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1. Embed this notice
   mhoye (mhoye@cosocial.ca)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 01:47:07 JST mhoye

   Once again I am heartbroken to remind you that the Dunning-Kruger effect is probably not real:

   https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-kruger-effect-probably-not-real

   Like Freudian psychology, Hardin's tragedy of the commons and any number of other popular pseudoscientific narratives, it caters to our preconceptions and makes fore entertaining, easy to re-tell stories, but it's also... not true.

   And - again, I am entirely saddened by this - that means that if we keep using these metaphors we're legitimizing the false ideas behind them.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 01:53:40 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     @mhoye
     My •extremely• limited understanding of the “it’s just noise” argument is that there •may• be room in the data for a gentler conclusion from the data:

     Everyone’s self-assessment is inaccurate in •both• directions (over- and under-estimating), but experts may be slightly less inaccurate. We don’t have evidence that ignorance comes with •bias•, but it might come with greater •noise•.

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 02:26:11 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Speed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸

     @hakona @mhoye
     You’ve half got the argument, half missed it.

     Yes, as the experiment is set up, experts don’t have much room to overestimate — and beginners don’t have much room to underestimate. Thus even if there is uniform inaccuracy (“noise”) across the whole ability spectrum, beginners will tend to overestimate and experts will tend to underestimate. This is exactly the “it’s just noise” argument, and the whole point of the article linked in the OP.

     What you’re missing is that experts do not in fact “get true self-assessment for free,” because they •could• also underestimate themselves — and they do, but (it seems, maybe) by less than beginners overestimate themselves. That conclusion, if it holds under scrutiny, is still an interesting one and not a statistical given.

   • Embed this notice
     Speed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸 (hakona@im.alstadheim.no)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 02:26:14 JST Speed demon 🇪🇺 🇳🇴🇺🇦🇵🇸

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands Except that if you really are a top notch expert, there is not much room to over-estimate your ability.
     The experts get that true self-assessment for free, because it is mathematically impossible to over-estimate by very much. @mhoye

   • Embed this notice
     Paul Cantrell (inthehands@hachyderm.io)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 07:02:46 JST Paul Cantrell

     in reply to

     • Brian Marick

     @marick @mhoye

     Yes, that’s the bit! And much better stated than I managed.

   • Embed this notice
     Brian Marick (marick@mstdn.social)'s status on Thursday, 19-Mar-2026 07:02:47 JST Brian Marick

     in reply to

     • Paul Cantrell

     @inthehands @mhoye Unless I misunderstand, that’s included in the article:

     'instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.’