
What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn't - gruseom
http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt
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jgg
My favorite part of the Dunning-Kruger effect are the people who used to talk
about how smart they are, but upon learning of the study run around saying
they're dumb because they think that puts them on par with the intelligent.

~~~
zazi
Comment by David Dunning (if he is actually him) on the blog post - "The blog
author is correct in describing what the original effect is poor performers
are overly confident relative to their actual performance. They are not more
confident than high performers"

It seems that really smart/intelligent people actually have a much higher
estimation of their ability then the less intelligent people (just that the
discrepancy between their actual ability and the estimated ability are smaller
than less smart people). So opp to what jgg mentioned, those who learn of this
study should be inflating their estimation of their own intelligence to put
themselves up there with the smartest quartile.

Those who run around saying they are dumb are actually.... dumb =)

~~~
damoncali
So the net of all this is that smart people think they're smart and dumb
people think they're dumb. But smart people underestimate their smartness and
dumb people underestimate their dumbness. Academia at it's finest. I feel
dumb.

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philk
I might be in the minority here but I have a hard time understanding why the
Dunning-Kruger effect is interesting in the first place. The only real value I
can see is to give bloggers a bit of pop psychology to throw into their
articles.

~~~
niels_olson
I stumbled across this in my data from a survey of study habits vs performance
in medical school. I didn't know it had a name at the time. Think of this from
an employer's point of view, or a client's. Your employees (or contractors)
think they're awesome, and thanks to the fundamental attribution error, you
assume their confidence reflects competence. But, oh, how wrong you are.

~~~
philk
But it's not even that exciting. Your lousy employees think they're pretty
good and your great employees think they're a bit better, but not awesome.

I suppose the main lesson you can draw from this is that you need to assess
your employees performance independently, but I'm not sure that's a surprising
conclusion.

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defdac
Note that David Dunning himself is commenting on the article.

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dpritchett
Strange how this meme has taken off in the last year or so. I first heard of
it from Steve Yegge's blog in 2008, but it's been a regular feature on HN and
Reddit in 2010.

Is there any impartial treatment of this subject that can make it easier to
believe in? It _sounds_ peachy but it's so easy for us to buy into that I'm
skeptical.

Here's a Google Trends search on the term, looks like it spiked last fall and
has been going strong ever since.
[http://www.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22dunning+kruger+effe...](http://www.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22dunning+kruger+effect%22&scoring=t&sa=N&sugg=d&as_ldate=2009/01&as_hdate=2009/12&lnav=hist9)

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haberman
Here's my wild guess: the DK effect is nothing more than people's
unfamiliarity with situations involving percentiles.

In school, <60% is failing. So intuitively 50% seems like a modest guess if
you really suck at something.

If people were more familiar with situations where they were stack-ranked with
their peers and saw numbers like 15%, their intuition would be better
calibrated. The curve between estimated performance and actual performance has
the right shape, it's just the calibration that's off.

But it became a popular phenomenon because it allowed people to project
flattering beliefs about themselves onto scientific data.

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hernan7
They think they know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is, those fools...

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jacksoncarter
It could be that as one learns more about a topic, one learns more about what
one doesn't know about a topic.

For example, if you know while, for, if/then and case statements you could
think that's all you need to know about programming. But once you start
getting into encryption and security, you realize there's a universe of
knowledge out there and you're really dumb _compared_ to that.

~~~
jgg
_It could be that as one learns more about a topic, one learns more about what
one doesn't know about a topic.

For example, if you know while, for, if/then and case statements you could
think that's all you need to know about programming. But once you start
getting into encryption and security, you realize there's a universe of
knowledge out there and you're really dumb compared to that._

That's just it. If you've ever actually _studied_ something (in order to
really understand it, not just to pass a test), you already understand what
goes on here. This whole discussion on competence and learning is stupid. For
example, as I delve more into what's considered the "universe" of Lisp
knowledge, I find more information and thus realize that there's more that I
don't know than what I knew it was _possible_ not to know. But I still know
more than someone who's never studied Lisp at all.

In other words, there's not really much substance to a meme that's being
perpetuated in blogs. Imagine that.

~~~
nandemo
I hope you're saying that misinterpretation of the research is stupid, not the
research itself.

What you and parent poster are saying was nicely illustrated by Alexander Pope
in his _Essay on Criticism_ :

 _A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,

While from the bounded Level of our Mind,

Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize

New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!

So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,

Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;

Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,

And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:

But those attain'd, we tremble to survey

The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,

Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,

Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!_

~~~
jgg
_I hope you're saying that misinterpretation of the research is stupid, not
the research itself._

More like the discussion about the research in general, but yes.

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billswift
This is a duplicate - it was posted a day ago here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1494732> which got fewer upvotes and no
comments. This kind of thing actually discourages posts; the randomness of
whether it will be noticed and of reinforcement (karma).

~~~
kungfooey
Being the original submitter, I'm just glad to see it got the attention it
deserves. :)

~~~
gruseom
In this case the URLs differed by a trailing slash. Normally I do an auxiliary
search to verify whether someone already submitted something, but I didn't
have time yesterday.

I'm not sure I agree with the GP that the occasional duplicate is harmful. It
may be that a small amount of randomness in these things contributes to the
life of the site.

~~~
billswift
I don't really think occasional duplicates are harmful as such - it is the way
many submissions are just never really noticed, like the original submission
of this one, that I think tend to depress submitters.

