The Irony of the Dunning-Kruger Effect

Now I know everything about Dunning-Kruger effect.

The irony of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that once someone learns of it, they immediately feel immune to it.

The best thing I've taken from this effect is to NEVER assume malice, always assume incompetence first.

I think Mount Stupid is still a useful construct in that it is a way for people to remember to temper their confidence on subjects in which they are beginners.

“My ignorance may now be more elaborate” that is an excellent quote.

This phenomenon makes a lot of sense if you understand the Dunning-Kruger effect. See, since no one truly understands the effect, they have an enormous amount of confidence in their flawed understanding of it. Just like the graph predicts!

I always took the “mount stupid” curve to be more of a general illustration to explain an abstract concept than a literal graph tied to actual numeric values.

I really like that line at the end. "My ignorance might be a bit more elaborate." Very well said

The dunning-krueger effect is essentially that if you ask people to assess their own performance relative to their peers without telling them how their peers performed, people are biased towards assuming they fall closer to the average than they necessarily do. The thing is, this is actually perfectly rational. If you don't know how well your peers performed, then the "least wrong" answer you could possibly give is "I did about a average." If you assume you fall into the 50th percentile, the most you could possibly be wrong is 49 percentile points. The farther your estimate is from the average, the greater margin for error you open yourself up to. Having said this, most people will err on the side of assuming they did a little better than average. This is where ego creeps in. Even still, the DK effect may look like the poorest performers have the most arrogance, but really they're only about as biased in their own favour as anyone else, they just happen to be more wrong in this instance.

As a researcher in the field of psychology, word of advice: almost never believe so-called “psychology finding” on internet. Such as left brain for logic right brain for creativity.

I've always thought of the Dunning Kruger effect as being that both people who are incompetent and people who are hypercompetent feel like they're of average competence. The difference is that incompetent people don't actually know what it takes to be average, so they greatly overestimate their own skills, whereas hypercompetent people know the difference between competence and incompetence, but because of their great skill they feel that surely it can't be so difficult to be competent and figure that they likely aren't significantly better than any other competent person.

There are numerous other problems with the original study. The setup is a bit confusing, because the participants had to rank themselves against their peers in the study and their scores are not absolut, they are *relative to their peers in the study*. The actual scores were never published. So you cannot just assume that the participants with the lowest relative score actually scored low in absolute terms. Which is actually unlikely, given that they were all students of the same university and courses, meaning they had to pass the same entry exams. What the studies in the original paper actually showed was that everyone figured themselves to be above average in ability. Also consider Regression to the mean.

The real Dunning-Kruger effect was the friends we made along the way ❤️

Still the "mount stupid" curve fits very well my own experience when learning a topic. Confidence grows much faster than actual knowledge before it starts to sink when you realize how much more there is to know. I think this is a general pattern and quite interesting in spite that calling it Dunning Ktueger is inaccurate.

I think the thing that worries me about the take away from the misrepresentation of the Dunning-Kruger effect isn't so much how the information is portrayed, but how people may be prone to interpret it. To sum it up in a very brief manner, it is generally a suggestion of something like, "Quiet people are almost certainly more knowledgeable than outspoken people." The thing is, if you sit back and think about experts in various industries, you will probably come up with examples of extremely controversial, polarizing people who are incredibly competent at what they do, are in no way humble or reserved, but act in that way precisely because they are knowledgeable enough to speak with a kind of cutting, brash authority on the matter. In my own opinion, I would argue that the reason why it seems that confident people are "more stupid than quite people" is because confident people make more noise than quite ones. That is, if you speak publicly about a thing, people will have heard your assessment of that thing. If, on the other hand, you say nothing, people will not know your thoughts on that topic. Therefore, the person who speaks is the only of the two that can later be rebutted for presenting incorrect information. You may have an intensely stupid, misguided position on, say, whether people need water to live. However, if you never say that you think water is something that is not necessary in order to live, then no one will have known your thoughts about water, and in turn, will not have formed a lesser opinion as an outcome. I do think this raises an interesting question: "Does that mean, if peoples opinion of you might be lowered by speaking, does that make silence the "smarter choice" to avoid being mocked by your peers?" I think the answer is that it depends. How willing are you to reassess any possible bad information you have? How high is your current social ranking? Are you a manager or subordinate? How well do you take criticism in general? Etc. I think the level of intelligence of knowing when to speak is predicated on understanding the environment and variables in which speaking will impact your life. TL;DR Knowing when to pick your battles is more important than any perceived confidence, or lack thereof, on that specific topic. Silence is not an indicator of intelligence, but can be used intelligently by making good choices, based on various details.

Honestly I love the way everything was explained, sourced, and and even questioned (even going as far as questioning your own conclusion). From beginning to end I felt like there was something to be learned, great job!

I envy this creator in being able to eloquently narrate this video in a second language to perfection. Impressive

I would like to point out that the way you explained it, the best students did not underestimate their performance but instead overestimated the performance of the other students, which is a big difference. I would have been interested in their answer to the question "How many questions do you think you answered correctly".

"my ignorance is now a bit more elaborate" is a gold standard quote

Fascinating video! I love that you included the thing about the 2018 study on overconfidence among beginners (which does seem to be a phenomenon) and differentiated this from the Dunning-Kruger effect.