[rafaeltorres]

Yeah, this makes sense to me.

Imagine in the Dunning-Kruger chart the second plot (perceived ability) was a horizontal line at 70, which is not true but not far off from the real results. Now imagine I told you "did you know that, regardless of their actual score, everyone thought they got a 70?" That's a surprising fact.

[topaz0]

I think the most egregious thing about the original presentation is that it leads you to believe that people with a given skill level all self-assessed similarly. If you plotted the scores and self-assessments of each individual you would see that it's not "everyone [in the first quartile] thought [they were about average]", it's that their self-assessments varied wildly, from low and accurate to high and inaccurate.

[clwk]

"Most believe themselves 'above average' at most things."

[mewse]

Most people have an above-average number of legs.

There's really no contradiction there; all it takes is for there to be a couple low scores pulling the average down.

[dragonwriter]

> Most people have an above-average number of legs.

The arithmetic mean and the median are both averages, but the upthread comment was about the median and yours about the arithmetic mean.

> There's really no contradiction there; all it takes is for there to be a couple low scores pulling the average down.

Well, no, when what you are estimating is relative performance by score percentiles, and people's self evaluation is biased toward the 70th percentile, that's not what is happening.

[LaurieKoudstaal]

In the context of the paper, we should be talking about the median, not the mean.