life, is what is shown in your graphs. "Affect" is your direct emotional experience of your life. What you call "wrongness" is just a failure to distinguish between the two - more money makes increasingly smug, but (beyond a certain point) doesn't make your like any more fun
- lambeosaurus 12y ago> more money makes increasingly smug, but (beyond a certain point) doesn't make your like any more fun That's not necessarily money's fault, and I'd point out that there are certainly rich people that don't fall into this category. People who want to pursue happiness need the freedom to do so. Freedom to pursue happiness can be directly correlated with how much money, or wealth, is available to the person. It's not money's fault that some people don't know how to be truly happy. Money simply affords freedom. The problem is that with enough freedom and no idea how to be happy in it, you're going to end up in a worse place than if you didn't have the money in the first place. Money doesn't automatically make people smug and funless (new word?). People make people smug and funless (when they have the freedom and inclination to (unintentionally(?)) do so).
- pharke 12y agoI believe what he meant by money making a person increasingly smug was perhaps that (Western) society holds the expectation that the amount of money a person controls is directly proportional to their overall success or fulfilment in life. This is not always the case but it does create the expectation that a person with money should represent themselves or think of themselves as more successful. This attitude is often interpreted (often correctly) as smugness given that it is rather the opposite of humbly acknowledging the fruits of work or fortune. Happiness means many things to many people. For some, work itself brings them joy whether or not it results in earning a great deal of money e.g. charitable work. For others it is close relationship with their family, a situation that increased wealth often worsens. Many work their entire lives without recognition or compensation to pursue art, giving up comfortable or successful lives and careers in pursuit of something that, more often than not, they are the only ones who see value in. Religious or aesthetic devotions have perhaps the longest history of eschewing wealth and what most would consider a normal life. As a society, I think that we are beginning to understand the faults in our current model of a successful life and so we've been seeing more of a trend towards simplifying our lives to make room for these other generators of happiness. We are starting to see that the freedom of money is not the same as the freedom from money.
- serve_yay 12y agoOh, it makes me so happy to see this. I have to cringe whenever I hear or see "Dunning-Kruger" these days.
- herendin 12y agoThe tendency of poorly-informed people to misunderstand the Dunning-Kruger Effect appears to be a clear example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect
- SilasX 12y agoIndeed, in that the typical usage of DK among the poorly informed is just "hey, I can accuse people of being too misinformed to realize it, without actually refuting their argument, all because I can cite a paper".
- danohuiginn 12y agopeople on the internet misunderstanding a paper? Might that be because 99% of them don't have access to read the thing, since it's suck behind a paywall? and to end a post about a paper people can't read with "Maybe I’m being naive here, but I think a major reason behind false memes is that checking sources sounds much harder and more intimidating than it actually is." -- that's just rubbing it in!
- mhaymo 12y agoI find just reading the abstract of a paper is usually enough to debunk the nonsense claims people are claiming it proves.
- nileshtrivedi 12y agoWhat if they're the ones who've read the full paper while you haven't?
- mhaymo 12y agoThen they'll be able to back up their claims.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- rfergie 12y agoMy personal responses to these are interesting. The first three I was all like "yes! So glad someone articulate is finally saying this". Then for type systems I was unable to overcome my current biases, thinking "what a load of tosh! Type systems are obviously a good thing". Makes me wonder what it would actually take to break the Dunning-Kruger meme
- cheatsheet 12y agoWhen enough people are aware of the meme, and the meme is ingrained in culture enough to have a statistically significant effect on perceived ability. Or when people decide it is meaningless, out of desire to control their expectations of their performance.
- kpmah 12y agoYou can still say type systems are obviously a good thing (I do too!). But you, sadly, can't say this is supported by scientific studies. It's an opinion based on your own personal experience. The good news is that this opinion doesn't contradict evidence either! The research just isn't there yet. Some of research I've seen so far is pretty bad.
- nickbauman 12y agoFP people do not always, even often, resort to type systems to solve problems. But then I am one of them and it could be DK working on me.
- Kronopath 12y agoThe fact that you actually recognized this response in yourself means that you're more than capable of adjusting that response to be less biased. It's a very good first step.
- nostrademons 12y agoOne option is to shrink your world to the things you have direct experience with. So yes, type systems are obviously a good thing - for you. Then the obvious question is why would somebody believe otherwise - and you can learn something by asking it. Worry about figuring out what the world is actually like once you've got a sample size of more than two.
- chrisdone 12y agoRegarding the “Income & Happiness” section the following section of a talk by Will Self comes to mind, on quantifying people's happiness and feelings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFNOWnklxAA&t=7m00s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFNOWnklxAA&t=7m00s
- DanBC 12y agoScientific reporting sucks, even in quality media that take it seriously. If I had money I'd pay a select group of bloggers to write about how a popular bit of science has been misreported and then colate links to those on some central site. A bit like Behind the Headlines, but about any science and by a wide range of science bloggers. http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx http://www.nhs.uk/news/Pages/NewsIndex.aspx
- maaaats 12y agoOne of Norway's biggest bloggers is a guy named Tjomlid[1]. His blog is "skeptical", as in he looks into various things circulating in the media and either backs it up or debunks it. When media says "X causes cancer", he comes with a level headed blog-post explaining the data. When anti-vaxxers point to a study, he shows that they have misinterpreted it, etc. Unfortunately, it's in Norwegian. I'm interested in reading more in this vein, so please let me know if you have good, English resources. [1]: http://tjomlid.com/ http://tjomlid.com/
- brianmcc 12y agoBen Goldacre writes some interesting stuff: http://www.badscience.net/about-dr-ben-goldacre/ http://www.badscience.net/about-dr-ben-goldacre/
- cataflam 12y agoGood article. However, I disagree with his interpretation of Dunning and Kruger's figures. There is limited data in those figures of course (3 sets with 12 points of data and 1 set with 8 points), and I don't know how big the actual sample sizes were. But in all 4 cases, it clearly and significantly shows that people with low actual ability overrate themselves and people with high actual ability underrate themselves. > The pop-sci version of Dunning-Kruger is that, the less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know. I can only guess that he is interpreting that too literally. I always took the latter part as "the more they think they know [compared to what they actually do]". You could plot "perceived - actual" or "perceived / actual" instead of the figures in the paper to make it more obvious.
- sergiosgc 12y ago> But in all 4 cases, it clearly and significantly shows that people with low actual ability overrate themselves and people with high actual ability underrate themselves. I read the data quite differently. I read that people don't use the full scale when rating themselves. The self rating scale goes from 60 to 90. If you correct for that, people kind of seem to do a nice job in self evaluation. It can be explained, too. People have social pressure not to rate themselves near 100%, nor in the bottom half of the scale.
- maxerickson 12y agoPresumably the plots represent averages. This hides the actual ranges of the reported self assessments, but it is likely that there is substantial overlap between adjacent test score groups. Just curving out the scale isn't going to address that.
- sergiosgc 12y agoTrue. Without knowing how are values distributed around the average, my observation that people do good self-assessments is poorly justified. Worse, a reduction in scale introduces worse granularity, so the end result is guaranteedly less precise. My observation is on the formality level of back of napkin calculations (i.e. it may be true, given the information provided, but is not proven true)
- hf 12y agoThe author states, as regards the interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger diagrams, that [i]n two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci conception of Dunning-Kruger. In my corner of the universe, you don't get to cherry-pick which pieces of data (ie "what instances of two sets of random variables") you bestow the golden twig of correlation upon. If I'm not entirely mistaken, correlation is very much a global feature, not a measure of proximity of two points on a chart. So, yes, Dunning-Kruger (as evinced from the diagrams sported here) indeed seems to make a weaker claim: that there's no correlation between “perceived ability” and “actual ability”. As such, this claim is as far from the "pop-sci conception" of Dunning-Kruger as it is from the author's.
- maxerickson 12y agoYeah, the valuable conclusion to make from the Dunning-Kruger paper is that self assessment isn't worth a lot.
- mreiland 12y agoself assessment is worth plenty.
- Tenoke 12y agoErr, no. There is clearly a pattern to the data, and drawing the conclusion that self-assessment and actual skill are uncorrelated is not what you should do (the simplified pattern being that unskilled individuals overestimate their skill, while skilled individuals underestimate theirs, or a regression to the average if you will). At any rate, even if we don't take that into account self-assessment is worth plenty as demonstrated by many studies which manage to get coherent data from self-assessments. Sure, you should take them with a grain of salt, and you can expect biases, but no need to throw them out.
- maxerickson 12y agoI apologize for not writing an essay carefully specifying what "worth a lot" means to me.
- Nimitz14 12y agoI don't get his part on Dunning-Kruger. Where is the "obvious" correlation? Why doesn't he specify which figures he's talking about? Each figure shows how the bottom quartile is overestimating their ability. And that's exactly what people call the Dunning-Kruger effect.
- emodendroket 12y agoWhat a gazillion pop-sci articles and blog posts suggest is that there is actually a negative correlation between self-assessment and performance -- i.e., that the higher people rate themselves, the worse they will perform. Looking at the graph we can see that while poor performers overestimate their performance relative to reality, there is still a positive correlation between performance and self-assessment.
- m_y-n_a_m_e 12y agoI liked Tal Yarkoni's blog post on Dunning-Kruger http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k... - even David Dunning posted a comment
- krig 12y agoI don't understand what point he is trying to make about the Dunning-Kruger effect. The only pop-sci version of the study that I've heard is that the bottom percentile tends to overestimate their abilities while the top percentile tends to underestimate their abilities. The data shown certainly seems to support this interpretation? edit: I read the article linked in another comment below [1] and now I think I understand what claim the original article was referring to. It seems a common misunderstanding of the D-K effect is that the bottom percentile would think that they are as competent or more competent as the top percentile. However, this is not what the study says, the bottom percentile is overestimating their ability but the estimations are still relatively lower than the self-estimations of those with higher ability. [1]: http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k...
- hasenj 12y agoWhen I read pop-sci interpretations of it (which is basically all I've ever read) my impression was that the top percentile estimate themselves as worse than the lower-percentile does. The graphs cited in the article show that the top still estimate themselves better than the lower percentile, which is new to me.
- lowbloodsugar 12y agoFrom your cited article: "Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good." Unfortunately, while the incompetent people may believe that they are not quite as good as people who actually are good, the problem is that they are not qualified to identify people who are actually good. From the original paper: "That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s." "As predicted, participants who scored in the bottom quartile were less able to gauge the competence of others than were their top-quartile counterparts." [2] So while the incompetent people may not believe themselves to be experts in general, they are less able to identify that the person sitting next to them is an expert. And further: "Bottom-quartile participants failed to gain insight into their own performance after seeing the more competent choices of their peers. ... [they] tended to raise their already inflated self-estimates." Not only do they fail to identify the expert next to them, but when presented with the expert's answers they will raise the own inflated estimate! Therefore, I believe that in practice, the DK paper does support the belief that less competent people believe themselves to be more competent than experts. [2] Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- mhomde 12y agoIt would be ironic if the author overestimates his interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger study...
- delibes 12y agoLooks like only people in the 3rd quartile are any good at estimating performance, and so perhaps they should immediately all become project managers?! :)
- delibes 12y agoI think there's an error in the blog post, because the 4th graph is the same as the 3rd. It should probably be http://danluu.com/images/dunning-kruger/dunning_4.png http://danluu.com/images/dunning-kruger/dunning_4.png which shows a positive correlation for "perceived logical reasoning ability and test performance". That then helps explain the statement "In two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill".
- Tenoke 12y agoThis looks like a very uncharitable interpretation of the pop version of Dunning-Krugger. For one, people who use an explanation like that pretty much always talk about unskilled individuals in particular. I might be projecting but it seems like a more charitable interpretation of what they are saying would be 'The less someone knows about a subject, the more they [overestimate what] they know' which is roughly correct.
- throwaway9324 12y agoOn income/happiness: "It’s a little easier to see why people would pass along the wrong story here, since it’s easy to misinterpret the data when it’s plotted against a linear scale, but it’s still pretty easy to see what’s going on by taking a peek at the actual studies." Googling http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/news/item/two-wws-professors-release-new-study-income%E2%80%99s-influence-happiness http://wws.princeton.edu/news-and-events/news/item/two-wws-p... "People’s life evaluations rise steadily with income, but the reported quality of emotional daily experience levels off at a certain income level, according to a new study by two Princeton University professors [...]" So seemingly that has nothing to do with the scale used, but with the definition of happiness. Guess someone didn't look "at the actual study"?
- jmmcd 12y agoThe fourth image on the DK effect is identical to the third. Copy-pasted link, maybe.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- asuffield 12y agoWithout commenting on the various claims about memes in this article, I can offer a hypothesis on the closing paragraphs: the most obvious reason why misinterpreted science is much more commonly seen is that sharing an unsupported meme takes far less time and effort (~few clicks) than finding the research paper and reading it, so we would anticipate seeing a lot more of the former. The pithy version is "a lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on", with thanks to Pratchett.
- jacquesm 12y ago> the most obvious reason why misinterpreted science is much more commonly seen is that sharing an unsupported meme takes far less time and effort (~few clicks) than finding the research paper and reading it I think your comment contains a highly recursive component: http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/ http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/07/13/truth/
- asuffield 12y agoI'm aware that it has history. The version I quoted is Pratchett's ;)
- whoisthemachine 12y agoI've always thought the Dunning-Kruger meme went: "The less you know about a given subject, the more you think you know, and vice versa", which I don't think is disputed by those graphs. It's just saying that people tend to overestimate their knowledge of a subject when they are under-educated and tend to underestimate their knowledge of a subject when they are over-educated. Of course, the study participants were asked to give their own estimates. What they were actually thinking of their abilities is a matter of debate that would need a more clever study to deduce.
- emodendroket 12y agoHow is that not disputed by those graphs? While there is distortion at both ends (particularly the lower end), it nevertheless shows self-assessment is positively correlated with ability.
- phtrivier 12y agoI always sucked at stats, so can someone clarify the income / hapiness case. From what I understand, we have : * a straight line on a log scale - which is misleading, since the man on the street is used to straight lines on linear scales - telling that money buys happiness * a "log-like" graph on a linear scale, which tells you that "money buys happiness a lot at the start, and then it doesn't change things a lot" - and the graph uses a linear scale on both axis, so there is less deformation. What am I missing ?
- Dylan16807 12y agoPeople are making the claim that money buys happiness up to a certain number and then stops. But there is no inflection point. 10% more money always buys you the same amount of happiness. Nothing makes $75k the point where you have 'enough' money as opposed to $5k. 75 million is just as far ahead of 5 million (at least if it continues to be logarithmic).
- phtrivier 12y agoThat's where I'm lost. 10% more money is much more money when you're rich than when you're poor (Captain obvious to the rescue.) So if you want to make me 10% more happy, that's going to cost you a lot more actual dollars / euros / yuan / whatever ; and the last 10$ are going to make me less "happier" (in absolute) than the first 10$. Considering people don't buy stuff in percentage of their salaries, but in absolute dollars (if i'm not mistaken), isn't that a case where the absolute / relative difference is relevant ? I'm pretty sure I'm having a stats 101-level argument, and there is something obvious that I'm missing, so please forgive and educate ;)
- msandford 12y agoSo the point is that 10% more money always makes you a certain amount happier. People trot this out and say "look, once you have a certain amount of money you don't get happier by having more!" Why should dollars buy happiness the same way they buy gumballs? It doesn't make any sense. The first gallon of water you have every day is pretty freaking valuable. The 1000th gallon of water you have every day is just about worthless unless you're a farmer. In engineering we use log-log charts to look at how systems respond to a HUGE range of inputs from the very, very slow to the very, very fast. Like filters. You want to know how it looks from 1Hz to 1GHz in a useful way. This is generally done with a Bode plot which is log on both x and y. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bode_plot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bode_plot If your plot covers several orders of magnitude (and income is many orders of magnitude) then the most informative way to understand it is by compressing it via logarithm. Here's a good example only on the Y since the company is growing X% per year. http://blogs-images.forbes.com/naomirobbins/files/2012/01/linear_log.jpg http://blogs-images.forbes.com/naomirobbins/files/2012/01/li...
- praptak 12y agoHere's a more detailed analysis of what the original Dunning-Kruger article supports and what it fails to support: http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/ http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k... Key quote: "I suspect we find this sort of explanation compelling because it appeals to our implicit just-world theories: we’d like to believe that people who obnoxiously proclaim their excellence at X, Y, and Z must really not be so very good at X, Y, and Z at all, and must be (over)compensating for some actual deficiency; it’s much less pleasant to imagine that people who go around shoving their (alleged) superiority in our faces might really be better than us at what they do. Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people."
- Chathamization 12y agoIt's also worth pointing out that you almost never see people bringing up Dunning-Kruger to say that they might be over estimating their own understanding of a topic. It's almost always used as evidence that those that disagree with them are ignorant; that it's a study that only says something about their opponents, not themselves.
- rthomas6 12y agoLooks like I should consider moving to Brazil.
- michaelochurch 12y agoHe's more right than most people are on the Dunning-Kruger effect. What it actually tells us is that self-assessed competence estimates carry low signal: the correlation is almost zero. This might be a regular, pointwise regression to the mean, or it might be an artifact of the aggregation (i.e. it could be that some people are great self-estimators but others are way off the mark). What Dunning-Kruger tells us is that, with regard to certain abilities and especially social skills, people are bad guessers of their own competence and that most people think of themselves as slightly above average. I think that he's also somewhat right on money vs. happiness. Self-reported happiness is not the same thing as actual happiness. You might rate yourself a "7" at two times of life, but be behaviorally different. Your "7" when you are poor might be, "commute sucked, but no one yelled at me at work today"; but when you're rich, it might mean "hotel is nice, but staff forgot to fold the toilet paper into a triangle". Self-reported contentment is the same, but stress levels and behavioral measures of happiness are very different. It is true that after $75k per person, other factors have more of an effect on happiness than money itself. You have to account for cost of living and family size, of course. Then there are job quality issues. A writer who reliably makes $100k per year is a smashing success; a professor earning that, at 40, is more than respectable; but someone who's a "Software Engineer II", making that, at age 40 is a failure. I think that success is much more strongly correlated to happiness than income. People with Harvard MBAs making $250k per year are often the most miserable people on earth, while famous artists who make a fraction of that often love their lives. His relating this to type systems is a bit silly. You can't put all "static typing" languages in the same bucket. Java's static typing is a hindrance with little power. Haskell's static typing is extremely effective-- if you know how to use it. Also, quality of the engineers matters more than the language itself: I'd much rather work on a disciplined Clojure or Ruby team than a sloppy Scala team that's still using Java patterns. If it is properly used, a Haskell-like type system can make code quality very high indeed. That said, most businesses aren't willing to budget the time for quality code, and that's a language-independent problem.
- bkeroack 12y agoThe income graph strongly suggests to me that increased happiness scales with the proportionate increase in income, rather than the absolute increase in raw dollars. That is to say, a 20% raise will increase everybody's happiness roughly equally, regardless of the absolute magnitude of the raise (eg, $10k for someone earning $50k/year and $100k for someone earning $500k/year). This probably has to do less with the utility of the money itself and more with psychological positive reinforcement ("I'm smart and successful and my boss recognizes that") as well as increasing the person's relative social status. I've read that, given the choice, people will prefer to (for example) earn $70k while their peer group earns $50k, as opposed to earning $100k while the peer group earns $150k. Income is an indicator of social status and is largely valued relative to the rest of your social cohort. Interestingly, the Japanese are said to be more efficient because their corporations tend to award social status directly to "salarymen" (sic) rather than indirectly through differential wages.
- dang 12y agoAll: please avoid gratuitous negativity in Hacker News discussions. Angry venting against someone you think wrong is gratuitous negativity. So are generic dismissals like "This whole article is just a bag of fail." If you think someone is wrong, please say why substantively, or say nothing.
- lowbloodsugar 12y ago"All: Please avoid generic criticism"