RobinZ comments on Restraint Bias - Less Wrong

16 Post author: Vladimir_Nesov 10 November 2009 05:23PM

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Comment author: RobinZ 10 November 2009 10:39:49PM 1 point [-]

Looking at the abstract:

People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others’. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999, 2002) argued that unskilled performers in particular lack metacognitive insight about their relative performance and disproportionately account for better-than-average effects. The unskilled overestimate their actual percentile of performance, whereas skilled performers more accurately predict theirs. However, not all tasks show this bias. In a series of 12 tasks across 3 studies, the authors show that on moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers differ very little in accuracy, and on more difficult tasks, best performers are less accurate than worst performers in their judgments. This pattern suggests that judges at all skill levels are subject to similar degrees of error. The authors propose that a noise-plus-bias model of judgment is sufficient to explain the relation between skill level and accuracy of judgments of relative standing.

...it appears that these authors are disputing the mechanism proposed by Dunning and Kruger, proposing a simpler one. The data remain the same, but the theory changes.

Assuming results such as these are upheld, we may certainly say that the Dunning-Kruger effect is refuted, but people far below average will still consider themselves above average, on average.