Looks like a good article overall. I have just one qualm:<p>> <i>The plural of anecdote is not data.</i><p>Ah, but it <i>is</i>. It's biased, hard to analyse, fraught with many perils… but it is still relevant information. Even though anecdotes are rarely conclusive, They can often tell you where you should look next.<p>This is similar to the correlation/causation thing. Sure, correlation doesn't <i>imply</i> causation. But it sure makes it much more <i>probable</i>.
The Dunning-Kruger effect effect: The perceived ability in people who have heard about the Dunning-Kruger effect to judge other people's abilities by observing their self-assessments.
Discussed at the time: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498136" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1498136</a>.
No one will read this, but ... this reinforces what I think is the singularly most powerful skill for creating a bootstrapped mind is metacognition. Without it, one cannot create the feedback loop for self improvement. The self taught learners who haven't gone off the rails, have for the most part a highly tuned ability to know _why_ they know what they know. Teaching a child how to learn is teaching them metacognition.
For me, the assessment of Dunning-Kruger is missing a key control group, people who don't claim any aptitude in the relevant skill. For a newbie, that's the class of people who they are most likely to compare themselves to, e.g. the typical small office's Excel guru knows a few `@` commands not pivot tables and linear regression and it's computer whiz has a general picture of directories as a tree structure and can use `cd` and `dir` and `*.bak` to find lost files.<p>To put it another way, the less skilled practitioner is comparing what they know today versus ignorance. An experienced practitioner has been around long enough to have experienced tough problems that highlight the limits of their knowledge. In other words, one group is likely to compare themselves to an unskilled cohort and the other to a highly skilled one.<p>Excluding people who rate their ability at zero and who perform consistent with that ability skews the graph.
tl;dr<p>"So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good."<p>and graphic:<p><a href="http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/dunning_kruger.png" rel="nofollow">http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/du...</a>
I remember reading an interview with either Dunning or Kruger at one point. They were really disappointed that everyone had used their research to point fingers at others.<p>In actual fact, the authors had hoped the real value of their research would be in getting people to question themselves.<p>I.e. Instead of saying: "look at that dumb person, he doesn't know he's dumb."<p>The authors hoped people would say: "what if I'm not as smart as I think I am?"<p>I guess the "other people are dumb" meme is so much more comforting, though.