Lessons Questionable science/validity of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: Implications for competency self-assessment in diving.

[lowwall]

First let me agree with the major finding of all of these. The core of D-K is mostly debunked, there is only a small bias towards overconfidence in the less-skilled or less-knowledgeable which turns into a very small bias towards underconfidence in experts.

But I am going to quibble a bit with the following, especially the second part.

Instead, less skilled (or at least less-experienced) individuals tend to over AND under-estimate their competence level by a wider range than more experienced individuals, but most folks generally have a "good" or "adequate"(their terminology - see #3) self estimation with outliers (basically a Gaussian distribution).

While the self-confidence errors do appear to be fairly evenly spread between overconfidence and underconfidence regardless of actual knowledge, the range definitely tightens as knowledge increases. Experts do a far better job of estimating their abilities than novices. The authors in #3 appear to be deliberately hiding this by lumping together all of the results, but by careful examination of the results from Figure 4, it appears that only around 44% of the "novices" (freshman and sophomores) had a "good" score on the self-estimation task compared to 74% of the professors.

There also doesn't appear to be any valid rationale for extending the acceptable scoring criteria from their previous work (the "good" scores) through their new categories of "adequate" and "marginal" and "inadequate, but not extreme". However, this did allow them to make the headline claim that only 5.3% of those tested fell into the D-K category of unskilled and overconfident versus the nearly 30% that fall into this category if we just consider the novices and their original boundary of "good".

The other interesting thing from the paper was the statistically significant finding of the difference in self-estimation accuracy between men and women. Women slightly underestimate their abilities while men significantly overestimate theirs.

 

[Tracy]

Dunning-Kruger Effect is just a fancy name for young males with excessive testosterone and limited experience. Looking back, the fact that I am still here is one of those unexplained accidents of nature.

One can argue cognitive decline, but there is no doubt that I knew it all at 16 and am awed at my ignorance now.

Just in case nobody quoted this yet.

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”​

― Mark Twain

 

[lowwall]

This quote always bugged me. I've read a lot of Twain and this just feels too clunky to have come from him. So let's look it up...

When I Was a Boy of Fourteen, My Father Was So Ignorant – Quote Investigator®

quoteinvestigator.com

Yep. It first appeared 5 years after his death. It's always attributed to Twain, but he certainly never wrote it. There's no evidence he said it and it would be strange if he did since his father died when Twain was only 11.

 

[wetb4igetinthewater]

This quote always bugged me. I've read a lot of Twain and this just feels too clunky to have come from him. So let's look it up...

When I Was a Boy of Fourteen, My Father Was So Ignorant – Quote Investigator®

quoteinvestigator.com

Yep. It first appeared 5 years after his death. It's always attributed to Twain, but he certainly never wrote it. There's no evidence he said it and it would be strange if he did since his father died when Twain was only 11.

"84 percent of all quotes on the internet are made up."
- Abraham Lincoln

If we can't trust Honest Abe, who can we trust?

 

[Akimbo]

It is not supposed to be age related

That is only true if you neglect to account for the Peter Pan phenomenon.

 

[lowwall]

"84 percent of all quotes on the internet are made up."
- Abraham Lincoln

If we can't trust Honest Abe, who can we trust?

I thought it was "89.5% of all statistics are made up on the spot."

 

[Wibble]

Does DK account for the novice's fallacy where "he doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know enough"? The sort of person who'll jump into a plane and try to fly it; if they succeed in living then it reinforces their invincibility, or something like that.

 

[Kensei]

Does DK account for the novice's fallacy where "he doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know enough"? The sort of person who'll jump into a plane and try to fly it; if they succeed in living then it reinforces their invincibility, or something like that.

That type of person would over estimate their ability to fly a plane. Just because they survived doesn't make them a skilled pilot. DK does not address the "reinforces their invincibility" part of what you wrote.

 

[Cthippo]

Dunning-Kruger Effect is just a fancy name for young males with excessive testosterone and limited experience. Looking back, the fact that I am still here is one of those unexplained accidents of nature.

One can argue cognitive decline, but there is no doubt that I knew it all at 16 and am awed at my ignorance now.

in my personal experience it is far more common in men between the ages of 40 and 60 who are so certain of their own superiority that they cannot conceive any circumstance that they could be wrong, no matter the topic or evidence.

For me that was 25 when I finally realized my parents did know what they were talking about.

I'm 43 and still waiting for it to happen.

I think of DK, perhaps incorrectly, as less a phenomena describing the population at large but rather as a certain personality type . I think there is a shared experience of things you don't understand looking easier than they are, but most people learn to recognize that perception as incorrect. It's the people that don't learn this that we see as the poster children (or memes) of DK.

 

[Lorenzoid]

That type of person would over estimate their ability to fly a plane. Just because they survived doesn't make them a skilled pilot. DK does not address the "reinforces their invincibility" part of what you wrote.

I think that because D-K and Normalization of Deviance are two theories that are frequently mentioned here, it’s tempting to relate (or rather, conflate) them.