[georgefox]

This is a fascinating discussion, to which I have little to add, except this. Quoting the article (including the footnote):

> [I]f you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect. The reason turns out to be embarrassingly simple: the Dunning-Kruger effect has nothing to do with human psychology[1].

> [1]: The Dunning-Kruger effect tells us nothing about the people it purports to measure. But it does tell us about the psychology of social scientists, who apparently struggle with statistics.

It seems to me that despite rudely criticizing a broad swath of academics for their lack of statistical prowess, the author here is himself guilty of a cardinal statistical sin: accepting the null hypothesis.

The fact that data resemble a random simulation in which no effect exists does not disprove the existence of such an effect. In traditional statistical language, we might say such an effect is not statistically significant, but that is different from saying that the effect is absolutely and completely the result of a statistical artifact.

The nuance of statistics is never-ending.

[ImaCake]

Later in the article the author points to an article which does systematically illustrate that the D-K effect is probably not real. They achieve this by using college education level as an independent proxy for test skill with the Y variable being an unrelated assessment of skill - self-assessment. So we can be pretty confident that the D-K effect is at least very small.