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SoullessAutomaton comments on Accuracy Versus Winning - Less Wrong
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To the best of my knowledge, this sort of effect is mostly not an effect of underestimation, but rather of either misestimating the skills of others, and/or of restricting the group against which one evaluates oneself.
Generally, it seems, if one has no knowledge of others' skills in an area, an estimation of one's own skill level is likely wildly inaccurate; if one's knowledge of others' skills is biased in favor of a non-random group, one's own skill is likely closer to the mean of that group than expected.
That is to say, if you're better at X than your friends are, you're probably not as good as you think; if you're jealous of your friends' skill at X you're probably better than you think. On the other hand, if you measure your success against the best and brightest in a field, you're probably wildly underestimating yourself; but if you're proud of being good at something and compare yourself to random people you meet you're probably substantially overestimating yourself.
People posting on LW are strongly self-selected in favor of rationality, so anyone reading this is probably closer to average within this community than they think they are!
Drivers think they are comparing themselves to the other drivers they see on the road. In fact, they are comparing themselves to the drivers whose skill they have most cause to think about, which is overwhelmingly often the worst drivers on the road.
Yes, this is the same principle of a biased relative estimate due to comparison against a non-random subset of others.
This is great information. Do you have a link?
Sadly, no; I have a poor memory for details and have not generally been in the habit of saving links to my sources, something I need to correct. Chances are it's actually a synthesis of multiple sources, all of which I read a year or more ago. Mea culpa.