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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28193 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.

I've seen a few variants of "Dunning-Kruger doesn't exist" papers, and nowadays I agree that the common version you usually hear needs to be greatly amended. My favorite one so far was someone showing that a) stupid/smart people do generally know that they're stupid/smart, they just on average tend to underestimate their distance to the mean and b) optimal bayesian reasoning will always lead to something that looks like this (if you start from the assumption that you're average in everything, and then update this prior based on new evidence, exceptionally smart and exceptionally stupid people will tend to underestimate their smartness/stupidity, even if they know in which bucket they fall). I unfortunately don't remember where I have that from.

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