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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.

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[–] water_and_shade ago 

1) Sure, the variance isn't shown. Error bars are important, and large error bars would support your claim, but given that all we know are these averages, the average for less intelligent people is clearly above their actual skill, and the average for more intelligent people is clearly below their actual skill.

2) I'm not saying this is causation; clearly studies like this only demonstrate correlation.

3) That would be interesting to read about :)