Hacker News Reader

Comment by greenyoda | Hacker News Reader

Here's a fictitious citation that commonly appears on HN - "Dunning-Kruger effect":

> The expression "Dunning–Kruger effect" was created on Wikipedia in May 2006, in this edit.[1] The article had been created in July 2005 as Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. Neither of these terms appeared at that time in scientific literature; the "syndrome" name was created to summarise the findings of one 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger. The change to "effect" was not prompted by any sources, but by a concern that "syndrome" would falsely imply a medical condition. By the time the article name was criticised as original research in 2008, Google Scholar was showing a number of academic sources describing the Dunning–Kruger effect using explanations similar to the Wikipedia article.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=55273744&diffmode=...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...

View on HN

The spread of the "ranged weapon"/"melee weapon" classification terminology from the roleplaying games world into writings on real-world anthropology and military history (without acknowledgement of the direction of the borrowing!) is a personal pet peeve. I haven't been able to pinpoint Wikipedia, much less a specific article, as the source of this but it seems to have at the very least accelerated the trend.

Is anyone scholarly using "melee" that way? Or is it just ignorant amateurs? I've only encountered the latter (but I, and all my friends, find it hard to avoid saying "melee" to mean "hand-to-hand", because we were all D&D players before we were anything else).

Anyway, much as I do it, it annoys me too.

Related peeve, though as far as I know this is still restricted to gamers... How do you feel about "akimbo" meaning "wielding two guns, one in each hand", I believe that's from CounterStrike.

Or perhaps the word "glaive", to mean a thrown multi-bladed spinning weapon? I believe from Warcraft.

>> Or perhaps the word "glaive", to mean a thrown multi-bladed spinning weapon? I believe from Warcraft.

No no, Krull (1983):

Colwyn is found and nursed by Ynyr, the Old One. Ynyr tells Colwyn that the Beast can be defeated with the Glaive, an ancient, magical, five-pointed throwing star.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krull_(film)

Incidentally, Krull is like many other fantasy films of that era (there was a bit of a trend at the time, it appears) that are very much like (some) D&D scenarios: the plot is essentially a string of little vignettes in each of which the good guys confront some terrible enemy and defeat it, culminating to a big boss fight at the end. Frex, Conan the Barbarian (1982) is very much like that, as is The Beastmaster (1982).

Oh, neat. TIL, TYVM!

Does that mean the Dunning-Krueger effect has no basis in truth?

I'm from the internet and I can assure you it has no basis in truth.

ETA: see response

Probably not no basis, Dunning and Krueger really did so research & found [retracted] a negative correlation between self-rated ability and performance on an aptitude test afaik [/retracted]. But it's often overgeneralized or taken to be some kind of law rather than an observation.

> Dunning and Krueger really did so research & find a negative correlation between self-rated ability and performance on an aptitude test afaik

No, they didn't.

They found a positive linear relation with between actual and self-assessed relative performance, with the intersection point at around the 70th percentile. (That is, people on average report themselves closer to the 70th percentile than they are, those below erring higher and those above erring lower.)

The (self-rated rank) - (actual rank) difference goes up as actual rank goes down, but that's not self-rated ability going up with reduced ability.

You're right, I misremembered/misspoke. I've edited my comment to make that clear. Thank you for the correction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com