the Daily Whale - 5 February 2017

The Standard Human Overconfidence

A large part of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, in which the incompetent are unable to recognize their incompetence, is not due to any metacognitive blahblah that Dunning and Kruger wrote about, but to logic: Without knowledge you can’t judge anything, much less skill. Psychologists are capable of discovering the obvious, so they must realize. I wonder, though—what is it like to be so ignorant that you feel superior in every way? I know one person would could tell us, but he will never realize it.

I don’t understand 1. why the Dunning-Kruger effect gets its own fancy name, since it’s plain as day and always has been, or 2. why people talk about it so often as a bias, since in large part it is logically necessary for any rational agent.

It’s not that people don’t know, it’s that they say silly things anyway! Dunning himself wrote “The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is,” which shows that he understands my point 2.

5 February 2017 - Dunning-Kruger Effect

clue: