site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Pending a detailed read of Nufher et al. and Gignac & Zajenkowski, this appears as one of three -- either the blogpost is simply wrong; or I have a misundertanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect; or the author has done a really shit job at explaining himself. Either way, I'm not convinced so far.

It means that we can throw random numbers into x and y — numbers which could not possibly contain the Dunning-Kruger effect — and yet out the other end, the effect will still emerge.

My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs. In this case, the lack of correlation in Fig. 7 from y being a variable with a uniform distribution uncorrelated with x already shows the effect! I'm not sure how the author is so sure that plotting uncorrelated variables and "showing" the DKE disproves it, as the entire point is that they're poorly-to-uncorrelated!

If my understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect is right, I suspect the author may be right to some degree (just based on personal experience, I think DKE is extremely oversold, and even if true is unlikely to be very important), but his working is definitely wrong.

My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs.

I think the point was something else. Imagine another test where people threw a dice and then they estimated what their dice throw was. Of course people who threw 6 could only underestimate or be correct and people who threw 1 could only be correct or overestimate.

So even if both the result and estimation was random, then you would reproduce Duning-Kruger effect due to autocorrelation. Result of “over/underestimation” is dependent and correlated to the measure you over/underestimate against which is also a variable. The correct answer is just that this is stupid statistical artefact.

vorelated

Kinky.

Avoid low-effort posts, please.

In that case I certainly did not get that impression from the blogpost, and I don't think this has anything to do with "autocorrelation" as much as it has to do with the data being bounded, which I think is another argument entirely. Incidentally I think the bounded-data explanation, which seems the most obvious one to me (along with other ones like the better-than-average effect and simple regression to the mean), are much more convincing than wrangling about autocorrelation. It's also using "autocorrelation" in a weird way.

I remain of the opinion that DKE is probably artefactual or minor at best, but the blog is still either poorly written or wrong.

My understanding of the DKE is that self-assessment is poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs.

This is not the "public consciousness" understanding of the DKE. That is the claim that "people who say they are real good and talk about how good they are are actually no better or even worse than the people who say they are bad".

poorly correlated with objective ability in such a way that poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs

This is not how poor correlation is usually defined either in real life, that's normally given by r, and you can have very high r while the statement "poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs" (say r = 0.99, an out of the world level correlation for anything in the social sciences) is still true.

This is not the "public consciousness" understanding of the DKE. That is the claim that "people who say they are real good and talk about how good they are are actually no better or even worse than the people who say they are bad".

In that case I stand corrected. That seems silly.

This is not how poor correlation is usually defined either in real life, that's normally given by r, and you can have very high r while the statement "poor performers overrate their performance and good performers underate theirs" (say r = 0.99, an out of the world level correlation for anything in the social sciences) is still true.

Well, of course "can have very high r and still have [that statement] be true" is true with r<1, especially since the data is bounded and poor performers are naturally going to be more room to overestimate and good performers underestimate. I thought the point of DKE was that r was low,