this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
39 points (95.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43908 readers
948 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The basic effect Dunning-Kruger is about is real and apparent everywhere. The specific formulation as stated from that pair may have some errors but throwing away the idea due to poor science isn't smart.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/
So, the experiment with completely fake data disproves Dunning-Kruger? How is this science?
If random numbers result in the same observable phenomenon, then the phenomenon is a property of mathematics and not cognition
Ah gotcha, I wasn't quite understanding that.
I still personally believe that the basic effect described by Dunning-Kruger does in fact exist on some level. If it's not due to cognition, that seems to imply that essentially everyone at every intelligence level accurately estimates their own intelligence, that would be weird.
Dunning-Kruger became popular because it gave a name to an apparent phenomena.
That article (or rather, the article linked in that article) doesn't contradict your intuition, just a specific interpretation of that intuition. The randomly generated data puts everyone around 50%, which is indeed what you would expect from randomly uniformly generated data. So the similarity that the generated data presents is supposed to imply the conclusion that "everyone thinks they're about average, so their judgement is no better than randomly guessing (assuming that the guesses are uniformly distributed)", which is a subtle difference from "dumb people think they're smart" - the latter attributes some sort of "flawed reasoning" to one's self-judgement, while the former specifically asserts that there is absolutely no relevant self-judgement going on.
edit: You would also be correct that this doesn't disprove the previous explanation, it just offers an alternative explanation for the observed effect. The fact that data matches up with a generated model definitely does not prove that it is not actually caused by something else, which is one of the criticisms of that viewpoint. It is obviously easier to rigorously demonstrate a statistical explanation than a psychological explanation of course, due to the nature of the two different fields.