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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is probably not real + The pervsion of science

#1
C C Offline
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is probably not real
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critic...y-not-real

EXCERPTS: I want the Dunning-Kruger effect to be real. First described in a seminal 1999 paper by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, this effect has been the darling of journalists who want to explain why dumb people don’t know they’re dumb. There’s even video of a fantastic pastiche of Turandot’s famous aria, Nessun dorma, explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect. “They don’t know,” the opera singer belts out at the climax, “that they don’t know.”

I was planning on writing a very short article about the Dunning-Kruger effect [...] But as I double-checked the academic literature, doubt started to creep in. While trying to understand the criticism that had been leveled at the original study, I fell down a rabbit hole, spoke to a few statistics-minded people, corresponded with Dr. Dunning himself, and tried to understand if our brain really was biased to overstate our competence in activities at which we suck... or if the celebrated effect was just a mirage brought about by the peculiar way in which we can play with numbers.

[...] The most important mistake people make about the Dunning-Kruger effect, according to Dr. Dunning, has to do with who falls victim to it. “The effect is about us, not them,” he wrote to me. “The lesson of the effect was always about how we should be humble and cautious about ourselves.” The Dunning-Kruger effect is not about dumb people. It’s mostly about all of us when it comes to things we are not very competent at. In a nutshell, the Dunning-Kruger effect was originally defined as a bias in our thinking...

[...] So case closed, right? On the contrary. In 2016 and 2017, two papers were published in a mathematics journal called Numeracy. In them, the authors argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect was a mirage. And I tend to agree.

The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. “We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid,” Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper.” In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.

[...] I recruited a husband-and-wife team, Dr. Patrick E. McKnight ... and Dr. Simone C. McKnight ... to help me understand what was going on. Patrick McKnight ... believed in the existence of the Dunning-Kruger effect ... But after replicating Dr. Nuhfer’s findings using a different platform ... he became convinced the effect was just an artefact of how the thing that was being measured was indeed measured.

[...] We had long conversations over this as I kept pushing back. As a skeptic, I am easily enticed by stories of the sort “everything you know about this is wrong.” That’s my bias. To overcome it, I kept playing devil’s advocate with the McKnights to make sure we were not forgetting something. Every time I felt my understanding crystallize, doubt would creep in the next day and my discussion with the McKnights would resume.

I finally reached a point where I was fairly certain the Dunning-Kruger effect had not been shown to be a bias in our thinking but was just an artefact. Here then is the simplest explanation I have for why the effect appears to be real.

For an effect of human psychology to be real, it cannot be rigorously replicated using random noise. If the human brain was predisposed to choose heads when a coin is flipped, you could compare this to random predictions (heads or tails) made by a computer and see the bias. A human would call more heads than the computer would because the computer is making random bets whereas the human is biased toward heads. With the Dunning-Kruger effect, this is not the case. Random data actually mimics the effect really well... (MORE - details)


The perversion of science
https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/202...2012260009

EXCERPT: . . . This insanity is rooted in eugenic concerns. [...] Not only is this obviously racist, it happens to engender policy that kills more Black people in absolute terms. Age is a far better predictor of COVID-19 vulnerability than race: As Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe of the New York University Grossman School of Medicine found, infected patients die at the same rate regardless of race. This means that if you give tranches of the vaccine to patients based on racial concerns rather than age concerns, the most vulnerable Black and Latino populations - elderly Blacks and Latinos - are more likely to die so that younger Black and Latinos can receive a vaccine for a disease to which they are probably 10 times less vulnerable.

This is the price of social justice thinking. By treating people as members of racial groups rather than as individuals, and by prioritizing race above age, more Black and brown people die in absolute terms, even if the overall proportionality of Black and brown deaths drops versus white deaths. “Equitable” statistical outcome has become a higher goal than actually saving lives.

That’s absurd and tragic. And it should undermine our trust in our public health officials. So, trust the scientists when they root their decisions in science. But doubt them at the top of your lungs when they start proclaiming that they are experts on morality... (MORE - details)
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#2
Syne Offline
(Dec 28, 2020 08:05 PM)C C Wrote: The Dunning-Kruger Effect is probably not real
https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/critic...y-not-real
...
The two papers, by Dr. Ed Nuhfer and colleagues, argued that the Dunning-Kruger effect could be replicated by using random data. “We all then believed the [1999] paper was valid,” Dr. Nuhfer told me via email. “The reasoning and argument just made so much sense. We never set out to disprove it; we were even fans of that paper.” In Dr. Nuhfer’s own papers, which used both computer-generated data and results from actual people undergoing a science literacy test, his team disproved the claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it (“a small number are: we saw about 5-6% that fit that in our data”) and instead showed that both experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. “It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range,” he wrote to me.

The Dunning-Kruger effect does not "claim that most people that are unskilled are unaware of it". You can be aware of being unskilled and still overestimate your ability. And people don't uniformly overestimate their ability on "science literacy". Most people have a wide variety of subjects they overestimate their ability on, and they do not do so on absolutely every subject.

This seems to be the bulk of new science nowadays. Just refute a straw man of the original research.

Quote:The perversion of science
https://www.post-gazette.com/opinion/202...2012260009

EXCERPT: . . . This insanity is rooted in eugenic concerns. [...] Not only is this obviously racist, it happens to engender policy that kills more Black people in absolute terms. Age is a far better predictor of COVID-19 vulnerability than race: As Dr. Gbenga Ogedegbe of the New York University Grossman School of Medicine found, infected patients die at the same rate regardless of race. This means that if you give tranches of the vaccine to patients based on racial concerns rather than age concerns, the most vulnerable Black and Latino populations - elderly Blacks and Latinos - are more likely to die so that younger Black and Latinos can receive a vaccine for a disease to which they are probably 10 times less vulnerable.

This is the price of social justice thinking. By treating people as members of racial groups rather than as individuals, and by prioritizing race above age, more Black and brown people die in absolute terms, even if the overall proportionality of Black and brown deaths drops versus white deaths. “Equitable” statistical outcome has become a higher goal than actually saving lives.

That’s absurd and tragic. And it should undermine our trust in our public health officials. So, trust the scientists when they root their decisions in science. But doubt them at the top of your lungs when they start proclaiming that they are experts on morality... (MORE - details)

All social justice policies ultimately do harm to the very people they purport to help. So much so that one has to wonder if it is intentional.
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