"Then it is dark; a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." - John Cheever

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Dunning Kruger effect

I came across this reference to the Dunning Kruger effect. "The paper compares people's skill levels to their own assessment of their abilities. In hindsight, the result seems self-evident. Unskilled people lack the skill to rate their own level of competence. This leads to the unfortunate result that unskilled people rate themselves higher than more competent people." This poses the question - am I so competent that I downgrade my abilities, or am I just incompetent?!

4 comments:

Tom said...

Interesting, and very plausible effect, and the site you link beautifully describes how it can apply in "debates" about climate change. It's amazing how often sceptics will confidently point something out, seemingly certain that the scientists themselves had never considered it, when of course numerous journals and studies had already addressed the issue.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Tom said...

A post removed on the Fitz!? Don't tell me we've been visited by one of those over-aggressive climate sceptic nutter?

John said...

no it was spam i think. i didn't remove it tho'