[ranger_danger]

I've got a different theory than this AI slop:

Engineers often aren't rational because engineers can still be stupid. Dogmatism/black-and-white thinking is often a sign of low emotional intelligence (and can also be a defense mechanism called "splitting").

The Dunning-Kruger effect also applies to "smart" people. You don't stop when you are estimating your ability correctly. As you learn more, you gain more awareness of your ignorance and continue being conservative with your self estimates.

[hunterpayne]

Dunning-Kruger applies to people who don't know a specific domain. If you spend all day writing code, you probably understand at least one language fairly well. Maybe you are not an expert in how compilers work but at least you understand programming to some degree. So this topic is probably one of the least appropriate ones to apply DK. If you want to make this argument, perhaps best to base it on identity, not DK.

[dragonwriter]

> Dunning-Kruger applies to people who don't know a specific domain.

I mean, its largely a statistical artifact around which a pop science myth has accumulated, but on its own terms it applies smoothly and continuously across the entire range of ability in a domain, not in any special way just one one side of binary knowledge dividing line (the finding was basically that people across the whole range of ability to tend to rate their own relative ability closer to the 70th percentile than it actually is, but have monotonically increasing with actual relative ability.)