TIL about Dunning Kruger Effect - why people with low competence overestimate and people with high competence underestimate themselves.
Dunning–Kruger effect - Wikipedia
That graph is shaped like a gun.
Please shoot me with it, I cant take any more of those smart people
Pretty sure most lemmy users are up there. But now that I say that.. could very well be wrong. Sorry everyone
most replies to my comments on here seem to think their are foolproof geniuses while espousing that there is no such thing is nuance or complexity in the world. there is only good (agree with them) or bad (disagree with them).
super big-brained thinking, that.
Its at least partially a statistical trick. People of lower competence rate themselves closer to the middle, but people with high competence also do this.
I also find it hilarious how virtually everyone acts like an expert in diagnosing dunning-krueger. Like looking at a graph for a second and then repeating an academic mystification and 5-10 word snippet repeated ad nauseum is pretty fucking ironic given the subject
No no you see, because I have heard of the Dunning-Krüger effect on no fewer than two separate occasioms, I am a master at recognizing it in people no matter where they fall on its spectrum. You just don't understand because your overexposure to the concept has dulled your natural instincts, unlike me. /s
Everyone has an opinion and nobody holds the absolute truth. Fun thing, reality is.
that sounds like it's part of the homosexual/trans agenda!
I find that folks that just keep their mouths shut, do their jobs quietly, competently and correctly are far better to have on your team than the loudmouth know-it-all.
Bonus is that when the former does open their mouth you know you should be paying attention.
I think they call it "quiet competence".
IME the loudmouths are mostly mouthing off about things that are totally unrelated to the problem at hand. all in some weird big to appear confident and in control.
All too common I've seen those loudmouths promoted, and the quiet competent are then talked down to about something they know far more about. Then they leave.
Middle management doesn't understand a skillset unless someone tells them directly they are skilled, it's a culture of failure.
I wish I had this but I'm in the between both of those people and incompetent
Today?
It has been a fad for some time.
Ironically mostly used by people who think they're smart bcs they've heard of it.
smart doesn't mean anything.
It means a lot of things according to the dictionary.
You might want to look it up.
Knowledge doesn't just diffuse into everyone's minds when it hits a fad threshold. There's still a point where one first learns about it. Shocking, I know.
You gotta be part of the hive mind man, it's pretty cool
A mindset I just fell into as a much younger man for reasons I no longer remember was assuming everyone knew more than I did and did things the way they did them for a reason. And I should learn what that reason is before I go proposing changes.
That mindset has never steered me wrong. Even when I change something someone else put in place what I come up with is a better solution for taking the time to understand why the previous person did it the way that they did.
I had a soccer coach from age 7-18. Same guy, brilliant dude, Dean of law at a very large state school. He told me at 12 to never talk to the other kids at the summer camps (competition) about what i was working on. "Just go out and do it and shut your mouth about it. That's how you impress on the field."
It's stuck with me since then.
This principle is sometimes called "Chesterton's Fence" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence)
i assumed there was some kind of story here - it being a parable - but its kinda more like a koan.
So much anger I see in the world is directed at policies, laws, procedures, whatever, that make perfect sense if one understands the background.
Sucks, but we can't all understand everything. I try, but I ain't that smart, and certainly can't be that experienced.
As far as I can tell, we all have this, even people who are experts, it's just in different domains that those of their expertise.
what baffles me is that so many experts just willfully refuse to apply there general intelligent to problems outside of their field of expertise in the most basic ways.
like so many 'genius' techies who can't cook or understand a sentence with more than two clauses. it's not really that hard... just break it down into the functional components like you do with your code, bucko.
It has been my experience that actual domain experience almost invariably beats genius-level intelligence, even that which is all the way up at the level of Einstein (so well beyond mere genius IQ).
What intelligence does bring is a faster ability to grasp things when explained and even to ask the right questions and piece a few more things together naturally than most people would, but that's still not enough for a very high intelligence newbie to beat somebody with years of expertise on a domain: a newbie doesn't just lack direct knowledge, they even lack knowledge of what are the right things to do to get that knowledge are as well as, in many domains, training to do it in a time effective way (or to put it another way, they don't just lack the answers, they even don't know the right questions to ask).
A last point: don't confuse tech domain expertise with very above average intelligence - domain expertise in a complex intellectual domain tends to look from the outside as very high intelligence but that's really an error in perception due to the unbalance in knowledge of the domain expert versus a non-expert. In my experience, there aren't that many actual geniuses (IQ of 120 or above) in Tech even if some areas of it seem to require above average intelligence to master.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
— Isaac Asimov
Isn't it more that people who are given a test will tend to think that the test was easy when they score well (when they actually scored well because they're an expert) and people will think a test is hard when they aren't familiar with the subject (nobody could've answered these question!) .
So it's more that experts and non-experts both assume their knowledge level is more average than it actually is. Not as fun as "dummies think they're smart and smarties think they're dumb." We all just tend to think we're average and most people are at a similar level of expertise to ourselves.
I think the "dumbies" and "smarties" part comes to play when people decide or not to open their big fat mouths and share their "great knowledge" in a domain they have barelly learned about, especially when they're dismissing expert opinions with their "great knowledge".
So whilst being in that very special point of the Dunning-Krugger Effect isn't really a metric of smarts (we're all there in at least a few domains), the likelihood of actually dismissing the opinion of domain experts when one's knowledge in that expert domain is at that point of the curve, is probably positvelly correlate with dumbness.
And it's been disproven
Could you elaborate? From what I read, Dunning and Kruger did find a real phenomenon where people with limited competence in a domain overestimate their ability, but they did not suggest these individuals thought they were smarter than experts; and one theory holds that it is a statistical truism, which still means it exists.
What happens is people have the Dunning Kruger effect on the Dunning Kruger effect itself. People call it up far too often and misuse the label
They're probably talking about this. It's been too long since I read it so I won't be discussing it, but I'll share a paragraph so folks don't have to click the link to see the gist. https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/
The Dunning-Kruger effect also emerges from data in which it shouldn’t. For instance, if you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology.1 It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation.
I've often heard it's misunderstood and used in inappropriate situations, but it's still a real phenomenon.
Like laypeople tossing around "OCD" when they shouldn't. Absolutely real, but not in the same way that it's commonly used.
I don't think it actually has.
I did a little digging on this, and there was one study that just threw some random numbers together and claimed it disproved it, but it doesn't seem to be widely regarded as a silver bullet to the DKE.
It's been demonstrated that it's mostly an illusion, and yet it's hard to escape the observation that many people who haven't studied it in detail understand the concept much less well than they think they do.
Came here to say this.
It is psychologically satisfying to believe DK, but ultimately just because you like the sound of it, doesn't make it true.
I don't think DK is really about intelligence but more on how averages work. I don't know, I don't have a degree in statistics just a basic biochem one.
We see what you did there
Don't discount yourself, I bet a lot of your education and research had to deal with statistics and deriving information from data. You're practically using statistics
People with low competence fail to understand their limits, and people who are competent can identify theirs.
Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers.
Lol flat earthers
Welcome to the internet
Ok, but what if I am smart enough to know I'm not?
Are you smart enough to know you are smarter than you think you are?
If so, according to the dk effect, you are smarter than you think you should be, based on what you think you are.
Exactly!
Are you smart enough to know you are smarter than you think you are?
Probably not haha
One can be never too smart not to know their limits.
The point is a smart person knows his or her limits. It is safer to be conservative and underestimate.
This shit has made me question myself so many times. Its usually brought up by the smartest asshole in the room when they propose something super risky or some super hard to fetch idea. When confronted they gotta bring up their dunning Kruger effect.
Well I hereby propose that no matter what any one of us do we are still just a tiny pale blue dot. Just let people be. You know? Who cares if some stupid guy thinks he's the shit. Eventually they learn.
So people with high competence are too dumb to know how smart they are ? m'kay.....
A 7 year old could see the flaw in this nonsense.
The real DK effect is very average people believing in the DK effect because it tells them they must be smarter than all evidence shows they are...
^ You seem to be proving the hypothesis by completely misunderstanding.
Experts think they understand everything, can't see that their expertise is limited to, well, their expertise. I'm sure you're smart enough to have parsed that. :)
You move like Dunning-Kruger, truth is overdone
A father like his son, look after number one
