I think stargroup is mostly right about Dunning-Kruger.
Caverino, I think you're reading of the Dunning-Kruger effect is off. I don't think anyone (not even Dunning and Kruger themselves) suggested it was as extreme as
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cavernio
an intellectual barrier to ever knowing that you are bad at something
|
since an exact quote from the paper: "We do not mean to imply that people are always unaware of their incompetence". makes it clear that you're misunderstanding something.
Rather, its simply that because the skills needed to be good at something are mostly the same as the skills needed to judge that thing, people who are bad at something don't have the skills to accurately judge their abilities.
They also did sub-experiments specifically to separate the effect from some other effects. So your comments there (specifically, you claim they only showed the above average effect, and that there was nothing to show it only effeted those with less skill, etc.) betray that you never read the paper or even a decent summary of it. In fact, the popular video you mentioned probably mentioned it as well if its
the video I'm thinking of so it sounds like you didn't even finish that much.
While everyone initially rated themselves a little above average, there was another test where the people were allowed to see a few other people test answers before rating themselves.
So if people with less skill fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect, their ratings will be unaffected since they don't have the skills to judge the tests. At the same time, the people with more skill should be able to judge other people's tests accurately against their own to see more accurately how skilled they are.
In this test, the people who did poorly still rated themselves above average, but people that were more skilled rated themselves more accurately.
There was also yet another test, where former participants were invited back for another test after minimal training and were all able to better predict their performance after the training.
The first sub-experiment rules out all effets that would affect both skilled and unskilled participants since only the unskilled failed to accurately judge, and the second rules out all effects due purely to the individuals involved since merely increasing their skills made them as good at judging their performance as the people who had high skills to begin with.
At the very least, this is perfectly consistent with the DK effect, and not easily explained otherwise. (there have been some notable attempts to pin everything on regression to the mean, task difficulty, and a few others, but they've all been debunked since like 2008)
You also seem to think DK claims to be more than it actually claims to be. They go out of their way in the paper to make it clear that the DK effect is not the only effect in play so questions like "If someone is just unable to perceive that they're bad at something, why would they therefore think they are good or decent at it at it?" are adresed trivially by other well known effects such as the above average effect which you seem to already be aware of.