The Dunning-Kruger-Effect is a very real thing.
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Unfortunately, some of us are kinda smart but end up sounding extra stupid to some folks . Can't please everyone I guess. Either way, nosce te ipsum.

I'm thinking of the ones that aren't that smart, but have the ability to sound as though they know what they are talking about when they don't. They get degrees in PPE from Oxford, and it's them that are running the country. Before long the country will be run by computers that aren't that smart but have the ability to sound convincing.

 

I'm thinking of the ones that aren't that smart, but have the ability to sound as though they know what they are talking about when they don't. They get degrees in PPE from Oxford, and it's them that are running the country. Before long the country will be run by computers that aren't that smart but have the ability to sound convincing.

IAN has nailed an unfortunate reality: " but have the ability to sound convincing." It used to be that the folks who were a bit goofy would write their stuff and the extensive spelling errors would let us know immediately about the source. Then along came smart word processing and now both grammar and spelling can always be good. So the immediate tip-off is gone. So te task of evaluation is much more challenging.
And now we have AI writing articles that sound good but ultimately do not convey any useful or new information. And editors not intimate with the topic miss it.

 

The Dunning-Kruger-Effect is a very real thing.
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Looks like a flawed assumption to me.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-dunning-kruger-effect-isnt-what-you-think-it-is/

 

"" But according to the work of my colleagues and me,
the reality is that very few people are truly unskilled and unaware ""

ROFL !!!
How ironic !!!
He can't even compose a sentence correctly.
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I did not follow that link to see the description of that "" The Dunning-Kruger-Effect ", so no comment about that.
As for brain capability, what about musical talent?? That does not appear to be learned, but somehow it happens.
I wanted to be a "rock Star" at age 16, but I considered my musical ability and talents I chose engineering instead. Never regretted it, but sometimes I wonder.

 

"" But according to the work of my colleagues and me,
the reality is that very few people are truly unskilled and unaware ""

ROFL !!!
How ironic !!!
He can't even compose a sentence correctly.
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What was said was that on average the unskilled individual does not overestimate their abilities for a given task. That contradicts that facet of the so called DK effect but it does not contradict the whole thing. To add to that, there are definitely people who grossly overestimate their abilities for a given task we've all met them from time to time, it's just not so on average. That means that for 100 dummies there will not be 80 that overestimate, there would be more like only 20. To add to that, I think there will be maybe 2 that grossly overestimate (ha ha).

I've found that some people although wrong still believe they have the right opinion even if you tell them what the right answer really is. Either that, or they continue to push their opinion as a secondary solution even though the correct solution is well known.

I've also found that as people learn, at some point they come to grips with the fact that they seem to know even less than they thought. That could be because as we learn we also learn new things that we have little knowledge about so far. Kind of like learning about something like what the universe is and what it is made of and how it works. For example, we think we know what gravity is for a long time, then learn that we've only learned a practical substitute for what it really must be.

 

I've found that the Dunning-Kruger-Effect, like so many other things, is related to I.Q..

It's like the Quote from the Scarecrow character in the movie "The Wizard of Oz",
when Dorothy asked ..... how can You talk if You haven't got a Brain ?,
and the Scarecrow replied ........ "I don't know, but some People without Brains do an awful lot of talking, don't they ?".

The Scarecrow character didn't realize that he was already a Genius,
because there were some things that he knew he didn't know.

The Wizard of Oz


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I have come across those folks who have no clue about how to do some task correctly, But they do not let that stop them or even slow them down. Instead they push on and often do considerable damage. That includes several large fires and resulting deaths. I my area at least one massive natural gas explosion that caused at least one death, and damaged a few homes nearby. And one fool on an expressway causing a gas tanker crash that took out a recently upgraded bridge. That fool did not know how to drive, but drove anyway.

 

Dunning-Kruger, like Sapir-Whorf, is an idea with great utility in areas other than it's direct application.

It wraps up a very complex set of interactions into a pithy "truth" with the apparent imprimatur of "science".

In fact, it is one possible attractor basin in a vast chaotic space. It can very closely correspond to observation—it the correct conditions pertain. It, by no means expresses a universal relationship of IQ (as close as we get to "smart") and overestimation of ability.

In fact, the title of the original paper is not "Stupid and Unaware", it's unskilled. Skill being the integration of experience and experience having the potential to reduce ignorance. Ignorance being the actual attribute of concern. It is not uncommon for an ignorant person to underestimate the difficulty of a task or project—and even the "smartest" people have no defense against ignorance save experience in some form.

"Naïve and ignorant" is not only largely redundant, it's not a very compelling title. "Ignorance and Hubris" fails as well, but it is much more to the point. It is hubris that leads a person to ignore the meta-experience she does have—past cases of ignorant assessments—to instead accept without question her simplistic evaluation of complex circumstances.

The meta-experience that allows a person to avoid this so-common problem is what we generally call "wisdom". Perhaps "Unwise and Unaware" is a better direction to go. For years I referred to Dunning-Kruger's paper—long before it was popular fodder. In fact I kept a copy on my web server so I could refer to it.

Later, as I began to realize how often I had simply canonized certain ideas that seemed to be scientifically validated, I was forced to reevaluate Dunning-Kruger, only to discover it hadn't been replicated and the lovely curve so often invoked couldn't be validated. I think there is still an important point to it—but it isn't science, it's wisdom with all if the heuristic qualities and caveats of important-but-not-universal tools for thinking.

I've stopped invoking Dunning-Kruger and now just say what I mean despite the loss of "official" status.

 

Certainly "Y" is correct and makes a very good point.
The fact is that "stupid" is quite separate from Unskilled , as well as ignorant. All three conditions are certainly able to do much harm and damage, but they are all different. The unskilled and the ignorant may choose to stop, realizing they are not able to get something right, while the stupid will charge ahead no matter what, seldom considering the consequences.

 

Hello again,

I am starting to think the topic of DK and a powerful CPU falls under the more general title of consciousness or having some sort of conscience. That makes it hard to define anything concrete perhaps.
It could be because it is known that difference people internalize things differently. To me that means what I think is a forming of pictures in the mind that direct our thinking to the point of coming to some conclusion.
This type of thing can be so varied that it becomes difficult to nail anything down that applies to every single person under the sun. It could be why some people are so good at one thing and so bad at another thing, and how they assess their ability to do such things because that would also be part of the internalization.

This also reminds me of the idea that intelligence is not measured by a single variable like IQ, but rather with a set of variables just like most other things we come across in everyday life. We can't really measure a box with just one number.

So what might this mean from a neurological standpoint? It means that each and every one of us always thinks inside the box until we come across a new concept, which could quickly change our opinion.

 

Now Mr Al has brought up an interesting and possibly rather disturbing concept: What happens when that whole different "BOX" becomes part of the alleged "thinking" inside a computer driven car??? Forget that obfuscation when they cal them "autonomous", that is just a dodge to cover up the reality that it is a computer, subject to every failure mode that computers tend to suffer from, that is doing the driving.
Consider that most humans and many animals continue to learn without weekly updates in thought their methods of thought processing.
OR, maybe I missed the train of thinking here.

 

"Creative Engineering" would seem to be a bit "outside of the box", and certainly it made money for my employers most of the time. It was also what made the job fun on many occasions.
As for the whole concept of anti-gravity, consider that the actual mechanism of gravity will need to be understood at some level to allow that to be developed.
A while back I read that somebody was asking why we never see materials that are repelled by gravity. My thinking is that stuff is what the part of the universe that is expanding away from us is made of. What else would be causing it to be moving away?? It has to be some sort of force.
As for the demise of cars and other forms of personal transportation, I see that as being, at least partly, by those who think that the option of going wherever we choose, whenever we choose, is terribly wasteful. Those are the folks who are convinced that they are much smarter than "the rest of us". (initially described as the rule over the proletarians by the intelligentsia.) You may have read the book.

 

Now Mr Al has brought up an interesting and possibly rather disturbing concept: What happens when that whole different "BOX" becomes part of the alleged "thinking" inside a computer driven car??? Forget that obfuscation when they cal them "autonomous", that is just a dodge to cover up the reality that it is a computer, subject to every failure mode that computers tend to suffer from, that is doing the driving.
Consider that most humans and many animals continue to learn without weekly updates in thought their methods of thought processing.
OR, maybe I missed the train of thinking here.

Hi,

That's interesting and you gave me another idea that might work to some degree. We might call this the "Connected Box" conjecture (might sound comical at first ha ha).

This comes up to me because what we are talking about always seems to involve two individuals (not just one) and their relationships to each other, and thus the "connectedness" in a sense.
The 1st person evaluates themselves based on other people, not standing alone. Like, how would a person who was living in very deep space all by themselves very, very far from other human life, rate themselves as to their intelligence or related. Could they say they were more or less 'smart' than anyone else, if there was nobody else around, especially if they were born there all by themselves somehow.

This way of thinking to me brings up the idea that there is a relationship between people that can be said to connect them if an only if they have some common knowledge, even if they don't know each other.
If person A knows about a given op amp circuit and person B knows the same, then they are connected, and if person C knows the same then they are connected to both A and B. Simply put, this would mean that all three should evaluate themselves as being of the same intelligence. If person B happens to know about a second op amp circuit that the other two do not know about then person B might evaluate themselves as being more intelligent. That also means that both A and C should evaluate themselves as less intelligent than B, but equivalent between themselves.
The more connected they are the more they should evaluate themselves as being equal.

This might allow us to put a number on each person about the circuits they know, but it would also have to include the complexity of each circuit as a separate dimension. Obviously, this would also not be confined to just electrical circuits, but just about anything else that could be known.

This might also point to the idea that intelligence itself is just relative, relative to some other form of intelligence, and that's the only way it can be evaluated. To that person living in deep space, I would think that they could only evaluate their intelligence based on what they knew the day before. Then if they learned that when they learned something new that it brought up even more questions, should they believe they were more or less intelligent than the day before (also kind of comical).

Of course, this probably needs more thought and application to some real-world situations.

 

Oh Wow!! that relationship sounds like we had at one very successful company. We were a team of folks who knew every aspect of what we were wanting to create to be the machine to do what our client required. Mechanical, hydraulical, and electrical controls. We could start with the list of requirements and create the moves for that, and then know what would make the moves and how it would be controlled. All in three or four hours. Then drawings and sketches and sequences in another meeting and then do the drawings. And for several years they were all perfect as built the first time. It was a fantastic trip while it lasted.

Two years ago I lost a friend who was the complement of what I knew.What I did not know he knew quite well. We were "the team". Then cancer and covid killed him. It is like part of my brain was removed, sort of. A very serious loss indeed.

 

Oh Wow!! that relationship sounds like we had at one very successful company. We were a team of folks who knew every aspect of what we were wanting to create to be the machine to do what our client required. Mechanical, hydraulical, and electrical controls. We could start with the list of requirements and create the moves for that, and then know what would make the moves and how it would be controlled. All in three or four hours. Then drawings and sketches and sequences in another meeting and then do the drawings. And for several years they were all perfect as built the first time. It was a fantastic trip while it lasted.

Two years ago I lost a friend who was the complement of what I knew.What I did not know he knew quite well. We were "the team". Then cancer and covid killed him. It is like part of my brain was removed, sort of. A very serious loss indeed.

Oh geeze, very sorry to hear that. That's one of the worst parts of life I think. A loss like that always seems to take part of us with it.
I guess all you could do is try to remember what he had a good knowledge of and try to learn about that too, although it could take time.

That's an interesting example too, because if you knew N amount of X things and he knew N amount of Y things, it could be that you were both well matched intelligence wise, even though the two of you were good at different things altogether. I guess what I was trying to do is find a quantitative way to understand that and simpler relationships.

 

Mr Bill;
I had a similar colleague, also lost to Covid.
Our thought processes were definitely different, but somehow synchronized and fully complementary. We even had our own nicknames; NPN and PNP. I would source an initial idea, he would then sink it.

For instance, when we were working in the lab troubleshooting a stubborn problem, I could start by saying: “How about if we slow…” and he’ll continue the sentence: “…the control loop, because the overshoot could be triggering…” And I would finish: “…..the upper threshold which causes the unit to shut down.”
And that would be the solution to our problem!! It was real magic to be working with him.
Miss him a lot.

 

Especially in troubleshooting ( Diagnostics), understanding how A SYSTEM OR AN ASSEMBLY WORKS is the valuable tool. Then, right after understanding how it is supposed to work, observing how it IS working, usually points at the problem. This is true even for a device that is stone dead. But there the inspection/knowledge, need to begin at the power connection.

 

Two years ago I lost a friend who was the complement of what I knew.What I did not know he knew quite well. We were "the team". Then cancer and covid killed him. It is like part of my brain was removed, sort of. A very serious loss indeed.

I had a colleague at the Academy that was very much like that. He is an absolute genius, but my strengths were in areas that filled in holes in his, so we made a great team. We would sit around working on something and spend most of the time shooting down each others ideas with wild abandon. Got some really good work done that resulted in lots of papers being published and, incidentally, my PhD.