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[–] AdHomonym 0 points 8 points (+8|-0) ago  (edited ago)

I have pretty good reason to believe that the Dunning-Krueger effect is woefully over-stated and misunderstood.

What their data actually shows is that people's perception of competence is, to an extent, orthogonal to their performance. That, and on average people think they are better than average, the 'Lake Wobegone Effect'.

I put together this thing to show what you would expect in different scenarios

and the actual graph from Dunning-Kruger attached to explain.

Here's a great blog talking about it.

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[–] Existentialist_ 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

orthogonal

Thanks for teaching me a new word.

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[–] FruityPants [S] 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

Thanks for the insights. The graphs you attached showing the different extremes of possible scenarios is pretty thought provoking.

It's bed time for me here, but that blog and the comment section looks like good early morning reading material

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[–] AdHomonym ago 

Hey, thanks! This is one of those scenarios where, even if the common interpretation is less than correct, it's still instructive. You can't trust perception of competence unless that person has a certain degree of experience.

The blog is really well written, definitely worth your time!

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[–] water_and_shade ago 

I feel like the second graph is pretty compelling; it seems to support the claim in the linked wikipedia article that "unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others."

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[–] AdHomonym ago 

But it doesn't, really.. we have the folks in the bottom quartile at 60% percieved competence... those people are all over the place, some of them think they are awesome... some of them know they suck. On average, the think they are 10% better than average.

The way it is understood by some is that incompetence breeds confidence, but the reality is that inexperienced people who are also confident haven't had reality adjust their perception... but nothing about inexperience makes people think they are good at something in and of itself. That idea is really tempting, and it feels good to believe, but it isn't really warranted given the data. It's the just world fallacy.

Also, the effect is significantly diminished when the complexity of the task is increased.