experts and novices underestimate and overestimate their skills with the same frequency. It’s just that experts do that over a narrower range.
This thesis comes from a study that correctly attributes Dunning-Kruger‘s metacognitive gap to “statistical noise,” which is why the author claims that the effect is an illusion.
He’s not even wrong, and far from invalidating the very intuitive, very obviously correct DK effect, the study just explains it.
Greater familiarity with your own abilities is part of skill acquisition, so when you guess your “score,” you do so with more precision. More importantly, however, because you’re in the upper bell curve, random guesses have much more room when you underestimate your performance than when you overestimate it, even if you’re doing so with equal frequency.
Someone who sucks, on the other hand, has way more room to overestimate their performance than to underestimate it.
For instance, if I claimed that my LSAT score would be perfect, I’d still be accurate to within 5 points, so my overconfidence hardly seems like hubris.
Compare that to a business major I knew who guessed he would score in the 75th percentile only to end up in the 5th percentile. The gap between his mediocre expectations and the brutal reality of being illiterate was substantial. And yet, it almost seems unreasonable to expect him to guess accurately! What is he supposed to say, “I’m gonna get a zero”?
The point is, the DK effect is a statistical artifact, and that changes absolutely nothing.
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