It’s obviously real, at least as used in conversation, whether it meets some rigorous definition I’m sure there’s an out, but we’ve all known these people. With vibe coding they’re everywhere. Is this going to be a modern “begging the question” where everyone knows what you mean but someone pipes up that actually the technical meaning is different?
The problem is that the original formulation was "most people" are unaware of being unskilled, but by now the name is used to mean "some group of people" is unaware of being unskilled. In that sense the article confirms that “a small number are", 5-6%, and therefore the effect exists in the colloquial sense but not in the scientific sense.
Mentioning the Dunning-Krueger effect incorrectly is wonderfully meta...
[ Unconscious Incompetence ] --> "You don't know what you don't know"
↓
[ Conscious Incompetence ] --> "You know what you don't know"
↓
[ Conscious Competence ] --> "You know, but you have to think about it"
↓
[ Unconscious Competence ] --> "You know it so well, it's second nature"
My experience with new CS grads was that most of them greatly overestimated what they knew, or alternatively, underestimated how much they did not know.
My experience with every person was that most of them overestimate what they know regardless of experience level. You just notice that more in new grads since its easier to tell when people are wrong about simple things than when they are wrong about more difficult things.
Software engineers tend to repeat the mantra "you cannot make accurate time estimates". That is true regardless of experience level, and everyone seems to be off by about the same amount. So there we have evidence that people overestimate their skills at every level, and its not that different.
Which is exactly what the Dunner-Kruger effect is. Knowledgeable people statistically underestimating their knowledge and non-knowledgeable people overestimating their knowledge.
For those interested, it’s not just in Apology this comes up. In Theaetetus he does a pretty good job disproving that it is even possible to know what knowledge is.
I think the third one is a separate thing. I don’t know of a name for it, but I’d call it the engineer’s (or physicist’s) blindspot or something like that.
I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
> I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
There is a brief bit where they attribute that observation to other causes:
In making these predictions, we felt that we could account for an
anomaly that appeared in all three previous studies: Despite the
fact that top-quartile participants were far more calibrated than
were their less skilled counterparts, they tended to underestimate
their performance relative to their peers. We felt that this miscalibration had a different source then the miscalibration evidenced by
bottom-quartile participants. That is, top-quartile participants did
not underestimate themselves because they were wrong about their
own performances, but rather because they were wrong about the
performances of their peers. In essence, we believe they fell prey
to the false-consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). In the
absence of data to the contrary, they mistakenly assumed that their
peers would tend provide the same (correct) answers as they
themselves—an impression that could be immediately corrected
by showing them the performances of their peers. By examining
the extent to which competent individuals revised their ability
estimates after grading the tests of their less competent peers, we
could put this false-consensus interpretation to a test.
My experience has been that this isn't limited to engineers. I'm sure most people here have had people from other departments tell them how they need to do their jobs in one way or another.
For example, there are always at least a few people who you have to consult regularly because their tickets are always written how they perceive a problem should be solved rather than explaining the underlying problem to be solved. Then there are the sales and marketing types who like to dictate how the UX of the front-end should be because they like to retell anecdotes to prospective clients about how they solved a problem. Then there's the guy who hands you a spreadsheet he's maintained for years and tells you he wants you to put something exactly like it in the flagship product as a new feature.
There's also the idea on the other side of the coin - whereby experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person.
The key claim: "Random data actually mimics the effect really well."
This makes some sense. If people are asked to guess a number between 1 and 6 and then roll a die, the people who roll low are more likely to overestimate and the people who roll high are more likely to underestimate. But the key is precisely how well random data mimics the effect.
They're simulating randomness incorrectly: relationship between true and perceived will average 0.5, not 0; and bias will average 50%, not 0%. That's why their "random data" is sloped.
Add negative relationship and negative bias, and the random data will act as intended - hovering randomly around 50%.
Indeed. And the obvious reason is that when you simulate the "self-assessment" using a Gaussian noise around the "actual intelligence", and clamp it to [0, 100] so that it doesn't go "out of bound" (eg "negative intelligence" is not allowed), you will necessarily skew the low scores upward and the high scores downwards.
But it's not because "some statistical model exhibit a bias that's similar to the result" that this implies "therefore the result is a statistical error"... that's a backward reasonning
Even if it isn’t true, it’s got the feeling of truthiness (1).
I don’t expect it to ever go out of the public consciousness. Like other things that were never real like Stockholm Syndrome I suspect it’s just stuck in the zeitgeist now.
Power poses, imposter syndrome, Stanford prison experiment, marshmallow test...
It seems like the overlap between "real psychological effect" and "subtle enough that it requires research to discover" is vanishingly small. I guess that's not really surprising.
Very hard to understand the meat behind all the fluff of the article, especially as the simulation code is not available, and as the presented simulated and original graphs are effectively the same (I don't see a disagreement).
It's clear that the perceived curve will be differently sloped, as no one will evaluate themselves as the topmost or the bottommost percentiles, so the edges will be biased.
And if in both cases we draw differences between perceived and actual, we will get the same curve that everyone knows, biased or not.
It's annoying they didn't plot the new and old "perceived" curves on the same figure, but if you pay attention to the y-axis, there is a very big difference.
In the old plot, the bottom quartile has about a 50 percentage point margin between actual and perceived performance while the new one is 30 percentage points, which is a 50% difference between the old and new curve. The second quartile has 3x more margin in the old version relative to the new one.
So what does that change? If there's no error bars on the graphs you can't discuss significant differences easily. And if they do differ, plotting differences will yield the U shape curve.
Now it's much more clear. The simulated data tries generating the true relationship between actual and perceived scores from 0.0 to 1.0, and bias in self-reporting from 0% to 100%.
So the output graph should be the average of all these data generating processes, yielding perceived relationship around 0.5 and bias around 50%, with some high variation.
If you have the access, run their Shiny code with these values, and you will see the published plot.
I'd argue that this demonstration is much weaker than "making original no more meaningful than random". It's more that the "simulated 50% bias and 0.5 true correlation looks similar to what DK published", which is also far fetched given the data generation they did.
Note: true random (what they were going for) would cover negative relationships, yielding the random true relationship around 0; and if they wouldn't correct the sign of Bias, it would also average at around 0; yielding a realistic "random" with the slope hovering about 50% for any percentile.
The replication crisis is not limited to psychology, that was just the first area where it was noted. I saw some meta-study comparing multiple social sciences and according to it replication failure in sociology and educational science was even worse than in psychology.
I wouldn’t assume the cause of the replication crisis is 100% due to a lack of rigor in psychology and the other relevant fields. These fields deal with concepts and phenomena that are often abstract and difficult to measure. In some sense, it’s just harder.
Besides, deciding what is and isn’t science is a question for the philosophy of science, not science itself.
Hard in "hard science" doesn't mean hard as in difficulty, it means hard as in not soft. Soft sciences are difficult to explore since they aren't rigid, they move around as you prod at them etc, you can't get a good grasp of its shape since they are so soft.
Physics on the other hand is hard as in unyielding. It is easy to figure out boundaries of physics and map out what is and isn't true, and the few cases were we made a mistake everyone can agree a mistake was made and that formulas needs to be updated since physics is so extremely hard that even a tiny error will get noticed.
Hope that clears it up, physics isn't hard as in difficult, its hard as in rigid. And psychology is soft, not easy.
So, your statement doesn't make sense at all in this discussion, they just said psychology has soft traits, and then you say "ok, so its hard since its soft!". No, soft is difficult, not hard.
So for example, physics is like describing the shape of a metal spoon, and psychology is like describing the shape of a pillow. You can see how describing the shape of the pillow is massively more difficult, because its not fixed, so you have to come up with a language to describe all the ways it can deform and how that would work.
If you ever took psych 101, it was immediately obvious it's mostly horse shit. Made up nonsense theory, with studies that have few participants and are done by people who don't know math.
Psych 101 says stuff like people being more willing to accept a date with a person after a scary experience since they mistake their quick beating heart for love, rather than humans sees a scary experience as a stronger signal of bonding than a casual experience.
There is so much simple tests that they draw extreme conclusions from in the very first lectures you hear, and when they teach those things as true when its highly debatable its hard to not throw the entire field in the trash.
Of course there is probably some good psychology work done, but you shouldn't have so many shoddy examples in the first course then since that gives people a bad taste for the entire field.
Take physics 101 (or something, anything from a hard science) and understand how they know what they claim to know, and compare it to psych. It's night and day.
One doesn't need to continue learning a topic to know it's bs when it's bs right from the start.
A 101 course should not teach frontiers of research. It should have fundamental established theories upon which the rest of the field is based. My experience with Introductory Psychology textbooks is that they spend a lot of time discussing ideas discarded decades ago, and then they spend some time discussing ideas that were discarded after the textbook was written.
It’s pretty handy as a signal. The moment someone starts banging on about Jungian this and Freud that, I know immediately to discount anything they say, ever.
The strict academic definition hasn’t followed the colloquial usage for a long time. Maybe ever:
If a specific novice is over-confident and out of their depth, we say “Dunning-Kruger”
If a specific is under-confident and performing better than their self-estimate, that’s not commonly considered Dunning Kruger, in the colloquial use. It’s called imposter syndrome, or not labeled at all.
The researchers aren’t really disagreeing with that. They found that novices had a wider range of self-estimates of their performance than experienced people. So in the novice group you were more likely to find someone who was grossly over-confident in their abilities, but you also found people who underestimated themselves.
> instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.
Which doesn’t precisely contradict the idea that among novices you can find people who overestimate their skills. Which is how it’s commonly used.
So I can believe it’s a statistical wash when averaging across all subjects. But I never considered the common use of Dunning-Kruger to be applied to averaged groups of people. It was always brought out for those outliers on the long tail of the novice grout who thought didn’t even know what they didn’t know.
Is any of the raw datasets of such an experiment available? I would like to see a scatter plot of self-assesed score vs actual score instead of the data aggregated into four bins.
Hm... I vaguely remember a different article debunking the Dunning-Kruger. Basically the conclusion was that the data from the experiment shows that people's estimations of their results are all over the place, with people scoring high being actually slightly (but only slightly) more confident that they did well.
The plot in the blog post seems to be very symmetrical around 50% (to the point where there must be some identity going on). The plot from the paper seems to cross over around 75%. So the 3rd quartile still has some explaining to do, right?
There are so many strange things about the original Dunning-Kruger plot. Why use quartiles for one axis and percentile for the other? Why use higher precision for the subject's estimate, which is by definition imprecise, and lower precision for the true score, which is known precisely?
I think the only conclusion you can draw from that plot is everyone thinks they'll be in the third quartile.
While the pop-culture notion of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is "idiots don't know they're idiots," the actual results of the paper were (essentially) that F students thought they were D students, whereas the A students thought they were B students. The argument here seems to be that the original effect is explained as essentially a kind of reversion of the mean argument (people assume themselves to be more average than they are), but I don't entirely buy that--especially since the simulation results they present don't really look like the original Dunning-Kruger results, since the crossover point is in the wrong place, and that's actually kind of significant in the original analysis...
Indeed. The true irony behind the Dunning Kruger Effect is that the pop culture understanding of it is essentially describing itself. Showing overconfidence in areas that you have little clue about.
Regardless of whether Dunning-Kruger is real the solution is the same. DK concerns poor performing people who cannot accurately address their performance relative to a group. Forget DK. The bigger problem is missing objectivity, which is a very real concern. So, just measure for objectivity.
Can they measure things or do they just guess? Are they willing to seek evidence? Even if evidence is immediately available will they use it? Everybody has bias, but is their bias primarily self-oriented?
The consequences for poor objectivity are profound and measurable, but then its an invisible failure for people that struggle with this in the first place. In many industries poor objectivity can result in termination, law suits, criminal penalties, physical harm, and more. Software just seems to pretend this is vapor.
The article may not take into account the possible effect of knowing about the Dunning-Kruger effect (or cultural sayings that goes in a similar direction) may bias measurements. Before it was widely enough known it was not a factor.
Also, negative knowledge comes in two flavours, what you know that you don't know and what you don't know that you don't know. There it may be ground for that effect, but also changes in culture may affect that, specially with exposure to internet/global culture and attitudes, that may make you more aware of what you don't know, and stories of success/fail for taking the wrong approach.
I think it's mostly misapplied. The best example of Dunning-Kruger is an intelligent, competent, Ph.D. in physics thinking 9/11 was faked because "jet fuel can't melt steel", not realizing that steel loses significant tensile strength as it heats up without necessarily melting, which I think most engineers would be aware of. His great knowledge in one area blinds him to his woeful lack of knowledge in another.
I mean, we all remember the cases where it was true, but do you really think most people think they are good at computer programming? Or speaking Russian? Or playing the harp? Or gardening? In the vast majority of cases, people who are not skilled at something, know that they are not. There are, sure, a few people who are overconfident, but the D-K effect as generally used in conversation was always pretty obviously untrue.
I think what people need to realize is that the Dunning-Kruger effect is mostly "not real" because, on average, everyone (regardless of competence) overestimates themselves. Saying that incompetent people overestimate themselves doesn't prove Dunning-Kruger is real, because it doesn't negate the fact that competent people also do this.
This article does not make its case. He shows a graph of "random" data, and then just kind of keeps going. But that random data is the meat of the whole thing.
Cut out 60% of the useless text, and focus on explaining why random data should look like that.
Agreed. Also it seems like, if the actual test scores and perceived test scores were both sampled iid, the “perceived” line should just be flat, with everyone being at 50th percentile. The fact that the displayed graph deviates from 50 in a way that more resembles the empirical data makes it seem like a cherry-picked random sample
But really, the article seems to be going out of the way to make the author's particular point... but reads to me that the original paper is often understood... it simply shows that "specialists who are very knowledgeable about a subject are more likely to accurately identify gaps in their own knoweldge, when compared to any population less knoweldgeable on the same subject."
For example, I am apparently the most knowledgeable birder in my family. I've taken graduate-level ornithology courses, identify a fair number of N. American birds by their calls, etc. However, I recognize that I know nothing about birds compared to anyone who actually works in the field with them... I don't know enough to even estimate what I don't know.
Do you think there's some element in published research that makes it automagically correct?
Papers saying that lead in petrol was totally safe were "published research", as were the papers saying that replacing tetraethyl lead with benzine made it safer.
Both of those turned out to be pretty majorly wrong, but they were "published research".
I've always found it somewhat ironic that the people who are least familiar with the actual research on the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to be the most confident in discussing it.
Having worked in tech my entire life, no amount of research will convince me that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not real. You might as well tell me that this isn't air that I'm breathing.
Excessive willful/unwillful ignorance is the root cause of someone exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger Effect. We've all at some point worked or lived with someone with real illusions/delusions about their abilities, and the root of it is ignorance. There's little we can do in our workplaces to mitigate these people. Word of advice from my experience: Never co-found a vc-backed software startup with someone that's done genuine innovation....and been completely ignorant and oblivious about everything else.
Damn if only this article actually explained why you see this effect from random data. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they understand the maths enough to know. Does anyone fancy reading those papers and giving us a TL;DR?
The graph of random data looks like that since its capped. The first place person cannot overestimate his position, and the bottom place person cannot underestimate his position. So any randomness at all will replicate the effect unless there is much more overconfidence in the high achievers than low achievers.
Maybe this is reveals more about me than anyone else but the whole usage of dunning-kruger is just another arrow in the quiver for media to talk down to a group that they dismiss because they have different priorities.
I find references to the effect in pop culture are almost always used in an insulting, smug manner.
Self-deception by any other name is still self-deception.
The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to smart people. You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
But overall I think real intelligence by definition requires empathy and humility.
One has to realize that we can't know the things we don't know, which includes the fact that we can't always trust our own beliefs and opinions because we might be relying on faulty or incomplete information, or we might be suffering from a mental health problem, whether we are aware of it or not.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach
This article seems really dumb (no Dunning-Kruger joke intended).
The two lines on the graph are basically linear (for the "actual performance" the quasi-linearity is obvious by the design, for the "estimated performance" it still means that even though dumber people over-estimate their performance, all group still think they do best, when they actually do best, in a relative linear way)
And when they do their simple model (we assume they just generated "real performance" from a gaussian, then added some gaussian noise for the "performance" and another gaussian noise for the "self-assessment") they still (obviously) got two linear graphs that crossed each other.
And then they conclude that this means there is no effect, because "the graphs are eerily similar" (whatever that means)
But obviously the simple model is going to make two lines cross (in particular if you use a min(100, max(0, actual_performance + noise)) since at each extreme, then min and max will tend to skew the line). To put it simply: someone really stupid will STILL not pretend that he's "negatively stupid".
The argument "I can make a simple model without using actual humans which shows some kind of bias that vaguely ressembles the result of a paper" doesn't mean that the actual paper is wrong...
I feel like the only important point in the article would be to explain how the random data was generated, yet it was relegated to the single sentence: "There was no bias in the coding that would lead these fictitious students to guess they had done really well when their actual score was very low."
Because on the surface, it doesn't make any sense for two sets of "random" numbers between 0-100 selected in pairs to deviate from each other based on whether the first number in the pair was low or not. You would not expect the first number chosen in a pair to influence the second number. Whether the first number was between 0-25 or 76-100, you would expect the second number to be about 50.
So this is obviously some sort of structured randomness that may be entirely justifiable, but the only way to find that out would be to read the two articles that this article purports to summarize for the layman. Instead there's over 1300 words of slop before this sentence, then nearly 700 words of slop after this sentence. Turns out we don't need AI for this. Speaking of random, I don't think that 2000 words is random.
-----
edit:
maybe the point of the papers is that low scorers can't underestimate their abilities - as in they literally don't have enough room? If so, that just means that the Dunning-Kruger affect is unavoidable. But the fact is that people are not choosing numbers at random, they are choosing them based on their expectations. People who got zero questions right and expected 100% are as likely as anyone else from a random number generator, and non-existent from actual people.
edit2:
OK, I've worked it out. I was making the mistake of thinking that they were evaluating absolute performance rather than relative performance. So each of the first numbers in the pair is unique. But that still leaves the fact that the random draw still predictably sits at 50% where the Dunning-Kruger data is around 65% based on the graph. Seems like norming that with the random data would give you better information.
edit3:
> In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers [...] his team [...] showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.
How is "narrower range" not an indication of more accurate self-evaluation? With that, and since people on the higher end of the scale have less room to overestimate their standing, and people on the lower end of the scale have less room to underestimate their standing, wouldn't you expect "Dunning-Kruger"? People on the low end of the scale would have wild swings that would be gated at zero, and people on the high end of the scale would have small swings that would be gated at 100. That would lead to small underestimates at the top, and large overestimates at the bottom. More accurate self-evaluation at the top of the scale is exactly what Dunning-Kruger is about, and the direction of the mistakes is predictable if this is true.
final, tldr:
Honestly, the entire debate is garbled. People are not being asked about their performance on a test, they're being asked about their standing within a sampling of people chosen by the experimenter, something which they have no reason to know anything about other than on the experimenter's word.
I think how people interpret Dunning-Kruger, and the only interesting thing about it, is that people who have more knowledge of a subject are more accurate in their assessment of how much they know about that subject. This seems likely (but not evidently) to be true, due to the range of (relative) self-assessment error being narrower in the top quartile as compared to the bottom quartile. This is what people found intuitive and compelling.
If it is true, the top quartile would tend to small underestimation (because of the narrower range and that they can't choose numbers higher than 100) and the bottom quartile would tend to larger overestimation (because of the wider range and that they can't choose numbers lower than 1.) That the average direction of over- and underestimation is forced by the nature of the evaluation doesn't make the effect any less true.
I found this counterargument more convincing: https://andersource.dev/2022/04/19/dk-autocorrelation.html
It’s obviously real, at least as used in conversation, whether it meets some rigorous definition I’m sure there’s an out, but we’ve all known these people. With vibe coding they’re everywhere. Is this going to be a modern “begging the question” where everyone knows what you mean but someone pipes up that actually the technical meaning is different?
The problem is that the original formulation was "most people" are unaware of being unskilled, but by now the name is used to mean "some group of people" is unaware of being unskilled. In that sense the article confirms that “a small number are", 5-6%, and therefore the effect exists in the colloquial sense but not in the scientific sense.
Mentioning the Dunning-Krueger effect incorrectly is wonderfully meta...
The four levels of competence:
My experience with new CS grads was that most of them greatly overestimated what they knew, or alternatively, underestimated how much they did not know.
My experience with every person was that most of them overestimate what they know regardless of experience level. You just notice that more in new grads since its easier to tell when people are wrong about simple things than when they are wrong about more difficult things.
Software engineers tend to repeat the mantra "you cannot make accurate time estimates". That is true regardless of experience level, and everyone seems to be off by about the same amount. So there we have evidence that people overestimate their skills at every level, and its not that different.
gell mann effect leads me to pay closer attention and then its game over
This then boils down to people being generally bad at estimating their own level of ability.
Which is exactly what the Dunner-Kruger effect is. Knowledgeable people statistically underestimating their knowledge and non-knowledgeable people overestimating their knowledge.
I've seen at least 3 different ideas on this topic:
- people not skilled in a thing are bad at estimating their skills
- people are generally bad at estimating their skills
- people skilled in a particular areas often feel they are intellectually fit in other areas
Out of these three I feel like there's some truth in it, at least anecdotally.
for the last one, that's the whole story of Socrates being the wisest man because unlike others he knew the bounds of his knowledge:
"I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing
For those interested, it’s not just in Apology this comes up. In Theaetetus he does a pretty good job disproving that it is even possible to know what knowledge is.
I think the third one is a separate thing. I don’t know of a name for it, but I’d call it the engineer’s (or physicist’s) blindspot or something like that.
I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
> I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
There is a brief bit where they attribute that observation to other causes:
In making these predictions, we felt that we could account for an anomaly that appeared in all three previous studies: Despite the fact that top-quartile participants were far more calibrated than were their less skilled counterparts, they tended to underestimate their performance relative to their peers. We felt that this miscalibration had a different source then the miscalibration evidenced by bottom-quartile participants. That is, top-quartile participants did not underestimate themselves because they were wrong about their own performances, but rather because they were wrong about the performances of their peers. In essence, we believe they fell prey to the false-consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). In the absence of data to the contrary, they mistakenly assumed that their peers would tend provide the same (correct) answers as they themselves—an impression that could be immediately corrected by showing them the performances of their peers. By examining the extent to which competent individuals revised their ability estimates after grading the tests of their less competent peers, we could put this false-consensus interpretation to a test.
Link if you need it:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_...
> people skilled in a particular areas often feel they are intellectually fit in other areas
This I think is a separate phenomenon, maybe Nobel Disease but there might be a more general term, for example that includes celebrities.
It's called "engineer's disease" which is pretty appropriate for this community:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease
My experience has been that this isn't limited to engineers. I'm sure most people here have had people from other departments tell them how they need to do their jobs in one way or another.
For example, there are always at least a few people who you have to consult regularly because their tickets are always written how they perceive a problem should be solved rather than explaining the underlying problem to be solved. Then there are the sales and marketing types who like to dictate how the UX of the front-end should be because they like to retell anecdotes to prospective clients about how they solved a problem. Then there's the guy who hands you a spreadsheet he's maintained for years and tells you he wants you to put something exactly like it in the flagship product as a new feature.
There's also the idea on the other side of the coin - whereby experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person.
And of course there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
What is “it”, of those 3? The last one?
The key claim: "Random data actually mimics the effect really well."
This makes some sense. If people are asked to guess a number between 1 and 6 and then roll a die, the people who roll low are more likely to overestimate and the people who roll high are more likely to underestimate. But the key is precisely how well random data mimics the effect.
They're simulating randomness incorrectly: relationship between true and perceived will average 0.5, not 0; and bias will average 50%, not 0%. That's why their "random data" is sloped.
Add negative relationship and negative bias, and the random data will act as intended - hovering randomly around 50%.
They, themselves, show the Dunning-Kruger effect by overestimating how much they understand randomness
Indeed. And the obvious reason is that when you simulate the "self-assessment" using a Gaussian noise around the "actual intelligence", and clamp it to [0, 100] so that it doesn't go "out of bound" (eg "negative intelligence" is not allowed), you will necessarily skew the low scores upward and the high scores downwards.
But it's not because "some statistical model exhibit a bias that's similar to the result" that this implies "therefore the result is a statistical error"... that's a backward reasonning
Even if it isn’t true, it’s got the feeling of truthiness (1).
I don’t expect it to ever go out of the public consciousness. Like other things that were never real like Stockholm Syndrome I suspect it’s just stuck in the zeitgeist now.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness
Power poses, imposter syndrome, Stanford prison experiment, marshmallow test...
It seems like the overlap between "real psychological effect" and "subtle enough that it requires research to discover" is vanishingly small. I guess that's not really surprising.
Very hard to understand the meat behind all the fluff of the article, especially as the simulation code is not available, and as the presented simulated and original graphs are effectively the same (I don't see a disagreement).
It's clear that the perceived curve will be differently sloped, as no one will evaluate themselves as the topmost or the bottommost percentiles, so the edges will be biased.
And if in both cases we draw differences between perceived and actual, we will get the same curve that everyone knows, biased or not.
It's annoying they didn't plot the new and old "perceived" curves on the same figure, but if you pay attention to the y-axis, there is a very big difference.
In the old plot, the bottom quartile has about a 50 percentage point margin between actual and perceived performance while the new one is 30 percentage points, which is a 50% difference between the old and new curve. The second quartile has 3x more margin in the old version relative to the new one.
So what does that change? If there's no error bars on the graphs you can't discuss significant differences easily. And if they do differ, plotting differences will yield the U shape curve.
Huh? The point is that the two graphs come out looking the same, making the original no more meaningful than random.
Source code is here: https://github.com/pem725/Dunning-Kruger (found here: https://pem725.github.io)
Thanks for finding the code!
Now it's much more clear. The simulated data tries generating the true relationship between actual and perceived scores from 0.0 to 1.0, and bias in self-reporting from 0% to 100%.
So the output graph should be the average of all these data generating processes, yielding perceived relationship around 0.5 and bias around 50%, with some high variation.
If you have the access, run their Shiny code with these values, and you will see the published plot.
I'd argue that this demonstration is much weaker than "making original no more meaningful than random". It's more that the "simulated 50% bias and 0.5 true correlation looks similar to what DK published", which is also far fetched given the data generation they did.
Note: true random (what they were going for) would cover negative relationships, yielding the random true relationship around 0; and if they wouldn't correct the sign of Bias, it would also average at around 0; yielding a realistic "random" with the slope hovering about 50% for any percentile.
Except "two graphs look the same" in no way means "therefore the results are equivalent"
The article is baseless and fluffy
Replication crisis. More than half of all psychology studies are not reproducible.
I'm at the point honestly, where I don't even consider psychology to be a science anymore.
The replication crisis is not limited to psychology, that was just the first area where it was noted. I saw some meta-study comparing multiple social sciences and according to it replication failure in sociology and educational science was even worse than in psychology.
I wouldn’t assume the cause of the replication crisis is 100% due to a lack of rigor in psychology and the other relevant fields. These fields deal with concepts and phenomena that are often abstract and difficult to measure. In some sense, it’s just harder.
Besides, deciding what is and isn’t science is a question for the philosophy of science, not science itself.
Yes, that's why psychology is the hardest science.
Hard in "hard science" doesn't mean hard as in difficulty, it means hard as in not soft. Soft sciences are difficult to explore since they aren't rigid, they move around as you prod at them etc, you can't get a good grasp of its shape since they are so soft.
Physics on the other hand is hard as in unyielding. It is easy to figure out boundaries of physics and map out what is and isn't true, and the few cases were we made a mistake everyone can agree a mistake was made and that formulas needs to be updated since physics is so extremely hard that even a tiny error will get noticed.
Hope that clears it up, physics isn't hard as in difficult, its hard as in rigid. And psychology is soft, not easy.
So, your statement doesn't make sense at all in this discussion, they just said psychology has soft traits, and then you say "ok, so its hard since its soft!". No, soft is difficult, not hard.
So for example, physics is like describing the shape of a metal spoon, and psychology is like describing the shape of a pillow. You can see how describing the shape of the pillow is massively more difficult, because its not fixed, so you have to come up with a language to describe all the ways it can deform and how that would work.
If you ever took psych 101, it was immediately obvious it's mostly horse shit. Made up nonsense theory, with studies that have few participants and are done by people who don't know math.
It is both amazing and saddening to me how you can have such an arrogant view of a whole field with just taking a 101 course.
Psych 101 says stuff like people being more willing to accept a date with a person after a scary experience since they mistake their quick beating heart for love, rather than humans sees a scary experience as a stronger signal of bonding than a casual experience.
There is so much simple tests that they draw extreme conclusions from in the very first lectures you hear, and when they teach those things as true when its highly debatable its hard to not throw the entire field in the trash.
Of course there is probably some good psychology work done, but you shouldn't have so many shoddy examples in the first course then since that gives people a bad taste for the entire field.
Take physics 101 (or something, anything from a hard science) and understand how they know what they claim to know, and compare it to psych. It's night and day.
One doesn't need to continue learning a topic to know it's bs when it's bs right from the start.
A 101 course should not teach frontiers of research. It should have fundamental established theories upon which the rest of the field is based. My experience with Introductory Psychology textbooks is that they spend a lot of time discussing ideas discarded decades ago, and then they spend some time discussing ideas that were discarded after the textbook was written.
It’s pretty handy as a signal. The moment someone starts banging on about Jungian this and Freud that, I know immediately to discount anything they say, ever.
But the answer to bad science is good science.
I don't know that it's possible in psych. The economics of doing larger scale studies make it extremely difficult.
A lot of them contradict each other too which is what got me going down the rabbit hole of researching it.
> More than half of all psychology studies are not reproducible.
Do you have a source for this?
There are tons going back to around 2015. Search Replication Crisis and Psychology. Only about 36-39% of studies can be replicated.
A similar argument was made a couple of years ago, here's the rebuttal of the argument from back then [2022]: https://andersource.dev/2022/04/19/dk-autocorrelation.html
What if the people writing that paper overestimated their own capabilities?
The strict academic definition hasn’t followed the colloquial usage for a long time. Maybe ever:
If a specific novice is over-confident and out of their depth, we say “Dunning-Kruger”
If a specific is under-confident and performing better than their self-estimate, that’s not commonly considered Dunning Kruger, in the colloquial use. It’s called imposter syndrome, or not labeled at all.
The researchers aren’t really disagreeing with that. They found that novices had a wider range of self-estimates of their performance than experienced people. So in the novice group you were more likely to find someone who was grossly over-confident in their abilities, but you also found people who underestimated themselves.
> instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.
Which doesn’t precisely contradict the idea that among novices you can find people who overestimate their skills. Which is how it’s commonly used.
So I can believe it’s a statistical wash when averaging across all subjects. But I never considered the common use of Dunning-Kruger to be applied to averaged groups of people. It was always brought out for those outliers on the long tail of the novice grout who thought didn’t even know what they didn’t know.
You've hit the nail on the head, it's a conditional defenition, rather than an absolute one.
Is any of the raw datasets of such an experiment available? I would like to see a scatter plot of self-assesed score vs actual score instead of the data aggregated into four bins.
Hm... I vaguely remember a different article debunking the Dunning-Kruger. Basically the conclusion was that the data from the experiment shows that people's estimations of their results are all over the place, with people scoring high being actually slightly (but only slightly) more confident that they did well.
UPD: probably this one https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...
The article in the post is older though
The plot in the blog post seems to be very symmetrical around 50% (to the point where there must be some identity going on). The plot from the paper seems to cross over around 75%. So the 3rd quartile still has some explaining to do, right?
Maybe the core reasons are buried in this, but the amount of empty statements makes it hard to find
There are so many strange things about the original Dunning-Kruger plot. Why use quartiles for one axis and percentile for the other? Why use higher precision for the subject's estimate, which is by definition imprecise, and lower precision for the true score, which is known precisely?
I think the only conclusion you can draw from that plot is everyone thinks they'll be in the third quartile.
While the pop-culture notion of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is "idiots don't know they're idiots," the actual results of the paper were (essentially) that F students thought they were D students, whereas the A students thought they were B students. The argument here seems to be that the original effect is explained as essentially a kind of reversion of the mean argument (people assume themselves to be more average than they are), but I don't entirely buy that--especially since the simulation results they present don't really look like the original Dunning-Kruger results, since the crossover point is in the wrong place, and that's actually kind of significant in the original analysis...
Indeed. The true irony behind the Dunning Kruger Effect is that the pop culture understanding of it is essentially describing itself. Showing overconfidence in areas that you have little clue about.
Regardless of whether Dunning-Kruger is real the solution is the same. DK concerns poor performing people who cannot accurately address their performance relative to a group. Forget DK. The bigger problem is missing objectivity, which is a very real concern. So, just measure for objectivity.
Can they measure things or do they just guess? Are they willing to seek evidence? Even if evidence is immediately available will they use it? Everybody has bias, but is their bias primarily self-oriented?
The consequences for poor objectivity are profound and measurable, but then its an invisible failure for people that struggle with this in the first place. In many industries poor objectivity can result in termination, law suits, criminal penalties, physical harm, and more. Software just seems to pretend this is vapor.
The AI-Kruger effect is here today...
...when very mediocre vibe coders think they are brilliant developers....
The article may not take into account the possible effect of knowing about the Dunning-Kruger effect (or cultural sayings that goes in a similar direction) may bias measurements. Before it was widely enough known it was not a factor.
Also, negative knowledge comes in two flavours, what you know that you don't know and what you don't know that you don't know. There it may be ground for that effect, but also changes in culture may affect that, specially with exposure to internet/global culture and attitudes, that may make you more aware of what you don't know, and stories of success/fail for taking the wrong approach.
I think it's mostly misapplied. The best example of Dunning-Kruger is an intelligent, competent, Ph.D. in physics thinking 9/11 was faked because "jet fuel can't melt steel", not realizing that steel loses significant tensile strength as it heats up without necessarily melting, which I think most engineers would be aware of. His great knowledge in one area blinds him to his woeful lack of knowledge in another.
I mean, we all remember the cases where it was true, but do you really think most people think they are good at computer programming? Or speaking Russian? Or playing the harp? Or gardening? In the vast majority of cases, people who are not skilled at something, know that they are not. There are, sure, a few people who are overconfident, but the D-K effect as generally used in conversation was always pretty obviously untrue.
I think what people need to realize is that the Dunning-Kruger effect is mostly "not real" because, on average, everyone (regardless of competence) overestimates themselves. Saying that incompetent people overestimate themselves doesn't prove Dunning-Kruger is real, because it doesn't negate the fact that competent people also do this.
This article does not make its case. He shows a graph of "random" data, and then just kind of keeps going. But that random data is the meat of the whole thing.
Cut out 60% of the useless text, and focus on explaining why random data should look like that.
Agreed. Also it seems like, if the actual test scores and perceived test scores were both sampled iid, the “perceived” line should just be flat, with everyone being at 50th percentile. The fact that the displayed graph deviates from 50 in a way that more resembles the empirical data makes it seem like a cherry-picked random sample
So this is a case of the Dunning-Kruger Effect?
I was going to say: is this a joke?
But really, the article seems to be going out of the way to make the author's particular point... but reads to me that the original paper is often understood... it simply shows that "specialists who are very knowledgeable about a subject are more likely to accurately identify gaps in their own knoweldge, when compared to any population less knoweldgeable on the same subject."
For example, I am apparently the most knowledgeable birder in my family. I've taken graduate-level ornithology courses, identify a fair number of N. American birds by their calls, etc. However, I recognize that I know nothing about birds compared to anyone who actually works in the field with them... I don't know enough to even estimate what I don't know.
Isn't trying to discount published research with a glorified blog post the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action?
Do you think there's some element in published research that makes it automagically correct?
Papers saying that lead in petrol was totally safe were "published research", as were the papers saying that replacing tetraethyl lead with benzine made it safer.
Both of those turned out to be pretty majorly wrong, but they were "published research".
I completely agree.
I've always found it somewhat ironic that the people who are least familiar with the actual research on the Dunning-Kruger effect tend to be the most confident in discussing it.
It's a sort of recursive Dunning-Kruger effect.
Ok. Let’s read the papers cited:
> Our results further confirm that experts are more proficient in self-assessing their abilities than novices.
Having worked in tech my entire life, no amount of research will convince me that the Dunning-Kruger effect is not real. You might as well tell me that this isn't air that I'm breathing.
I'm 100% confident it's real but I have no expertise on the subject. Checkmate, Atheists.
It is absolutely real.
Excessive willful/unwillful ignorance is the root cause of someone exhibiting the Dunning-Kruger Effect. We've all at some point worked or lived with someone with real illusions/delusions about their abilities, and the root of it is ignorance. There's little we can do in our workplaces to mitigate these people. Word of advice from my experience: Never co-found a vc-backed software startup with someone that's done genuine innovation....and been completely ignorant and oblivious about everything else.
Damn if only this article actually explained why you see this effect from random data. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they understand the maths enough to know. Does anyone fancy reading those papers and giving us a TL;DR?
Yeah - I kept looking for the meat of the argument. The graph of random data looks a little correlated and I’d love to know why.
That being said I loved the mercury/Glasgow explanation. Anecdotally I see that all the time.
The graph of random data looks like that since its capped. The first place person cannot overestimate his position, and the bottom place person cannot underestimate his position. So any randomness at all will replicate the effect unless there is much more overconfidence in the high achievers than low achievers.
They constructed a straw man and then bitched about the straw man. In effect, they proved Dunning Kruger.
Maybe this is reveals more about me than anyone else but the whole usage of dunning-kruger is just another arrow in the quiver for media to talk down to a group that they dismiss because they have different priorities.
I find references to the effect in pop culture are almost always used in an insulting, smug manner.
> The Dunning-Kruger Effect Is Probably Not Real
Self-deception by any other name is still self-deception.
The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to smart people. You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self-estimates.
But overall I think real intelligence by definition requires empathy and humility.
One has to realize that we can't know the things we don't know, which includes the fact that we can't always trust our own beliefs and opinions because we might be relying on faulty or incomplete information, or we might be suffering from a mental health problem, whether we are aware of it or not.
"As a rule, strong feelings about issues do not emerge from deep understanding." -Sloman and Fernbach
I think the Dunning-Kreuger effect is more pernicious in smart people. I think Engineer’s Disease is basically DK by another name.
This article seems really dumb (no Dunning-Kruger joke intended).
The two lines on the graph are basically linear (for the "actual performance" the quasi-linearity is obvious by the design, for the "estimated performance" it still means that even though dumber people over-estimate their performance, all group still think they do best, when they actually do best, in a relative linear way)
And when they do their simple model (we assume they just generated "real performance" from a gaussian, then added some gaussian noise for the "performance" and another gaussian noise for the "self-assessment") they still (obviously) got two linear graphs that crossed each other.
And then they conclude that this means there is no effect, because "the graphs are eerily similar" (whatever that means)
But obviously the simple model is going to make two lines cross (in particular if you use a min(100, max(0, actual_performance + noise)) since at each extreme, then min and max will tend to skew the line). To put it simply: someone really stupid will STILL not pretend that he's "negatively stupid".
The argument "I can make a simple model without using actual humans which shows some kind of bias that vaguely ressembles the result of a paper" doesn't mean that the actual paper is wrong...
But what if that is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
I feel like the only important point in the article would be to explain how the random data was generated, yet it was relegated to the single sentence: "There was no bias in the coding that would lead these fictitious students to guess they had done really well when their actual score was very low."
Because on the surface, it doesn't make any sense for two sets of "random" numbers between 0-100 selected in pairs to deviate from each other based on whether the first number in the pair was low or not. You would not expect the first number chosen in a pair to influence the second number. Whether the first number was between 0-25 or 76-100, you would expect the second number to be about 50.
So this is obviously some sort of structured randomness that may be entirely justifiable, but the only way to find that out would be to read the two articles that this article purports to summarize for the layman. Instead there's over 1300 words of slop before this sentence, then nearly 700 words of slop after this sentence. Turns out we don't need AI for this. Speaking of random, I don't think that 2000 words is random.
-----
edit:
maybe the point of the papers is that low scorers can't underestimate their abilities - as in they literally don't have enough room? If so, that just means that the Dunning-Kruger affect is unavoidable. But the fact is that people are not choosing numbers at random, they are choosing them based on their expectations. People who got zero questions right and expected 100% are as likely as anyone else from a random number generator, and non-existent from actual people.
edit2:
OK, I've worked it out. I was making the mistake of thinking that they were evaluating absolute performance rather than relative performance. So each of the first numbers in the pair is unique. But that still leaves the fact that the random draw still predictably sits at 50% where the Dunning-Kruger data is around 65% based on the graph. Seems like norming that with the random data would give you better information.
edit3:
> In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers [...] his team [...] showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.
How is "narrower range" not an indication of more accurate self-evaluation? With that, and since people on the higher end of the scale have less room to overestimate their standing, and people on the lower end of the scale have less room to underestimate their standing, wouldn't you expect "Dunning-Kruger"? People on the low end of the scale would have wild swings that would be gated at zero, and people on the high end of the scale would have small swings that would be gated at 100. That would lead to small underestimates at the top, and large overestimates at the bottom. More accurate self-evaluation at the top of the scale is exactly what Dunning-Kruger is about, and the direction of the mistakes is predictable if this is true.
final, tldr:
Honestly, the entire debate is garbled. People are not being asked about their performance on a test, they're being asked about their standing within a sampling of people chosen by the experimenter, something which they have no reason to know anything about other than on the experimenter's word.
I think how people interpret Dunning-Kruger, and the only interesting thing about it, is that people who have more knowledge of a subject are more accurate in their assessment of how much they know about that subject. This seems likely (but not evidently) to be true, due to the range of (relative) self-assessment error being narrower in the top quartile as compared to the bottom quartile. This is what people found intuitive and compelling.
If it is true, the top quartile would tend to small underestimation (because of the narrower range and that they can't choose numbers higher than 100) and the bottom quartile would tend to larger overestimation (because of the wider range and that they can't choose numbers lower than 1.) That the average direction of over- and underestimation is forced by the nature of the evaluation doesn't make the effect any less true.