Quote:
Originally Posted by stargroup100
I don't necessarily blame people for over- or underestimating themselves at something, however. It's kind of a meta problem: How would you determine/describe how good you are at something? You'd have to potentially compare yourself with something better and something worse, and it's difficult to do so if you don't understand this something in the first place. This is basically a description of Dunning-Kruger effect. In addition, there's the issue of search space. Even if you are good or bad at something, it doesn't necessarily make it any easier to determine your skill when approached from different angles or similar related things. It's kind of like predicting the future; it's difficult for any system to describe the range of the system itself. (If you could predict the future, you could then avoid it and it wouldn't be the future anymore.)
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That's not a description of the kruger-dunning effect, that's the description of it that some guy made a video of that got lots of hits on youtube, and now everyone thinks that it's somehow strongly experimentally validated. It's not. What you described is merely one explanation, and not in my mind the most obvious one either, of the results of the experiments they've done.
There've been counter studies that support other explanations of the experiments. Mostly though, I really think they broke down the data quite poorly. They grouped people into 4 groups then took averages of those 4 groups and then compared those 4 groups, prolly used paired t tests or something. They specifically compacted data, essentially losing it, in their analysis. They should have done a regular ANOVA.
Furthermore, the fact that some people who were, apparently, shown exactly how bad they were in comparison to others on whatever measures they were using, yet they still rated themselves not as bad as they actually were, speaks to me more of a psychological barrier to perceiving that they can be bad at something, unless they're just overall unable to understand the concept of 'you're worse than 80% of people at this', which seems highly unlikely given that their subject pool was probably undergrad psychology students.
Dev showed me some youtube link about it a few months ago and it got me all riled up that unproven things were found to be proven and that because of the popularity of the video and that it actual went into some details about the studies, it came off as strongly evidence supported when, actually, it's not.