9/19/2023 0 Comments Dunning kruger graph![]() ![]() “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. We never set out to disprove it we were even fans of that paper.” In Dr. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. “We all then believed the paper was valid,” Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. In them, the authors argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect was a mirage. In 20, two papers were published in a mathematics journal called Numeracy. That’s misinformation and it’s pushing down on that confidence button in my brain. But if I am asked what is the capital of Scotland, I may think I know enough to say Glasgow, but it turns out it’s Edinburgh. Dunning tells me he believes the effect “has more to do with being misinformed rather than uninformed.” If I am asked the boiling point of mercury, it is clear my brain does not hold the answer. Since then, many studies have been done that have reported this effect in other domains of knowledge. Everyone was asked how well they thought they did and everyone was also graded objectively, and the two were compared. There were assessments of grammar, of humour, and of logical reasoning. ![]() This is what student participants went through for Dunning and Kruger’s research project in the late 1990s. This discrepancy is the effect, and it is thought to be due to a specific problem with our brain’s ability to assess its skills. But if my actual score was 15% (because I’m terrible at grammar), I might think more highly of myself and predict a score of 60%. ![]() I might predict I would get a 70% score while my actual score would be 90%. And if I excel at English grammar, the effect dictates I would be likely to slightly underestimate how well I would do. If I am terrible at English grammar and am told to answer a quiz testing my knowledge of English grammar, this bias in my thinking would lead me, according to the theory, to believe I would get a higher score than I actually would. In a nutshell, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally defined as a bias in our thinking. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. ![]() The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Have we been overstating our confidence in the Dunning-Kruger effect? A misunderstood effect or if the celebrated effect was just a mirage brought about by the peculiar way in which we can play with numbers. Dunning himself, and tried to understand if our brain really was biased to overstate our competence in activities at which we suck. While trying to understand the criticism that had been leveled at the original study, I fell down a rabbit hole, spoke to a few statistics-minded people, corresponded with Dr. End of story.īut as I double-checked the academic literature, doubt started to creep in. Here’s the effect, how it was discovered, what it means. I was planning on writing a very short article about the Dunning-Kruger effect and it felt like shooting fish in a barrel. “They don’t know,” the opera singer belts out at the climax, “that they don’t know.” There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma, explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. ![]()
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