Dunning-Kruger Effect

At least sorta related to the debate here - the first of a five-part series about "unskilled and unaware of it."The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong but You'll Never Know What It Is (Part 1) - The New York TimesThis has been discussed here in the past. The article has interviews with Dr Dunning that go into a little more depth.

Probably for as long as there have been schools, teachers have noticed that:

• A students know that they are A or B students;
• B students know that they are B students;
• the top C students know that they are C students;
• the bottom C students and the D students "know" that they are A students.

This research seems to document those observations.It all suggests that the first step in acquiring knowledge is to Know Thyself.

I heard about the Dunning-Kruger Effect about a month ago. Now reading about it, I had no idea it was such a recent discovery. It seems like it would be fairly obvious. But of course, the fact that it seems fairly obvious to me now is exactly the Dunning-Kruger effect. It seems obvious because I now know it. Before I knew what the Dunning-Kruger Effect was it wasn't obvious because I didn't know that I didn't know it existed.How could you properly self-examine if your initial inference is that your hypothesis is correct?I realized when I was a student that if I have the wrong method I could do the same problem over and over and come up with the same result. The consistency of results would lead me to believe I was solving the problem correctly. However, my consistency was merely consistency in failure until I was taught the proper method.Until someone is shown that they are wrong they are highly unlikely to suspect they are wrong. We've used all of our evaluation tools to formulate our original hypothesis, it seems ridiculous to believe we could use the same tools to find out where our hypothesis is wrong. Using the same faulty tools will give us the same faulty response.Ignorance is really just ignorance and should not be demeaned. However, refusal to learn is an abomination and should be loathed.

This is one of the key flaws in human cognition - we tend to establish a hypothesis and then perform tests that would confirm the hypothesis, not tests that would falsify the hypothesis.We can be trained out of that mental trap, but it can be difficult, and more so if the hypothesis in question is emotionally significant.

This didn't sit right with me when I first read it, based on personal experience. In the school system I went through, people got segregated into ability groups and, as far as I could recall, those placed in the bottom group usually agreed that they were the worst performers at this subject. Maybe I thought this had something to do with the psychological effect being classified as 'the bottom group', and couldn't think of much intelligent to say, so didn't.But I just came across a blog post on Citation Needed today, which points out that Dunning and Kruger's experiments are often misinterpreted. The relevant bit is in this graph from the original paper: The worst performers still tended to consider themselves the worst performers, they just grossly underestimated how much worse they were. Your point above would be better if it finished "the bottom C students and the D students "know" that they are top C students, as do those who have no hope of getting a D."Edited by caffeine, : To add link - thank RAZD

Hi caffeine,try html:test

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test

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note that this link does not lead to a proper page because I inserted the square brackets.

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Enjoy

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by our ability to understand
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I was commenting on what I see in University classes, usually on specialized topics. I agree it would be different from what you see in high school. Put it in the form [url]http://...stuff...[/url];, except replace every internal (part of the url) '[' with '%5b' and replace every internal ']' with '%5d'.

So I waded through to the end, wondering if there were any connection with cognitive dissonance. It was not until part 5 that something close came up, regarding the ability of people to process information, how it was easy when the information conformed to their beliefs, but difficult when it didn't. Dunning had this venn diagram: Then I went back to the wiki article on D-K to see if there was a connection.

quote:

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Original study

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The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".[1] The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras. This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.[2]

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Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance.[3] Dunning and Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.[4]

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In Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (2005), Dunning described the Dunning—Kruger effect as "the anosognosia of everyday life", referring to a neurological condition in which a disabled person either denies or seems unaware of his or her disability. He stated: "If you're incompetent, you can't know you're incompetent ... The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is."[5][6]

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If you lack the skills to recognize incompetence you lack the skills to recognize your own incompetence, but you also lack the skills to recognize competence in others.To connect this to cognitive dissonance:

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In A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (1957), Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency in order to mentally function in the real world. A person who experiences internal inconsistency tends to become psychologically uncomfortable, and so is motivated to reduce the cognitive dissonance, by making changes to justify the stressful behavior, either by adding new parts to the cognition causing the psychological dissonance, or by actively avoiding social situations and contradictory information likely to increase the magnitude of the cognitive dissonance.[1]

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Magnitude of dissonance

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The reduction of the psychological stress of cognitive dissonance is a function of the magnitude of the dissonance caused by the existential inconsistency, between two contradictory beliefs held by the person; or by the contradiction between the person's beliefs and an action he or she has taken.[3] Two factors determine the degree of psychological dissonance caused by two conflicting cognitions or by two conflicting actions:

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1. The importance of cognitions: The greater the personal value of the elements, the greater the magnitude of the dissonance in the relation.
2. Ratio of cognitions: The proportion of dissonant-to-consonant elements.

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Reduction

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... In practice, people reduce the magnitude of their cognitive dissonance in four ways:

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1. Change the behavior or the cognition ...
2. Justify the behavior or the cognition, by changing the conflicting cognition ...
3. Justify the behavior or the cognition by adding new cognitions ...
4. Ignore or deny information that conflicts with existing beliefs ...

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ie

1. Change an existing belief at odds with apparent reality ...
2. Justify the existing belief, by changing the perception of reality ...
3. Justify the existing belief by adding new beliefs ...
4. Ignore or deny information that conflicts with existing beliefs ...

In debates on this forum we often see people employing {2} and {4}, usually accompanied by their inability to recognize their level of (in)competence in the fields they argue in or the repercussions/consequences of their proposed revisions of science and objective empirical evidence that conflicts with their belief/s ... because they lack the skills to recognize in/competence.We see denial, self-deception and cluelessness ...Enjoy

One can also throw in worldview here

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A world view[1] or worldview is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the whole of the individual's or society's knowledge and point of view. A world view can include natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and ethics.[2] ...

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A worldview can be expressed as the "fundamental cognitive, affective, and evaluative presuppositions a group of people make about the nature of things, and which they use to order their lives."[10]

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Assessment and comparison

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One can think of a worldview as comprising a number of basic beliefs which are philosophically equivalent to the axioms of the worldview considered as a logical theory. These basic beliefs cannot, by definition, be proven (in the logical sense) within the worldview precisely because they are axioms, and are typically argued from rather than argued for.[30] However their coherence can be explored philosophically and logically.

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If two different worldviews have sufficient common beliefs it may be possible to have a constructive dialogue between them.[31]

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And problems arise for people holding beliefs that are incompatible with the world around them, the evidence for extreme age for the world as an example.Enjoy

One thing that's always puzzled me is the creationist's ability to put their personal notions of science above science's itself. This despite never having studied the subjects formally themselves.Faith, for example, has personal theories about geology, molecular genetics, evolution, palaeontology, and more - despite having no education at all in any of those subjects.She really does believe that she can make stuff up in the moment and that the stuff she makes up is better than the work performed and published by real scientists working for lifetimes in the field.At least part of this must be a total cluelessness about how science is actually done, the standard of evidence required to make a scientific claim and the necessity to fit the claim inside a pre-existing body of knowledge. Any claim that is inconsistent with other established findings requires substantial confirmation.Having fairly recently published a scientific paper on a relatively simple idea, that took several years of real hard slog plus another year of review and criticism, this struck a chord with me

quote:

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Other investigations of the phenomenon, such as "Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence" (2003), indicate that much incorrect self-assessment of competence derives from the person's ignorance of a given activity's standards of performance.[3] Dunning and Kruger's research also indicates that training in a task, such as solving a logic puzzle, increases people's ability to accurately evaluate how good they are at it.[4]

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I'm thinking that she somehow believes that God has given her wisdom which the rest of us don't have.

It's depressing but the entire issue can be covered with one word - delusion.

That would fall under the self-deception part of the venn diagram: Enabled by the Dunning-Kruger Effect where ignorant/incompetence is unable to recognize their failing ability and think they have a superior understanding. Because they don't know much they think by comparison the scientists (& everyone else) don't know much, so their opinions are equal to the task. Take creation ... please ... Except those who have never done this for any of their beliefs/opinions don't know why it needs to be done to validate those beliefs/opinions. Congrats. But they have to want to learn, and that is another issue. It's the ones that don't want to learn that are the problem. Those that want to learn, do learn, they are the ones who can modify beliefs to conform to reality.EnjoyEdited by Adminnemooseus, : Fix first quote box.