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Damn if only this article actually explained why you see this effect from random data. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like they understand the maths enough to know. Does anyone fancy reading those papers and giving us a TL;DR?

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Yeah - I kept looking for the meat of the argument. The graph of random data looks a little correlated and I’d love to know why.

That being said I loved the mercury/Glasgow explanation. Anecdotally I see that all the time.

The graph of random data looks like that since its capped. The first place person cannot overestimate his position, and the bottom place person cannot underestimate his position. So any randomness at all will replicate the effect unless there is much more overconfidence in the high achievers than low achievers.

They constructed a straw man and then bitched about the straw man. In effect, they proved Dunning Kruger.

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