| I feel like this article is severely over-complicating the analysis. Looking at the original blog post [1], their key claim appears to be that "random data produces the same curves as the DK effect, so the DK effect is a statistical artifact". However, by "random data", the original blog means people and their self-assessments are completely independent! In fact, this is exactly what the DK effect is saying -- people are bad at self-evaluating [2]. (More precisely, poor performers overestimate their ability and high performers underestimate their ability.) In other words, the premise of the original blog post [1] is exactly the conclusion of DK! Looking at the HN comments cited [3] by the current blog post, it appears that the main point of contention from other commenters was whether the DK effect means uncorrelated self-assessment or inversely correlated self-assessment. The DK data only supports the former, not the latter. I haven't looked at the original paper, but according to Wikipedia [2], the only claim being made appears to be the "uncorrelated" claim. (In fact, it is even weaker, since there is a slight positive correlation between performance and self-assessment.) So, my conclusion would be that DK holds, but it does depend on exactly what is the exact claim in the original DK paper. [1] https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-k... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31036800 |
Is it that hard to actually check the original paper before bothering to make such a claim? The original paper explicitly claims to examine "why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves".