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Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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geo

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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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stahrwe wrote:
Taylor wrote:My question is. Isn't Dunning/Kruger, in essence demonstrating that the typical person is for the most part a one trick pony?.
I suggest that you read the study. It explains what their premise is. It is linked to above with the study's title UNSKILLED AND UNAWARE OF IT and the link is reproduced here. It is neither a long nor very deep.


Unskilled and Unaware of It
Stahrwe's link is the actual Dunning-Kruger paper. Awesome! Thanks, Stahrwe.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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Stahrwe wrote:That is clearly not true. From elementary school through high school I believed myself to be mathematically behind my fellow students. Even though my yearly placement exams ranked me in the upper percentiles I was convinced that there was something wrong with the test results. It was not until university calculus that I revised my assessment of myself. Mind you I am nowhere near an expert but I am at least competent to do basic algebra. That competency sets me well above the average* persons I have worked with over the years whose eyes glaze over when you show them a basic linear equation applied to a simple business problem.
This is an excellent example. You are much better at math than I am, it's clearly one of your strengths. The fact that you were good at it, yet your self-assessment was lower than your peers, fits well in the figure graphs. Perhaps it's a little too humble, but it fits with the trend.

On the other hand, I don't believe you're as good at logical reasoning as you think you are. I know, it's a topic related to math, but perhaps that is part of the issue. Your realization you were good at math perhaps bleeds over when it should't. You seem to shift between heuristics and logic without realizing it, and it turns into an amazingly complex web of mostly true chains of logic with entirely false conclusions.

FYI, the video was of the knight of ni from Monty Python. He believes he's winning even with all his limbs chopped off. :tease:
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Taylor

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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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From the paper:
"Our data also provide an empirical rebuttal to a critique that has been leveled at past work on over confidence. Gigerenzer (1991) and his colleagues (Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, & Klienbolting, 1991) have argued that the types of probability estimates used in traditional overconfidence work-namely, those concerning the occurrence of single events- are fundamentally flawed. According to the critique, probabilities do not apply to single events but only to multiple ones. As a consequence, if people make probability estimates in more appropriate contexts (such as by estimating the total number of test items answered correctly), cognitive illusions such as overconfidence disappear. Our results call this critique into question. Across the three studies in which we have relevant data, participants consistently overestimated the number of items they had answered correctly, Z=4.94,p<.0001.

Concluding Remarks

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a duel burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly"

These are the final two paragraphs from the article, I take it that my relating a character fault to being the result of people being a one trick pony was contradictory to Dunning/Kruger.
Last edited by Taylor on Sun Jul 26, 2015 11:29 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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stahrwe wrote:If there are specific instances of me posting videos w/o a transcript please cite the instance.
You already listed one instance of a video over one hour long without a transcript; referencing a book is obviously not a transcript. You have posted two or three other videos without transcripts when it suited your purposes, but I'm required to troll through dozens of your posts to find them? No.

The basic issue: There is no point in discussing the Dunning Kruger effect because starhwe is certain he knows more about it than the authors of the paper.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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I got D' s and F' s on tests. In 6th grade I was still working in the basic math book while the class had moved on.
n=Infinity
Sum n = -1/12
n=1

where n are natural numbers.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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Most videos don't include transcripts.

I'm going to refuse to discuss books that don't come with videos.

Just kidding. Kinda.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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Just to be fair, I can understand Stahrwe's reticence to look at videos. I almost never look at videos either.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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They can be pretty time consuming.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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There's some indication that the paper was intended to be humorous or a bit satirical, right? It won the Ig Noble Prize one year. That award could also mean that the paper was judged to be a highfallutin' scientific illustration of an observation about human nature. I don't know what the case really was. I do know that the overconfidence of ignorance has been known about for ages. The reticence of expertise, maybe not so well known, but definitely observable in day-to-day life. It wouldn't surprise me if an aphorism or two already covers this phenomenon, or if a good novelist has dissected it. It does seem to me a joke to give this foible the imposing label "Dunning-Kruger effect," as though a new principle of physics had been discovered. As is common with research in psychology and other social sciences, a truism has been subjected to research and found to be valid. That might be part of stahrwe's reason for dissing psychology.
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Re: Why the Dunning Kruger is a joke!

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DWill wrote:There's some indication that the paper was intended to be humorous or a bit satirical, right? It won the Ig Noble Prize one year. That award could also mean that the paper was judged to be a highfallutin' scientific illustration of an observation about human nature. I don't know what the case really was. I do know that the overconfidence of ignorance has been known about for ages. The reticence of expertise, maybe not so well known, but definitely observable in day-to-day life. It wouldn't surprise me if an aphorism or two already covers this phenomenon, or if a good novelist has dissected it. It does seem to me a joke to give this foible the imposing label "Dunning-Kruger effect," as though a new principle of physics had been discovered. As is common with research in psychology and other social sciences, a truism has been subjected to research and found to be valid. That might be part of stahrwe's reason for dissing psychology.
The term does sound pretentious, but the paper itself, entitled "Unskilled and Unaware of It" makes no reference to the "Dunning-Kruger effect." I would guess that the moniker came into being only to identify this, one of many cognitive biases, that can lead us to make errors.

Based on my limited reading so far, it sounds like it's a legitimate paper that makes testable claims. In a sense we must identify and study each bias as part of a collective in the ultimate pursuit of figuring out how the brain works.

But you're right, Dunning and Kruger are exploring a cognitive bias that has been identified in aphorisms that go way back.

Confucius ("Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance")

Bertrand Russell ("One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision")

Charles Darwin ("Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge").

The Darwin quote is actually quoted in the paper itself.
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