Dunning-Kruger Effect: Does it exist or it is merely applied poorly.

Husky_Khan

The Dog Whistler... I mean Whisperer.
Founder
Sotnik
Usually when I see the term Dunning-Kruger Effect stated on an internet discussion, I usually chalk it up to a dumb person trying to sound smart calling someone else dumb. But this paper, if it's not an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect itself, argues that the term is often misapplied or may even just be an artifact of intellectual discourse and most importantly that the misinterpretation, perhaps ironically, has more to do with people being misinformed as opposed to uninformed. Which honestly, I think a lot of people assumed already, but its overuse on the internet distorted the meaning never the less.


Of course it's not just internet discussions that have warped the research of this 1999 paper. Thousands of news articles ranging from the highly respected New York Times :p to the BBC and New Scientist have vomited forth the Dunning-Kruger Effect and their interpretation of it as being gospel when it comes to explaining bias in the human mind.

Long story short or tldr:

- The Dunning-Kruger effect was originally described in 1999 as the observation that people who are terrible at a particular task think they are much better than they are, while people who are very good at it tend to underestimate their competence
- The Dunning-Kruger effect was never about “dumb people not knowing they are dumb” or about “ignorant people being very arrogant and confident in their lack of knowledge.”
- Because the effect can be seen in random, computer-generated data, it may not be a real flaw in our thinking and thus may not really exist
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
Frankly, the idea that the Dunning-Kruger effect described Humanity in general was always suspect, and I find this passage to be true to life:

In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and 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.
There are people who are stupidly overconfident in areas that they have no experience in. People who look at something and think "Yeah, anybody can do that." People who think they know everything because they skimmed through the Wikipedia page on Philosophy. That's not generally true of humans, but it is true for some of them, and confirmation bias only makes the problem worse.

At the other side, you have anti-Dunning-Krugers, people who know little about a topic and think they know even less. These people are hard to spot because they usually aren't vocal about not knowing something, because... well, who is? But when it comes to teaching them, they're harder to train than the average person. Sometimes, it seems like they have a mental block, like they don't know anything about the subject and don't think that they can be taught. You have to walk them through step by step over and over again until they finally get the experience and confidence to do it for themselves.
 

Doomsought

Well-known member
I tend to base my arguments on first order logic. Some of my arguments fly right over people's heads because of it.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
In my experience, people who are "stupidly overconfident" about things they have little to no experience in often don't actually think they're experts, they're just too proud to admit that they might be wrong and/or that they're only guessing.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
In my experience, people who are "stupidly overconfident" about things they have little to no experience in often don't actually think they're experts, they're just too proud to admit that they might be wrong and/or that they're only guessing.

or they become socialists and communists.
 

JagerIV

Well-known member
Yeah, that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a serious issue for maybe 5-10% of people sounds about right to me. Its just they tend to be the most vocal, and also tend to be intelligent enough to make an argument out of it. So they heavily overrepresent in people's memory of arguments.
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
But when it comes to teaching them, they're harder to train than the average person. Sometimes, it seems like they have a mental block, like they don't know anything about the subject and don't think that they can be taught. You have to walk them through step by step over and over again until they finally get the experience and confidence to do it for themselves.
Oh, yeah, forgot to note.
I had a professor in college who taught electronics, wireless communication, and signal theory if you could get a one-on-one class approved by the Dean.

He also taught remedial math. He took the kids who flunked their way through middle and high school and got them up to speed on math so they could do the calculations required for electrical work. When these kids entered that remedial math course, many of them couldn't do multiplication or long division without a calculator. By the end of the semester, most of them could do algebra.

The professor's catchphrase was "Let me show you how easy it is" and that sums up his whole philosophy about math. Math is really a simple set of tools that you use to evaluate numbers, and when you show people what those tools are and how to use them, instead of just grading tests or getting lost in the weeds, they learn surprisingly fast.
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
Irrelevant. It doesn't really matter if its literally true.

The Dunning Kruger Effect can be seen in a meaningful sense. It doesn't matter if its true or our understanding of it is correct or not.

If Todd thinks he's good at dealing with electrical appliances, but his knowledge is not as good as his confidence would suggest, and I say, "Todd is manifesting the Dunning Kruger effect," everyone will know what I mean.

Whether its actually a common phenomena or not isn't the point. The point of words and phrases is to express ideas or concepts succinctly.

So it can absolutely be said to exist, because it has a definition, and I can use it to describe a person, and people will know what I mean and also recognize it when they see it.
 

ShadowArxxy

Well-known member
Comrade
He also taught remedial math. He took the kids who flunked their way through middle and high school and got them up to speed on math so they could do the calculations required for electrical work. When these kids entered that remedial math course, many of them couldn't do multiplication or long division without a calculator. By the end of the semester, most of them could do algebra.

I've helped teach remedial math, as a volunteer staff member in a community college program for high school students. And my experience was largely the same as your professor's -- presenting algebra and geometry as tied to real-world things as opposed to abstract numbers-on-a-page concepts was pretty much a "lightbulb goes on" moment for these students.
 

ParadiseLost

Well-known member
I've helped teach remedial math, as a volunteer staff member in a community college program for high school students. And my experience was largely the same as your professor's -- presenting algebra and geometry as tied to real-world things as opposed to abstract numbers-on-a-page concepts was pretty much a "lightbulb goes on" moment for these students.

I recall an experiment in Brazil or some other SA country where they asked kids math problems like "what is 13 * 12" they didn't know, but when they phrased it as "How much money do you have if you had thirteen piles of 12 *whatever Brazilian dollars are called*?" they could answer it fine.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
I recall an experiment in Brazil or some other SA country where they asked kids math problems like "what is 13 * 12" they didn't know, but when they phrased it as "How much money do you have if you had thirteen piles of 12 *whatever Brazilian dollars are called*?" they could answer it fine.

Having lived in the Barrio yeah I belive it.

You had some guys who seemed like idiots but the moment money was on the table their IQs would go up 20 points.
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
Having lived in the Barrio yeah I belive it.

You had some guys who seemed like idiots but the moment money was on the table their IQs would go up 20 points.
And the moment the cards come out, they start doing extreme probability calculations in base-52.
 

gral

Well-known member
I recall an experiment in Brazil or some other SA country where they asked kids math problems like "what is 13 * 12" they didn't know, but when they phrased it as "How much money do you have if you had thirteen piles of 12 *whatever Brazilian dollars are called*?" they could answer it fine.
Like Cherico, I can believe it. Also, they're called Reais(singular Real).
 

ShieldWife

Marchioness
There are certainly cases of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I don't know if it is the general trend though. It does seem reasonable to suspect that stupid people are less likely to be competent in any given field and more likely to overestimate their own abilities, but I don't know if that trend overcomes the ability of people in general to access their own abilities.

I think that the Dunning-Kruger Effect may seem more prevalent than it is because it is far more likely to stand out to us when someone claims expertise when in reality they have none. We very frequently encounter people who claim to be ignorant in some topic or have no ability in some activity and they claims are correct. A girl says that she isn't good at math, she in fact isn't good at math, and it seems perfectly natural and we don't give it much thought. Along the same lines, someone claiming to be good at something when they actually are good at it doesn't stand out that much.

My guess would be that most of the time, people are generally accurate when they describe their own abilities. With a slight bias towards overestimating themselves, with full fledged Dunning-Kruger people being outliers.
 

Cherico

Well-known member
There are certainly cases of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. I don't know if it is the general trend though. It does seem reasonable to suspect that stupid people are less likely to be competent in any given field and more likely to overestimate their own abilities, but I don't know if that trend overcomes the ability of people in general to access their own abilities.

I think that the Dunning-Kruger Effect may seem more prevalent than it is because it is far more likely to stand out to us when someone claims expertise when in reality they have none. We very frequently encounter people who claim to be ignorant in some topic or have no ability in some activity and they claims are correct. A girl says that she isn't good at math, she in fact isn't good at math, and it seems perfectly natural and we don't give it much thought. Along the same lines, someone claiming to be good at something when they actually are good at it doesn't stand out that much.

My guess would be that most of the time, people are generally accurate when they describe their own abilities. With a slight bias towards overestimating themselves, with full fledged Dunning-Kruger people being outliers.


the biggest problem is that said full fledged Dunning-Kruger people seem to end up going into politics very frequently.
 

ShieldWife

Marchioness
the biggest problem is that said full fledged Dunning-Kruger people seem to end up going into politics very frequently.
Yes, that is certainly a problem. I think that one cause for that is that people are terrible at assessing the abilities of other people, especially in fields they are themselves ignorant of. People usually judge how smart or skilled somebody else is based on their confidence, not on any objective assessment of ability. When interviewing for jobs, more narcissistic applicants tend to be hired more frequently than humble applicants even if abilities are similar.

This probably doubly applies to politicians who discuss issues that hardly anybody understands and who can win from getting the votes of ignorant people. If there are two politicians having a debate and they are asked an economic question about the efficacy of stimulus spending or changing the interest rates, chances are that they don't understand how that works and its also likely that 90% or more of the people watching the debate don't know how it works either. If candidate A says that he doesn't know and that he would have to consult with some experts on the subject and candidate B says effectively nothing but does so in a confident way that sounds like he understands the subject, then far too many voters are going to think that A seemed dumb and that B seemed smart.
 
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