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Comment by J-dawg | Hacker News Reader

Could you explain what the real Dunning-Kruger effect is? I always thought it was pretty much "you're so dumb that you think you're smart".

Wikipedia says: "The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is"

Which, to me at least, pretty much reads as "you're so dumb that you think you're smart". (Or, to be slightly more accurate, "Your ability is so low that you think your ability is high")

I don't claim to know anything about this, just genuinely curious what you mean.

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Dunning–Kruger showed that less competent individuals in a sample thought they performed much better than they actually did, whereas more competent individuals thought they had not performed as well as they actually did.

The less competent individuals did not think they were "smart" or on the same level as those that performed better in the tests. Just their perception of where they were was markedly different to the perception of those that did well in the tests

Or as Donald Rumsfeld would say, the less competent individuals are suffering from unknown unknowns

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_known_knowns

It's the conclusion that the curve of "how good you think you are" is basically flat.

Some studies find it a little positively sloped, some even find it negatively sloped, but it not nearly as sloped as the actual performance.

When I was 5 year old, I thought I was a maths genius. I had arithmetic absolutely nailed and I knew there were a few more things to learn, but arithmetic was easy so presumably there was just a little more to learn before I could be a professor.

I think that's what he means.

It has nothing to do with being smart or dumb. Consider the way expertise in one field seems to lead many to believe they are experts in other fields, or as I like to put it, "engineers know everything".

The ELI5 is everyone thinks they are closer to average than they are. Both people above and below average are effected. They still recognize which side of average they fall on though.

Lots of great discussions and links on D-N previously: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=Dunning-Kruger&sort=byPopulari...

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