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Comment by belviewreview | Hacker News Reader

The reason people find the DK effect persuasive is that everyone has run into this many times in their own lives. Like with an idiot boss who thinks he knows your job better than you do, or an article by someone that gets things completely wrong about a topic that you yourself know very well, through personal experience or extensive study. And we have all been dismayed about the impact such people can have, like through their decisions or influencing each other.

If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed.

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We want theories to be backed by more rigorous data precisely because "having run into this many times in their own lives" is not reliable. People's own perception is incredibly biased. We can see a bias at play in your very own closing sentence — "your study is bad if it doesn’t not confirm my existing belief" is plainly not science.

It's not science, but also a lot of stuff that purports to be science is not. "Science" is subject to many of the same forces that politics is.

Using your personal experiences and the personal experiences of people you trust as an anchor is a good thing. It keeps you from falling for propaganda. Note that this DOES NOT mean studies conflicting with your personal experience are all wrong.

The tricky part here is understanding the limit of what your own experience can tell you.

> It's not science, but also a lot of stuff that purports to be science is not. "Science" is subject to many of the same forces that politics is.

I am glad that people are finally waking up to this.

I was explaining why people believe it. I think they are often correct in their belief. So let me ask you, have you experienced this yourself, like for a subject that you have a good knowledge of, observed someone who claims they do but is wildly off track?

Related: The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. In Michael Crichton's own words:

"Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."

Michael Crichton also was an outspoken skeptic of climate crisis.

Crichton's Law: unwittingly serving as the best example of one's own snarky law.

Maybe the problem is that DK isn't about individuals, but about topics? I.e. perhaps everyone exhibits the phenomenon about topics they are most ignorant about.

(and I am ignorant about DK, so...)

No, I think it's about people - about us. About you, me, all of us.

"about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at", according to the article.

We are the answer.

What is amusing to me is when I think about what happens when the so called "experts" have this effect? Because "experts" are people too...

https://xkcd.com/793

That was always what the DK effect was about.

> If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed.

It’s the opposite problem. The research is bad because it “demonstrates the DK effect” even for cases where it cannot possibly be true. Like “people who tend to roll lower dice rolls overestimate their own ability to roll high dice values and people who tend to roll higher values tend to underestimate their own ability”

Which is just obviously incorrect and the true result should have been “there’s no correlation between people’s estimate of their ability to roll dice and their actual outcomes”

If you want to demonstrate an actual effect like DK, you have to set up an experiment such the if it truly doesn’t exist then the experiment tells you so. A great way of checking this is to throw random data at it in which case it should come out saying “I saw no correlation” but that’s no the case with their setup.

>If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed.

I don't have an opinion about Dunning-Kruger either way, but I wanted to point out that this is a pre-replication crisis mindset. Social psychology spent decades producing catchy, intuitive results that turned out not to replicate. We've learned over and over that we can't trust it when a result feels right, we need to rely on proven statistical methods.

>If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed.

Why do the research if you are so convinced from your own personal anecdotes? Quite a weird thing to say...

Your anecdote is not describing dunning-kruger, though, it's describing "some people exist in society with too much confidence in their ability" which can be true on its own, and is not exclusive to beginners.

Confirmation bias. You don't notice when people back down from their bad takes because that's normal and expected. Or possibly just selection bias if you are in situations where people are more likely to be arrogant.

> If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed.

What? This is anecdotal and subjective. If the research doesn’t back up those anecdotes, then the research doesn’t back up those anecdotes. You want the research to back up your lived experience because it’s validating. That doesn’t mean that’s the actual reality.

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