
Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome - llambda
http://www.arstechnica.com/science/2012/05/revisiting-why-incompetents-think-theyre-awesome/
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glenra
Always worth mentioning: the fact that most people think of themselves as
above-average drivers is _not_ a delusion; it happens to be _true_ given quite
reasonable assumptions as to what constitutes "being a good driver" that most
people are above average drivers.

The average number of legs per person is slightly less than two, so if you
have two legs, you have an above-average number of legs. Thus, nearly
everybody in the population has an above-average number of legs.

Similarly: The number of car accidents the average driver causes per year is
fractionally more than zero, so if you caused no accidents last year you were
"an above average driver". Some measurable attributes just happen to be
"chunky" in that way - they don't follow a normal distribution.

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VMG
Most people might be better than the _average_ driver, but not better than the
_typical_ (median) driver (same goes for legs).

I'd say that the _typical_ is a better reference point than the _average_ ,
since the counter-intuitive effects you describe disappear, and the reference
point "1,9999995 legs / person" is pretty useless.

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gosub
Wouldn't the _typical_ driver be the mode, not the median?

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lindenr
I'd say it depends. Even "average" can be several different things depending
on your definitions. More precise than "average" is "mean", and even better
than that is the "arithmetic mean". Typical is typical in its ability to be
misunderstood.

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mistercow
>How are we to parse all this information? Do any of these people know what
they are talking about? And if anyone does, how can we know which ones to
listen to? The research of Dunning and Kruger may well tell us there is no way
to figure out the answers to any of these questions.

Yikes, that's a stretch. Dunning and Kruger's work tells us nothing about our
ability to assess _others'_ competence; just our ability to assess _our own_.
This idea of trying to apply that to arrive at "how do we know which experts
to listen to?" is really reaching.

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brudgers
It's turtles all the way down. Incompetence includes over-estimating our
ability to evaluate experts (e.g. acting upon or ignoring legal advice from
web forums).

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mistercow
Perhaps, but is that something that that Dunning and Kruger (or anyone, for
that matter) has actually demonstrated?

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DanielBMarkham
_Do any of these people know what they are talking about? And if anyone does,
how can we know which ones to listen to?_

I must confess to bailing out here.

The purpose of democratic government is the _consent of the governed_ , not to
find the best experts to make the best decisions. People have to agree on
stuff, and that means people who don't understand issues have to agree on them
anyway. That's much more important than intelligence and competence. In fact,
I'd argue for many of the complexities of the modern nation-state, _nobody_
knows what they are doing in many areas, not even people who have paid lots of
money to be trained on these issues. Simply because we can imagine that there
is some sort of hierarchy of intelligence and competence in a certain field
does not mean that there actually is one. Every generation, no matter how
ignorant, has always had a somewhat ordered list of intelligentsia. Many times
they have had little to do with how much is known and much more to do with how
well somebody is respected by their peers.

Humility is a good thing.

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tensor
How is having people agree on bad decisions a good thing? Would it not be
better to have governments make the best decisions they can for their people,
and also teach the people why these decisions are best?

Yes, many of the issues facing governments are complex and difficult to solve.
You seem to be arguing that because it's difficult to learn what course of
action is best, we should not even try.

Humility is a good thing, but it is completely absent in popular opinion.

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DanielBMarkham
_How is having people agree on bad decisions a good thing?_

Because the decision affects everybody. Even more so, everybody has a greater
stake in the system of decision-making than they do in the decision itself.

Look at it this way: suppose ten people are in a lifeboat stranded on the
ocean. There are no supplies, and everybody is starving to death. Logically,
killing and eating one of the people would allow the rest to survive. However
the group votes not to do that, and they all starve. Later it's discovered
that had they lived a few more days they would have been rescued.

Or you could play it the other way: they all unanimously decide to draw straws
- the "law of the sea" -- and yet it does no good.

In either case, having consent of those involved is more important than
optimizing around one individual's opinion, _even if that opinion represents
an outcome that's in the best interest of the most people involved._

You don't have to believe me. Play various scenarios out a few times yourself
and work through it. And it's not unanimous agreement, not at all. The trick,
as the other commenter pointed out, is to create a simple and understandable
system where the minority still participates when they lose arguments.
(Obviously eating the minority in our example would prevent such
participation, which is why only unanimous consent would work, and it would
only work in coming up with some selection criteria, not actually applying
it.) I think you'll find that people deserve the dignity of being wrong, even
when faced with their own death.

I'm also not saying that "we should not even try." Far from it. True learning
takes place in a group setting from the bottom-up, in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Once critical mass is reached, persuasion is used to convince the majority.
That's the way systems of people operate, which is much, much different from
the way we might like them to work, or the way a mathematical proof might
work.

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saraid216
An excellent book about this topic, which also gives some suggestions on how
the majority and minority should actually conduct themselves to make sure this
happens, is Danielle Allen's Talking with Strangers.

<http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/014665in.html>

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mathattack
Very important document. At year end, how many employees really believe
they're in the bottom 50% of a population? And is it really worth fighting
this when measurement of ability is so hard?

Most "Up or Out" firms need to cull people so they are firm, and try to create
the appearance of rigor.

Most software firms find this much more difficult. Very few start-ups have
formal evaluation processes, which sounds terrible to the MBA crowd, but could
just be admitting that it's impossible to really fairly judge people. (Deming
would say judge the system anyway)

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sad_panda
How about the bravado of the startup "code ninja rockstars" fresh out of
school - simply a brave face in a macho subculture, or is it the Dunning
Kruger effect at play, because they haven't had the chance to work alongside
experienced colleagues that make them realize they have more to learn?

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WalterSear
And I thought it was because they were given all the cushy management and
executive jobs.

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michaelochurch
The D-K results don't actually say that incompetents think they're awesome. It
says that, as a group, they tend to estimate themselves as slightly above
average. So do the most competent. What this means is that percentile-based
self-assessment has no signal, not that unskilled people are preternaturally
inclined to think of themselves as excellent.

