Dunning-Kruger Means You

[woodwardiocom]

A friend mentioned the Dunning-Kruger Effect in his LJ, which inevitably led to me browsing a few articles on it. One of the more insightful ones said that most smart people interpret DK to mean, "Stupid people — i.e., other people — don't know they're stupid."

The article went on to say that this was misguided. The most valuable thing smart people can take away from DK is, "In areas in which I am unskilled, I don't actually know how unskilled I am, and I should think carefully before opening my mouth."

Heaven knows I myself (and many of my very smart friends), when confronted with a fact in an area I have no qualifications in, immediately open my mouth and spout something ill-informed and backed by nothing but gut...

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Oo, yes. And I find the places in which it trips me up the most are those in which I have juuuuuust enough learning to think I understand things--which in fact I only have a very basic, introductory understanding of. (Insert appropriate poetry quote here.) I've been corrected on matters of swordfighting and linguistics for exactly those reasons. If I really and truly know nothing about a topic, I'm more likely to at least realize that I'm spouting an opinion, not Useful Information.

[spinrabbit.livejournal.com]

When I do that, or am tempted to do that, in response to a question, I call it "I don't know, but I can make something up." I've worked pretty hard on dialing that one down. If the one thing I know about a subject seems relevant to the conversation, I also try to slip in the fact that it *is* the one thing I know. (It hasn't happened recently, but it's really embarrassing to trot out the entire extent of one's knowledge on a subject in a sentence or two and then be complimented on how knowledgeable one is.)

When done in a tone of great authority, especially by a person with more privilege talking to one with less privilege but equal or greater knowledge, it's 'splaining, which is a generalization of "mansplaining".

[trowa-barton.livejournal.com]

In the end, it's all about a Charisma roll.
This is why I hate politics.

[mizarchivist]

One could ask quiet_elegance about how often he gets to encounter people DKing the shit out of construction and carpentry.

One could, but it's a bit like juggling with live grenades to do so. (And is why he doesn't go hang out with a majority of the people who work in tech anymore because omg-is he tired of their assumptions)

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

And is why he doesn't go hang out with a majority of the people who work in tech anymore

I sincerely hope I've never been one of those guys. I've found QE an invaluable source of info in that area.

Cannot confirm or deny

[mizarchivist]

1. Any possibility of such a thing would have been long ago since he's not being social where you're social, so remembering accurately is not an option.
I try hard not to
2. interpret for or
3. speak for him

Ya know?

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

Yah!

[drwex]

Apropos of this, today I drove to work behind an obvious work-truck that had a sticker saying "wiring is not a hobby - call a professional electrician".

I've also worked in some odd professional corners and it's my experience that pros in most such areas don't take well to amateurs. I do think D-K is slightly different though. As I read D-K it's less about people-who-spout-off and more about the erroneous degree of self-confidence people have in areas where they are ignorant, even if they're silent about it.

I hope I'm not being too pedantic here; in psychology there's a big thing about "answers" vs "confidence in answers".

[woodwardiocom.livejournal.com]

it's less about people-who-spout-off and more about the erroneous degree of self-confidence people have in areas where they are ignorant, even if they're silent about it.

People who are silently wrong don't bug me as much.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

This appears to be akin to the fallacy of supposing that because you are trained in one of the sciences, you are necessarily better able to judge what is true theoretically or right practically in any field, which has inspired a lot of political thinking in science fiction, especially in the early days when the influence of Technocracy was still strong. See also the idea of "scientism," or the transformation of science into a political ideology.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Oh, my god, this explains so many of my friends from college. (English major here, with lots of physics/astronomy/engineer friends)

[sparkymonster.livejournal.com]

The article went on to say that this was misguided. The most valuable thing smart people can take away from DK is, "In areas in which I am unskilled, I don't actually know how unskilled I am, and I should think carefully before opening my mouth."


Which I haaaaaate but is so true.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths

[notthebuddha.livejournal.com]

I stand indicted by my corpus of LJ postings.

[rednikki.livejournal.com]

Yes, this is something I think more and more about every year.

I often say, "Here's what I think, but let me do the research" when something comes up at work. People seem a little o.O that I want to double check things. However, I've been wrong once too often, and I hate being wrong.

What drives me nuts are the people who are wrong, are shown they are wrong by someone who has actual knowledge, and then double down on that wrongness. Because THEY CAN'T BE WRONG. They will go through all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to not be wrong. (It may drive me nuts because I used to be that person.)

[phil-masters.livejournal.com]

Or, as Dilbert's pointy-haired boss once put it, "I start from the assumption that anything I don't understand is easy".

People with scientific training talking that way about politics doesn't worry me too much these days, because they rarely get to cause real trouble - they just spout fairly obvious nonsense at each other, and can safely be ignored. Where this effect seems to cause actual problems is (a) managers with no technical training, or technical backgrounds in a different field, making impossible demands of their technical staff, and (b) scientists who pontificate about sciences which are way out of their area of authority. The latter makes for problems when reading reports on scientific topics in the press; if "leading scientist" Professor Xyz is quoted as saying something important, you sometimes have to check whether Professor Xyz can be trusted to know the first thing about the subject.