Most videos don't include transcripts.

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

Just kidding. Kinda.

Just to be fair, I can understand Stahrwe's reticence to look at videos. I almost never look at videos either.

They can be pretty time consuming.

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.

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.

Going even further out on the limb, we might argue that the Dunning-Kruger effect contributes to the ancient notion that man is "above nature." Alan Watts has said such a "false sense of personal identity is at complete variance with the facts of nature. And "as a result . . . we act in a way that is inappropriate to our natural environment, and when that inappropriate way of action is magnified by a very powerful technology, we swiftly begin to see the results of a profound discord between man and nature. As is well known we are now in the process of destroying our environment as a result of an attempt to conquer it and master it. And we have not realized, therefore, that our environment is not something other than ourselves."

Or, as the poet Archibald Macleish says, "Nothing is more characteristic of the intellectuals of our generation than their failure to understand what it is that is happening to their world, and nothing explains their failure as precisely as their unwillingness to see what they have seen and to know what they do truly know."

So maybe the Dunning-Kruger effect has far-reaching implications for the human species? Maybe it needs to be studied.