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Comment by raincole | Hacker News Reader

> as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. (link to the wikipedia page of Dunning-Kruger Effect)

> A cognitive bias, where people with little expertise or ability assume they have superior expertise or ability. This overestimation occurs as a result of the fact that they don’t have enough knowledge to know they don’t have enough knowledge. (formatted as a quote)

However, the page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) doesn't contain the quote. It's also not exactly what Dunning-Kruger Effect is.

Either that the author didn't read the page they linked themselves and made up their own definition, or they copied it from somewhere else. In either case the irony isn't lost on me. Doubly so if the "somewhere else" is an LLM, lol.

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It's as if the author made the same misunderstanding as described in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article.

It actually really seems that way.

They unwittingly illustrate part of the phenomenon while claiming to explain it.

The wikipedia editor clearly believes the misunderstanding is so common that they have to put it in the first paragraph. But people (like the OP author) still just ignore it.

I have a quote for this:

> "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning." — Rick Cook

But wikipedia.

That is a direct paraphrase of the abstract of Kruger & Dunning, 1999[1]:

"The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it."

Now, it may be possible that the definition has evolved since then, but as the term Dunning-Kruger effect is named after this paper, I think it's safe to say that Wikipedia is at least partially wrong in this case.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10626367/

You're misinterpreting the quote. Unskilled people overestimate how skilled they are, but they still understand that they are unskilled. They just don't know quite how unskilled. What Kruger & Dunning actually showed is that people tend to skew their estimates of their skill towards being slightly above average.

Above average is not unskilled. That does not compute for me. The point is clearly about how lack of skill/experience in a task make people bad at judging how they do at the task. That is clearly what the article Kruger and Dunning) and the article (OP) are both saying.

You could help your argument by explaining how I'm misinterpreting the quote.

Check out this graphic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...

This is the only thing Dunning-Kruger found.

Actual performance is correlated with perceived performance, mediated by the fact that everyone thinks they are a bit above average.

> It's also not exactly what Dunning-Kruger Effect is.

What do you think it is?

It's people who overestimate their expertise (at the low end) or underestimate it (at the high end). But the people at the high end still estimate their skill higher than those at the low end.

Instead, what it has turned into is this idea that "stupid people think they're smarter than smart people" when it says nothing of the sort.

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