The author says as much in this article:
> Why so angry? [...] [Frankly], for the last few years, the world seems to be accelerating the rate at which it’s going crazy, and it feels to me a lot of that is related to people’s distrust in science (and statistics in particular). Something about the way the author conveniently swapped “purely random” with “null hypothesis” (when it’s inappropriate!) and happily went on to call the authors “unskilled and unaware of it”, and about the ease with which people jumped on to the “lies, damned lies, statistics” wagon but were very stubborn about getting off, got to me. Deeply. I couldn’t let this go.
It's true, the previous article (https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k...) was pretty harsh on the authors of the original paper:
> In their seminal paper, Dunning and Kruger are the ones broadcasting their (statistical) incompetence by conflating autocorrelation for a psychological effect. In this light, the paper’s title may still be appropriate. It’s just that it was the authors (not the test subjects) who were ‘unskilled and unaware of it’.
But on some level, the original paper sounds just as condescending and dismissive. It presents a scholarly and statistical framework for looking down on "the incompetent" (a phrase used four times in the original paper). In practice, most of the times I see the DK effect cited, it functions as a highbrow and socially acceptable way of calling someone else stupid, in not so many words.
Cards on the table, I've never liked DK discourse for this reason. It's always easy to imagine others as the "Unskilled and Unaware", and for this reason bringing DK into any discussion rarely generates much insight.