Comment by nosefrog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nosefrog | Hacker News Reader

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I think the main point of this post is correct -- just because you can find the effect in random noise, doesn't mean it's not real phenomenon that happens in real life. But it's missing a nuance there: if an effect can be replicated with random noise, then it's not a psychological effect (e.g. something that you would explain as a human bias), but a statistical effect. E.g. regression towards the mean is a real effect, but it's a statistical effect, not a psychological effect.

And that's the point the original article was trying to make ("The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology. It is a statistical artifact — a stunning example of autocorrelation."), though that point does lost a bit as it goes on.

I think this article gives a better summary of how the Dunning-Kruger effect probably isn't a psychological effect: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critical-thinking/dunning-...

> if an effect can be replicated with random noise, then it's not a psychological effect

This isn't true either. Statistical dependence does not determine or uniquely identify causal interpretation or system structure. See Judea Pearl's works (e.g. The Book of Why) for more on this.

People lacking the ability to self-assess is interesting psychologically. People can learn from experience in many other contexts. People can judge their relative position versus other people in many contexts. Why would they be so bad at this particular task? There could be a psychological underpinning.

Even if it turns out we have useless noise-emitting fluff in the place that would produce self-awareness of skill, that would be a psychological cause of a psychological effect. Not the ones that Dunning and Kruger believed they were seeing, but still.

Now, if you asked frogs for a self-assessment of skill, I would expect that data would not show any psychological effects.

> People lacking the ability to self-assess is interesting psychologically. People can learn from experience in many other contexts. People can judge their relative position versus other people in many contexts. Why would they be so bad at this particular task? There could be a psychological underpinning.

Is there an existing and relevant phenomenon about people lacking the ability to self-asses, that is true, proven, and not just trivia?

I do believe that people understand all the available information about their skills and performance, and they rate themselves according to it.

E.g. if they are asked about whether they perform good on an IQ test against their classmates they will produce noise (see E.g. the article "I can't let go of.."), and if they have the results of the IQ test, they will be able correctly calculate in which quartile they are.

Is there anything against this view?

I have no idea. I think it would be a fascinating experiment to take people who have never taken an IQ test, ask them how they think they'll do, then compare that against their actual performance.

Sure, it's an interesting question, but if the way you're measuring it can't be distinguished from noise, you need to find a different measure.

"Noise" isn't a generic concept that can be universally applied in the same way in any scientific context. That's the point of the article. It doesn't make much sense to assume that people's self-assessments come from an internal random number generator.

It makes sense as a robotically developed null hypothesis, but it doesn't make sense in the real world.

To riff on one of the author's previous comments, if height was uncorrelated with age for 0-20 year olds, that would be very surprising, and hopefully we wouldn't need to make posts saying "the fact 20 year olds are just as likely to be 1 ft tall as 1 year olds is not a physical phenomenon, it's a statistical effect."

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