[oceliker]

> Wouldn't that mean unskilled people tend to overestimate their skill, and experts tend to underestimate it?

I think it's because the original paper speculates far beyond it:

> The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

The argument about autocorrelation says this "dual burden" doesn't need to be there to observe the effect.

[andersource]

Again, not in my reading. In the random data thought experiment, everybody (experts and unskilled alike) suffer from the burden of not having the skill to estimate their performance. The author is even surprised that the DK effect in the random data is bigger than observed in the DK experiment ("In fact, as Figure 9 shows, our effect is even bigger than the original") - but that's because in reality, people do have some ability to estimate their own skill. So the claim that the lack of skill is related to the lack of ability to self-evaluate does make sense, or at least, isn't contradicted by the experiment.