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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 :(
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