Comment by throwawaythekey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwawaythekey | Hacker News Reader

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throwawaythekey

I think people overlook the natural experience of Dunning-Kruger we all have.

You think you are good at chess because you win against your neighbour, then eventually a class mate absolutely embarrasses you multiple times and you realize there is a whole world you don't know, and before now you didn't know that world existed. Then you eventually beat your classmate before getting whomped by the beginner in the chess club and the whole cycle happens again. After this happens a few times, you should begin to find each time less surprising than the last.

To me this is the essence of DK and not really something to be proven/disproven by maths. You don't know what you don't know, and it takes some learning before you are wise enough to realize there are unknown unknowns.

> 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.

I think this is trying too hard on the researcher's part... if the data were reinterpreted such that small estimation errors are considered correct then the effect would reappear.

That one time I was able to beat a 'good' chess player at school :-) I still remember that one. Usually I lost, but... I also came to the chess club rather to play Magic: the Gathering, so I didn't mind.

With that in mind, it has been a while (more than twenty five years) but what you said sums up the one time I went to my first Magic: The Gathering tournament, by having to build a deck with a limited amount of packs. You don't have the advantage of owning any power cards there (unless if you are lucky). What happened? Well, you could see who was doing well based on where they sat. And, I got absolutely wrecked! But, I also had a very bad (useless) rare [Shauku, Endbringer]. Which I shouldn't even have put in my deck, but I still did, cause.. it was a rare! [1] Still, there's much more luck to be had with decent commons and uncommons. In later tournaments (different types), I did better, and my fav experience (apart from some of my cards being stolen on a later tournament at that location) was the one where you'd buy a bunch of packs, open a pack up, and pass the packs on. Some people would pick only meta cards, some people would only pick expensive ones, others would always pick rare ones. If you don't intend to win, that could be a decent strategy. But I went for the strategy where I would pick the best cards for my deck, and that worked out well.

When "natural experience" gets tossed around, I tend to immediately think: What about the _opposite_ natural experience?

In this case, it would be something like: Most people who are earnestly interested in a subject are so inclined to look upward (at the world elite) or to their side (at their own competition) that they tend to forget how much of humanity is increasingly left beneath them. We perceive everything we have already learned as "the easy stuff," the stuff we will never learn as "black magic," and the stuff we are currently learning as "getting interesting." But these labels are always relative.

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