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- Hacker News
- The chart they show from the original paper is approximately just:
(With the caveat that "ability" is a percentile rather than some absolute measure.)perceived_ability = 0.5 + (actual_ability / 4)That's not the negative correlation that it's often presented as in discussions. And it could as easily relate to mis-measuring everyone else's skill as to mis-measuring your own skill.
by unwise-exe - Very hard to understand the meat behind all the fluff of the article, especially as the simulation code is not available, and as the presented simulated and original graphs are effectively the same (I don't see a disagreement).
It's clear that the perceived curve will be differently sloped, as no one will evaluate themselves as the topmost or the bottommost percentiles, so the edges will be biased.
And if in both cases we draw differences between perceived and actual, we will get the same curve that everyone knows, biased or not.
by 5555watch - A similar argument was made a couple of years ago, here's the rebuttal of the argument from back then [2022]: https://andersource.dev/2022/04/19/dk-autocorrelation.htmlby renlo
- Damn, I remember I worked through the whole damn thing some years ago when I read this article for the first time, and it didn't hold up to it's claim. I was actually contemplating to do a write-up, but it wasn't really important to me so I didn't. Seeing the same article re-appear on HN for the second time now I really wish that I did. Unfortunately I've forgotten the details by now.by _0ffh
- The reason people find the DK effect persuasive is that everyone has run into this many times in their own lives. Like with an idiot boss who thinks he knows your job better than you do, or an article by someone that gets things completely wrong about a topic that you yourself know very well, through personal experience or extensive study. And we have all been dismayed about the impact such people can have, like through their decisions or influencing each other.
If the research can't demonstrate the DK effect, then the research is bad, like poorly designed.
- Replication crisis. More than half of all psychology studies are not reproducible.
I'm at the point honestly, where I don't even consider psychology to be a science anymore.
by datakan - Even if it isn’t true, it’s got the feeling of truthiness (1).
I don’t expect it to ever go out of the public consciousness. Like other things that were never real like Stockholm Syndrome I suspect it’s just stuck in the zeitgeist now.
by MBCook - The key claim: "Random data actually mimics the effect really well."
This makes some sense. If people are asked to guess a number between 1 and 6 and then roll a die, the people who roll low are more likely to overestimate and the people who roll high are more likely to underestimate. But the key is precisely how well random data mimics the effect.
by brlewis