Dunning-Kruger and other memes (2015)
&gt; The pop-sci version of Dunning-Kruger is that, the less someone knows about a subject, the more they think they know.<p>Author&#x27;s take on Dunning-Kruger is a strawman. I haven&#x27;t seen that version be a &quot;meme&quot;. I also dislike this single word rejection, the calling it a &quot;meme&quot;, of how people talk about DK, it&#x27;s like name calling or something. Unwarranted and arrogant dismissal. It&#x27;s one thing to be wrong, it&#x27;s another to be wrong and then also haughty about it. I feel like most people that I&#x27;ve seen bring DK up understand what the implications of it are. My favorite thing I&#x27;ve read about it is that the less you are competent in something the less you are able to gauge competence in that something.<p>&gt; In two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci conception of Dunning-Kruger. A plausible explanation of why perceived skill is compressed, especially at the low end, is that few people want to rate themselves as below average or as the absolute best.<p>In one sentence he&#x27;s declaring someone else&#x27;s opinion on it as pop-sci than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some charts. I did like seeing that people with more skill saw themselves as better than people with less skill, but conjecture on what people want to think of themselves? That&#x27;s pop-sci.