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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   27494 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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The Dunning-Kruger effect is autocorrelation

Huh. I can only apologize for the relatively bare link, but I feel like it's worth drawing attention to something so widely accepted yet utterly worthless, especially when it comes up so often here.

The thing about the DK effect is that it makes intuitive sense. To extend it past the realm of typical human intelligence, an ant or a chimp isn't very good at knowing how dumb they are because they're not very good at most things. However, I suspect that the average dumb (human) person does know they're a bit dim, so it confuses me how this finding can even arise.

The problem with the Dunning-Kruger chart is that it violates a fundamental principle in statistics. If you’re going to correlate two sets of data, they must be measured independently. In the Dunning-Kruger chart, this principle gets violated. The chart mixes test score into both axes, giving rise to autocorrelation.

Realizing this mistake, Edward Nuhfer and colleagues asked an interesting question: what happens to the Dunning-Kruger effect if it is measured in a way that is statistically valid? According to Nuhfer’s evidence, the answer is that the effect disappears.

Is it possible to salvage a non-trivial version of the DKE? The one we know and once loved literally works for random data, so that's right out. In other words, what's the cut-off where a stupid person becomes smart enough to know they're stupid, or at least worse than their peers?*

*In a more general sense than a chimp knowing he's not as strong or big as the alpha male.

It might just be that the effect is bullshit and there is nothing to salvage.

I'm not some genius, but just because I can use relatively advanced English grammar and I know a lot about some things like history and math compared to the average person (though not nearly as much as someone who has dedicated himself to those fields!), I often get people I just met telling me how smart I am and how they feel that they are not capable of doing a bunch of things that come easily to me. To the point that I often find it embarrassing and I try to get them to have better esteem about their own intellectual abilities.

In other words, I have a lot of experience of people who actually are not good at certain things telling me that in their opinion, they are not good at those things.

On the other hand, I rarely experience someone telling me that they are good at something and then just utterly failing to demonstrate it. I imagine that most people who are inclined that way quickly learn from the embarrassment that they feel after failing to not go around boasting about those particular skills.

I have also met exceptions, of course, but perhaps they prove the rule.

My experience with the DKE can basically be translated as 'I am knowledgeable and skilled at one thing, therefor, I am knowledgeable and skilled at everything.'

Often with lawyers.

The topical example right now is surely "I can build electric cars and rocket ships (in both cases with a level of intense study that took me a year or more and would take someone without my IQ or work ethic decades) so I can run a social media company by winging it and still have time to shitpost."

I mean, he turned out to be right, did he not?

On the other hand, I rarely experience someone telling me that they are good at something and then just utterly failing to demonstrate it.

With easily demonstrable skills or testable claims this is relatively rare. But with skills or claims that are hard to test I feel like this is relatively common.

People don't tell you that they're "good" at history, economics, epidemiology or whatever, but they clearly believe it, and it's also clearly a false belief.

This might be a different thing but I believe that there is something to the idea that a little knowledge often makes people overconfident, especially when reality doesn't check them on this, which can make them functionally less "informed" than the uneducated, partially because they stop believing their lying eyes.

People "higher up" have slightly different issues. Like having a lot of knowledge in one area often makes people overconfident in the validity of their limited knowledge in other areas. Or they overgeneralise the insights from their area of expertise.

With easily demonstrable skills or testable claims this is relatively rare. But with skills or claims that are hard to test I feel like this is relatively common.

If you've actually read the original Dunning-Kreuger paper, they make this point explicitly, using basketball as an example. The percentage of people who think they could go one-on-one with a top NBA player and end up looking like other than a complete fool is, I would imagine, statistically indistinguishable from zero. And those few exceptions probably really are mostly outliers in basketball ability relative to the general population, even if they aren't as good as they think they are.

It would be interesting to look at this with more charged examples that people have higher mental error bars on - how many people think they could go one-on-one with a random WNBA player and not look like a total fool? I suspect that some will overestimate their own ability and underestimate women, others with deflect because they don't want to state that they think women are basically bad at basketball. The 2023 top scorer in the WNBA is only 5'10", so it's likely easier for a typical hobby baller to think they can get a few buckets and/or stops than when considering the obvious mismatch in how trivially Giannis Antetokounmpo will dunk on your head and swat away anything you try to put up.

It might just be that the effect is bullshit and there is nothing to salvage.

Within the range of intelligence in the kind of people usually recruited for such psychometric studies? Probably.

But lower than that? I think someone with an IQ of say 60, in the retarded category, simply doesn't know how bad they are. It seems to me that that kind of general awareness of relative competence arises somewhere, even if most humans are past it.

I have also met exceptions, of course, but perhaps they prove the rule.

My BP just shot up 20mm of mercury after hearing that phrase haha. Exceptions cannot prove the rule. They do the very opposite, at least in the sense most people use the phrase!

The origin of it, which is far more reasonable, is along the lines of seeing a sign saying "visiting hours 3-5 pm" at a hospital, from which we can glean that visiting isn't allowed outside this window. Thus the existence of an "exception" carved out from a general rule suggests the existence of said rule in a broad sense, but you're not using it that way :(

This is the hill I choose to die on, I'm digging trenches and planting mines as we speak.

Exceptions cannot prove the rule. They do the very opposite, at least in the sense most people use the phrase!

What is the sense most people use the phrase in? I've always understood it as, "since the only exception you can think of is an obvious special case that is so different from everything else, you cannot use it to challenge the validity of the general rule". For example, "Prof. Dull will fail you if you miss the paper submission deadline even by a second. Don't even bother asking him for an extension!" - "But what about Tim? He disappeared for two months and Dull didn't fail him!" - "Tim's a victim of murder-suicide, the only surviving member of his family. His mom shot him in the head on the day Dull handed out the assignments and he has spent these two months in the ICU. He's the exception that proves the rule".

The exception proves the rule (where proves means something closer to imply) is a useful linguistic short hand for understanding situations in which the existence of an exception implies the existence of a rule to which there is an exception.

First, I don't think your hypothetical is how this phrase is normally used. The parent example in this thread which is almost a perfect match for every example I have ever caught in the wild is literally, I think people be this way but some people are not, so maybe I am correct and people are actually this way. The added 'authority' of the aphorism is being grossly abused.

In your hypothetical, the exception still does not seem to 'prove' the rule. The rule in your hypothetical is, You can't turn in papers past the deadline. The exception is, some kid was allowed to turn in papers past the deadline. This exception explicitly disproves the rule. You can change the rule to include, without a very good reason, and then Tim at least serves as a data point about the kinds of good reasons that the rule would accept/reject. Still to me, the rule is clearly being 'proven' by the smuggled in NotTims who did not get an extension for their various lesser reasons. Basically your hypothetical is, most evidence seems to prove the rule, and while Tim is an exception, Tim is such an outlier he should not be considered as evidence against the general rule. To phrase that as, "He's the exception that proves the rule." seems both confused and wrong. At best he is the exception that fails to disprove the rule.

a sign saying "visiting hours 3-5 pm" at a hospital, from which we can glean that visiting isn't allowed outside this window

Apparently there is some debate about this, with many internet sources supporting your interpretation, but this is not how I understand the phrase "the exception proves the rule." Your example about limited hours (at a hospital, or parking) is commonly used but I don't really think it demonstrates the true meaning of the phrase. My perspective is, as long as people keep visiting the hospital between 3-5 pm, we can't really know what would happen if someone visits outside those hours. Maybe it is really enforced, or maybe the sign is like those vestigial "Please maintain 2 meter distance" signs we see everywhere nowadays, and nobody really cares.

So the way we really prove (in the sense of to test, as in "the proof of the pudding is in the eating) is when a visitor shows up at the hospital at 6pm. If they are turned away, then there really is a rule that nobody can visit outside the hours of 3-5 pm. If they are let in, there is no such rule. So in other words, it's not the sign, but the attempted visit outside "visiting hours," that proves the rule.

Edit: For transparency, the Wikipedia article which I indirectly referenced here thinks I'm engaging in wishful thinking about what I think the phrase should mean, rather than its actual origin. Which.... may be a fair criticism.

The presumption, which I think is highly justified in reality, is that if someone went to the trouble of explicitly stating an act is allowed during a particular period of time/place/whatever, that implies that it's not allowed or at least discouraged outside of those specific circumstances.

Rules are not necessarily adhered to 100% of the time, in the hospital from which I'm shit posting, there is a rule regarding the timings when visitors are allowed, the typical person coming outside of that will be turned away, but if you're connected or have an important reason, you'll be let through. That does not invalidate the general principle that visitors aren't allowed outside the allotted time.

It might well be that the security guard was napping and didn't notice, but that doesn't mean there isn't a rule, in the same manner that successfully launching a heist on Fort Knox isn't proof that stealing is legal.

Yeah, it makes sense that sometimes it's just easier to state the exceptions than all the allowed cases. And apparently the Latin origin of the phrase, "exceptio probat regulam in casibus non exceptis," is something like "the exception demonstrates the rule for non-excepted cases", so I don't really have an etymological leg to stand on. I just like my understanding of the phrase so if we are going to move away from the original meaning, I'm trying to steer people towards my preference rather than the nonsensical "the counter-example that invalidates my supposed rule actually proves that my rule is correct!"

Edit: After discussion with AI, I have decided that I need to be charitable and allow that the common, modern usage also is sensible, under this interpretation: "the exception proves the rule" --> "the distinctiveness and memorability of an exception highlight the regularity or norm of other cases"

In cognitive psychology, there's a concept known as the "von Restorff effect" or "isolation effect," which states that an item that "stands out like a sore thumb" is more likely to be remembered than other items. Applying this to the phrase, an exception is memorable precisely because it deviates from the norm. Its uniqueness and the mental emphasis we place on it implicitly reinforce the understanding that it is an outlier, while the standard or usual cases don't stand out in memory because they conform to the expected pattern.

This is nice. I always assumed the intended meaning must be something related to this, until I learned the real origin. IE, something like "Okay, we admit this is an exception (points at really weird special case), but look how far we had to go to come up with an exception - clearly the rule is going to apply the overwhelming majority of the time."

Stop making my sworn enemies seem reasonable, you're doing far too good a job at it!

shakes fist

The origin of it, which is far more reasonable, is along the lines of seeing a sign saying "visiting hours 3-5 pm" at a hospital, from which we can glean that visiting isn't allowed outside this window. Thus the existence of an "exception" carved out from a general rule suggests the existence of said rule in a broad sense, but you're not using it that way :(

I didn't actually know this, I always thought that the idiom was stupid, but this explains a lot.

We mock the South Pacific "cargo cults" specifically, but "copy what we see even if our copy no longer makes sense" is a very general human failing.

I wouldn't be surprised if at this point the idiom is used more to mean "I treat evidence against me as evidence in favor" than for its original meaning.

To muddy the waters further, there's also an in-between meaning: if someone points out that an X is famous for also being Y, that's disproof rather than support for the 'rule' that no X can be Y, but it also often does support the 'rule' that Xs are Y at a disproportionately low rate, because otherwise the exceptions would have been ordinary rather than famed.

You're welcome, after learning the explanation a while back, my furious urge to genocide anyone who uses it casually has been tempered to mere homicide of the unrepentant, since there's a small chance they're using it the original sense. A very small chance indeed :(

I was using "the exception that proves the rule" as an idiom but I agree with you that it does not make sense literally.

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