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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

I think that's assuming more ignorance than even an unskilled person has.

If you had never listened to a professional play piano before then you'd have no idea what level of performance is possible. Similarly, if you had never seen skilled skaters perform on TV.

But we have done these things, so it's obvious that they're doing something that's very difficult.

Maybe you don't fully appreciate the skill, though. You wouldn't do well as a judge who compares the performances of professionals. But comparing novices to professionals seems easy?

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If you had never listened to a professional play piano before then you'd have no idea what level of performance is possible. Similarly, if you had never seen skilled skaters perform on TV.

But we have done these things, so it's obvious that they're doing something that's very difficult.

Sometimes the things we find most impressive, in a demonstration of a skill we don't have, aren't the most difficult things.

I remember being absolutely blown away by some aerial circus tricks and stunts I saw at shows. Later, I started studying and eventually performing myself, and it's often the case that the most crowd-pleasing stunts are some of the easiest to perform.

As a performer, you could always tell which members of the audience knew their stuff, because they'd be the only ones applauding the tricks that might not have looked so spectacular, but were actually the most difficult.

It's more like intermediate (most vulnerable to the DK-effect) to advanced (utmost appreciation for professionals).

Taking the piano example: after 1-2 years of progressive learning you can certainly give off the impression to somebody unfamiliar/untrained (including yourself to an extent) that you are actually quite good: Intermediate stage. But after awhile when confronted with more and more challenging stuff, by discovering different styles and finetuning your hearing; you at some point reach the very visceral and uncanny sensation of the countless possible roads you can now explore: advanced stage.

Further one travels the less one knows - Lao Zu

>Similarly, if you had never seen skilled skaters perform on TV.

then, as a person who has lived in the world and has the normal physical skills of such you probably think "whoa, how in the heck did they do that" when you finally see it.

The OP article mentions in their rumination that there's some difficulty in generalising DK:

"And maybe there’s no contradiction - there’s always room for nuance, for finding out where the Dunning-Kruger effect is relevant and where it’s not. That can be done with more studies, but only if the authors manage to agree on assumptions and basic statistical practice."

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