Sunday, March 28

This explains a lot.


The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than in actuality; by contrast the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to a perverse result where less competent people will rate their own ability higher than more competent people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent understanding. Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.


The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
— Bertrand Russell

4 comments:

Unknown said...

A-ha, now it all make sense. I suppose the more ignorant you are the less aware you are of your own lack of knowledge. Though that may also keep you happier. There's a unit in one of my books at work where studetns have to list the top ten given reasons for happiness from 1-10. They almost always put intelligence near the top and genes near the bottom and are then astonished to find that it's the other way round.

A good quote too. I hadn't heard that one before.

Metamatician said...

Thanks :)

And yeah, I wouldn't say intelligence is a blessing.

Hans said...

Are you two speaking English?

Metamatician said...

:-|

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