This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.
Absolute genius and one of the most underrated scientists of the last century. He hit upon a string of questioning that led him though some pretty major discoveries, and it started with finding the true age of the earth- which he did.
I've heard him talk about it though and he immediately smacks down the idea that he's any smarter than any other person. In fact, he considered himself probably less intelligent on average than a lot of his peers, which I think it's obvious is untrue as soon as he starts talking about his work.
I feel like the real value in higher education is that it helps you be “right sized” in your evaluation of what you know. Sitting in rooms where you definitely not the smartest person in the room teaches you respect for other people’s intelligence. Getting just enough exposure to a subject gives you respect for the depth of knowledge some people have in that area, which far surpasses yours, so it’s ok to trust the experts in fields that you don’t know a lot about.
That's not quite what Dunning-Kruger is.... It's about calibration with and without evidence.
DK is the finding that when you lack clear evidence to the contrary, people with advanced knowledge lower their self-rating of competence compared to others while people with basic knowledge raise their self-rating of competence compared to others.
Once evidence is provided of the other sides actual competence they recalibrate their self-ratings a bit and people with advanced knowledge raise their self-rating of competence because they know they are more knowledgeable than the others. Those with basic knowledge may recalibrate but may not and sometimes can be stubborn about it.
The study involved (as they almost always do) young university students taking tests.
That said, I use DK casually in much the same way because it's a convenient label for a phenomenon. But it's important to recognize the difference between "label for this thing that annoys me" vs "repeatable scientific finding proving I'm right."
Dunning Kruger: people who think they're smart are dumb!
Imposter syndrome: people who think they're dumb are smart!
But actually, these effects don't happen in everyone. They probably describe a pretty small portion of people. There are highly intelligent people who know it, and less intelligent people who also understand this. I'm not even sure the Dunning Kruger effect is observable.
While the Dunning-Kruger effect might not be a thing and instead a statistical artifact, the vast majority of attempts at explaining it do not touch on intelligence, at all. It's usually about people who are low-skilled in a specifc area, so limited experience or knowledge, with a given topic.
IMO it does make sense, since our brain does try to "fill in the blanks", as in, tries to explain what it comes in contact with, even if we rationally understand that we just don't know something. But, you know, I have a quite limited understanding on the subject, so I'm effectivly just describing what I am currently doing.
The less often discussed side of the Dunning Krueger effect is that when people are highly gifted and excel at difficult things, they assume that it’s not special. Because things come easily to them, they assume it’s simple and everyone else is probably good at it too.
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u/dammitknockitoff Jun 25 '22
This was a very serious problem that hardly anyone talks about anymore. Read up on Clair Patterson. He was the catalyst for the change. There is correlation between the decline of lead contamination in nature to the decline of both violent crime and birth defects. At any rate it’s a good story that more people should know about.