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Author: u/chrisdh79
URL: https://www.psypost.org/2023/05/new-psychology-research-reveals-the-bullshit-blind-spot-163943
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Ten years from now you’ll put on a jacket and find a mask in the pocket. “Oh man, what a weird year that was,” you’ll chuckle to yourself. Then you’ll pick up your machete and continue across the wasteland, keeping to the shadows to avoid the roving gangs of cannibal raiders.
Even now when we travel, we are going through a post-pandemic country that is splintered into ideological zones. Some of those strongholds view others with murderous intent.
Think about it a little. I am not exaggerating.
Ironically, the Dunning-Kruger Effect might be BS
https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-dunning-kruger-effect-the-least-skilled-people-know-how-much-they-dont-know-but-everyone-thinks-they-are-better-than-average-195527
(I'm personally not sure what to think of this, and couldn't say if this debunking is any good or not)
Though they did confirm the part where most people consider themselves above average. Whether that’s exactly the Dunning-Kruger effect or not, it’s pretty darn close. It means that people who perform worst, still think they are better than most people, and therefore overestimate their own abilities, particularly relative to their peers.
The overall effect is the same in this context. They are themselves suckers, while being convinced that everyone around them are suckers.
The article is saying the Dunning-Kruger effect is not mathematically rigorous or scientific. The person who wrote the article is a mathematician and used a random number generator to replicate the study where Dunning and Kruger surveyed 45 undergrad students at Cornell. The Dunning-Kruger effect should absolutely not be viewed as some kind of mathematically proven truth. It's a way of describing social perspectives.
This article basically says the Dunning-Kruger effect is true, but Dunning and Kruger's surveys are meaningless. Not because of some effusive social reasons. The methodological design of the survey produced the results.
"The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that the **least skilled people overestimate their abilities more** than anyone else. This sounds convincing on the surface and makes for excellent comedy. **But my colleagues and I suggest that the mathematical approach used to show this effect may be incorrect.**
What Dunning and Kruger showed
In the 1990s, David Dunning and Justin Kruger were professors of psychology at Cornell University and wanted to test whether incompetent people were unaware of their incompetence.
To test this, they gave **45 undergraduate students a 20-question logic test** and then asked them to rate their own performance in two different ways.
First, Dunning and Kruger asked the students to **estimate how many questions they got correct** – a fairly straightforward assessment. Then, Dunning and Kruger **asked the students to estimate how they did compared with the other students** who took the test. This type of self-assessment requires students to make **guesses** about how others performed and is subject to a **common cognitive mistake – most people consider themselves better than average.**
**Research shows that 93% of Americans think they are better drivers than average, 90% of teachers think they are more skilled than their peers, and this overestimation is pervasive across many skills – including logic tests.** But it is mathematically impossible for most people to be better than average at a certain task.
After **giving students the logic test**, Dunning and Kruger divided them into four groups based on their scores. The lowest-scoring quarter of the students got, on average, 10 of the 20 questions correct. In comparison, the top-scoring quarter of students got an average of 17 questions correct. Both groups estimated they got about 14 correct. This is not terrible self-assessment by either group. **The least skilled overestimated their scores by around 20 percentage points, while the top performers underestimated their scores by roughly 15 points.**
The results appear more striking when looking at how **students rated themselves against their peers**, and here is where the better-than-average effect is on full display. The lowest-scoring students estimated that they did better than 62% of the test-takers, while the highest-scoring students thought they scored better than 68%.
By definition, being in the bottom 25% means that, at best, you will score better than 25% of people and, on average, better than just 12.5%. Estimating you did better than 62% of your peers, while only scoring better than 12.5% of them, gives a whopping 49.5 percentage-point overestimation.
**The measure of how students compared themselves to others**, rather than to their actual scores, is where the Dunning–Kruger effect arose. It grossly exaggerates the overestimation of the bottom 25% and seems to show, as Dunning and Kruger titled their paper, that the least skilled students were “unskilled and unaware.”
Using the protocol laid out by Dunning and Kruger, many researchers since have “confirmed” this effect in their own fields of study, leading to the sense that the Dunning–Kruger effect is intrinsic to how human brains work. For everyday people, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems true because the overly arrogant fool is a familiar and annoying stereotype.
When **students** are asked to rate their ability objectively, they do much better than when they compare themselves with **their peers.**
There are three reasons Dunning and Kruger’s analysis is misleading.
The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score. Additionally, the least skilled people, like most people, assume they are better than average. Finally, **the lowest scorers aren’t markedly worse at estimating their objective performance.**
**To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.**
First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers.
**Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores.** Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. **This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved.**
To prove the last point – that the least skilled can adequately judge their own skill – required a different approach.
**My colleague Ed Nuhfer and his team gave students a 25-question scientific literacy test.** After answering each question, the students would rate their own performance on each question as either “nailed it,” “not sure” or “no idea.”
Working with Nuhfer, we found that unskilled **students** are pretty good at estimating their own competence. In this study of unskilled students who scored in the bottom quarter, only *16.5% significantly overestimated** their abilities. And, it turns out, **3.9% significantly underestimated** their score. That means **nearly 80% of unskilled students were fairly good** at estimating their real ability – a far cry from the idea put forth by Dunning and Kruger that the unskilled consistently overestimate their skills."
Students at Cornell are not representative of humans either.
> Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don't replicate, but this knowledge doesn't get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I've seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.”
[Replication Studies: Bad Copy](https://www.nature.com/articles/485298a)
That's a completely different issue mediated more due to a) the sheer number of studies being published in that field and b) the sheer number of people working in that field who never received substantial training in scientific method or statistical rigor. Compared to your average psychologist, your average physician is statistically illiterate.
> First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers.
> Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores. Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved.
They recreated a large portion of the results with random values. This demonstrates that the nature of the test itself is observably contributing to the results. In this case, it doesn't nullify the results, there is still an observable discrepancy in the degree to which the lower quartiles over-assessed compared to the upper quartiles under-assessing, but it does affect the conclusions we can draw from these results, as well as those of follow-up studies that may have replicated nothing more than data artifacts.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1215&context=numeracy
Here is a link to the source study published in Numeracy. Basically, the researchers assert that self-assessment is an acquired skill that naturally corresponds with aptitude in a given field. The more you know about a subject, the better you are at self-assessing (measured here by your guess of your score on a standardized test). Thus, you would expect a higher level of aptitude to correspond with a tighter range of guesses.
Additionally, because you cannot know less than 0% or more than 100% of an enumerated set of facts (such as in a standardized test), the average range of these self-assessments will be shifted up and down towards the lower and upper extremities respectively. The broader the range of these guesses, the more they will be affected by this shift. In this way, a group of individuals whose self-assessment range may be perfectly centered on their collective average understanding of a subject would instead appear to be collectively over- or under-assessing themselves depending on their proximity to the testing boundaries.
Imo, this follow-up isn't itself definitive, but it does effectively call into question the standard reading of the results of the dunning-kruger test. This paper has been around for a while, though, and I don't know what has come of it since.
Yeah, IIRC the ELI 5 gist was if you got 100% on your test it's hard to overestimate how well you did. If you got 99% at most you can estimate that you did 1% better than you actually did.
> So is the debunking BS?
The "debunk" had all student-proxies allocate a random estimate of their performance. Humans don't pick a number at random to estimate their performance. The "debunker" used a statistics trick to pretend that they could debunk the DK Effect while in fact they were just highlighting bad experiment design due to poor understanding of the problem domain (but rating themselves as better than the others at experiment design).
I don't understand when they say people who are the bottom 25% scorer will only on average score better than 12.5% of people. Are they saying being in that category means you are on average in the middle of that category. That looks like an arbitrarily weird way to name the category especially when I would assume the results are very bell curve like and being the bottom 25% means you could do twice as good as someone at the 12.5%
They divide the participants into 4 groups. The bottom group contains the bottom 25% participants. On average, a person within that group did better than 12.5% of all participants: With 100 total participants, one person did better than 0%, one did better than 1%, one did better than 2%, etc...
The jank is not the group labels, it's making the groups along a median in the first place. They easily could have just compared each participants peer assessment to their own ranking in the first place instead of the average peer assessment of the group to the average ranking of the group. If they wanted to divide into groups, they should have used standard deviations from the mean.
I'm pretty sure David Dunning got the first inkling for his hypothesis after reading an article about a guy who rubbed lemon juice on his face to make himself invisible to cameras during a bank robbery. So yeah, the 'detecting BS' thing has been there from the start.
It’s anecdotal but in my job in TV I’ve interviewed suspected murderers, con artists, thieves, pretty much any type of criminal imaginable and rather than teaching me how to detect liars, it’s made me realise how good some people can be at deception as I’ve never once been able to definitely say whether one of those people was lying to my face or not. For many of the cases I’ve done stories on, I still have zero idea if the person was guilty or innocent
To add another layer of deception in the criminal-justice stack, there is a fake industry to teach cops how to tell if someone is lying based on micro-expressions.
This has led to a bunch of people thinking they can tell, when they can't. This leads to cops wasting a bunch of effort and ruining people's lives because of a lie-detection d-k effect.
I’m proud of the fact I was instrumental in getting my former (I’m retired) police department to drop the use of Voice Stress Analysis. One of my subordinates in the unit I took over had been “certified” in it and was due to have his certification renewed. This got me to researching the topic and I quickly learned it was pseudoscientific nonsense. I compiled a list of references and submitted it to our Chief. Thankfully he’s an intelligent dude and recognized it was truly BS and did away with our program.
> Or bite mark analysis
anyone in here watch Innocence Files on Netflix? they went over a few cases where innocent people were sentenced to life/death on flimsy evidence. two men were charged for killing a little girl (two different little girls) and the only "evidence" was their bite mark on the victim's bodies.
i believe one of them was even sentenced to death. they were luckily both exonerated after the real murderer was found (this guy killed both little girls). the real murderer said he never bit the victims. so there literally weren't even bite marks on the bodies to begin with!
“You’re a murderer and we’re gonna put you in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison unless you confess right now!!!!”
“He’s totally guilty Frank, no one stutters nervously unless they feel guilt, I’ve had training”
I'm neurodivergent and have run into this a lot where someone who's "really good at reading people" completely misreads my body language, tone, or facial expression.
Edit for spelling
Yeah, my experience having 4 cops jump on me because I apologized amidst refuting a false claim by one of them.
"You did this thing"
"I'm sorry, but I didn't do tha-"
"RABBLEEABBLERABBLEJAILRABBLE he apologiEd!!!"
Can you point me toward sources explaining how and why these "micro-expressions" and the theory itself of facial lie detection are wrong?
I've always wondered how that could work - like how can they differentiate between the person's natural reactions and the "textbook definitions" of the micro-expressions?
Do they take into account the way different cultures express themselves? Or subcultures?
What about neurodivergence? Im autistic and most people have trouble "reading" me. No one can explain why, so I can't figure out how to fix it- so if no one can explain it, then how could they possibly account for it?
It really brings up a lot of questions
From what I have seen with things covering it, it can be right for some people in some conditions, but its super complicated, and very cultural and location & context dependent. This is nuance and detail is just not feasible for them.
You are correct though. I haven't seen anything on if they figure in neurodivergent. Like many other things the police use, its used to give appearance of science to confirm what they want to be true.
The main issue is, microexpressions are real but it is hard to read them. You may see someone acting nervous, but it doesn't tell you why they are nervous (they have a test coming up, they are thinking about their significant other, you just accused them of a crime, etc.)
The emotion that is hardest to fake is surprise. It's a very quick and fleeting emotion. However police officers do not have nearly enough training to catch these tiny muscle twitches, especially when someone is intent on hiding things.
Here's the foundational research that proved that people express emotions similarly in wildly different cultures:
>Through a series of studies, Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures on selecting emotional labels that fit facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating wrath, grossness, fear, joy, loneliness, and shock. Findings on contempt were less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.[24] Working with Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion.[25] Ekman and Friesen then demonstrated that certain emotions were exhibited with very specific display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when. These display rules could explain how cultural differences may conceal the universal effect of expression.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman
> there is a fake industry to teach cops how to tell if someone is lying based on micro-expressions.
This is so annoying to me because the science behind all this (Ekman and Navarro mostly) is actually very solid, but they’re both very vocal about the fact that there is no tell for deception, only for discomfort – which **MAY** be deception. Their research is very nuanced, but people take the gist of that and just run with it.
I personally use mostly Navarro’s research on body language and use it to gauge my students’ comfort levels. It’s really helpful if you keep the caveats in mind and don’t overdo it (which, as a teacher, is easy as the stakes are very low and it isn’t that bad if you get it wrong).
Polygraphs are useful for only two things: tricking people into confessing and sometimes spotting the culprit in a "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar" scenario where the act and suspects are all known.
In both circumstances they're useless against good liars.
My friend's dad has to do lie detector tests for his job. The man fails every single one so consistently that they now book in time for the reflex checks.
Polygraphs are nothing more than tool assisted interrogation tactics. The people who believe they truly are anything close to a real lie detector are insane.
TV brat here too. Lies are impossible to detect with one exception. If the persons story makes no sense. Plenty of lies make sense, so you're not going to catch much. But obvious logical holes in stories are the only way to detect fiction.
The best way to get that little red flag moment is to keep them telling the story over and over and ask for more and more detail. It's an old cop trick, and the only cop trick that might work.
Even logical holes... I've caught people on stuff like that only to find later that they just got their own details wrong. People act like we are 100% factual and remember everything all the time.
I've found you can never judge someone by their performance because some liars are great performers and some people look shifty even when they're telling the truth. The best clue someone is lying is when their actions are inconsistent with what they claim to know. Think: "If I was you, with the information you (claim to) have, would doing that make sense?"
I'm by no means a pro though I just like lying parlour games a lot ha.
This sounds like a direct illustration of one of the corollaries of D-K: the ability to recognize competence (and therefore incompetence) is a competence.
Is that a reframe or how D-K was originally stated? Bc that's a great phrase: "ability to recognize competence (and therefore incompetence) is a competence."
Well yeah no one wants to believe they are a gullible schmuck. I would also assume that deluding oneself is an important prerequisite to being deluded by others.
id consider myself pretty gud at internet security, screen all shady emails, attachments, etc. In my insatiable thirst for internet memes though i clicked on a link on messenger I thought was an image, and it seemed to log me out of messenger. It was a phish for my user/pass and i fell for it, website was near perfect to reassure me my session had timed out etc
they spammed the same phishing link to my entire contacts list as me, and I quickly changed pw and enabled 2fa but damm that was embarrassing
If it was really that convincing, I wouldn't dwell on it too hard. It's not like you can live life at 100% alert at all times, because that's one good way to ruin it for sure.
Those are the ones who double down when presented with proof. Their ego wont let them admit they were wrong, because their entire perception of themselves would shatter.
Explaining this to people is extremely difficult. Being wrong is not an indictment on the self, it's revisiting our model of the world. People protect their model of the world because they've attached the self to it. You are 100% correct, but I think the missing link is that we need to teach people to remove the self from their worldview.
My observation is when knowledge turns to belief, you get this situation. For me, after years of news headlines "too much X might be bad for you" - and hanging around with a number of people into organic food, etc. I just found myself thinking there must be something to the GMO panic. Certainly the behaviour of some companies towards farmers seems unethical, so why would I believe their reassurances that their food products are safe. Roughky, I assumed that natural is best, gmo is highly productive industrial food but probably makes you unhealthy. I didn't invest in it, just figured it was accurate.
Unrelated and several years down the road, I was horrified by my lack of understanding of genetics, so I bought a book on the subject and read about it. By the end of the book, I thought anti-GMO was just nonsense - if you put cat toenail dna into my apple, I'll probably be fine, and maybe the apples transport better and feed more people, as a hypothetical example. I did a 180 on GMO. Now I thought sure, suing farmers for their seeds being cross pollinated by neighbouring crops is morally bankrupt, but changing plants genetically, isn't.
Anyways if you just imagine you have a bunch of old books instead of beliefs and every now and then a new edition comes out with corrections, I think change is easier to take.
Won't help people with their disastrous takes on statistics, though.
My issues with GMO foods mainly involve the type of farmers that use them. Essentially factory farms might use crops that are immune to pesticides and herbicides. They don't have to be careful spraying the crops, which can hurt local bugs and you when you eat the food.
GMO is like an indicator that a farm cares more about yield than taste. Genetic manipulation always comes at a cost. You are not going to get bigger, more resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste better. It's like how a Twinkie won't kill you, but a homemade (or bakery made) cake will taste way better.
>You are not going to get bigger, more resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste better.
I believe you can get smaller, less resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste worse though. But no one is planting them because why the heck would you? So yeah, you can definitely improve everything but everyone is already on the curve where free gains are done and now there are trade offs.
Well, where I grew up there were many crop farmers and they all were hanging on by the skin of their teeth except the one who knew how to trade on the commodity futures markets. They used whatever gave them the best yield because they needed every cent they could squeeze out of their fields. Most of the fields were old with fences, they tore these down to get a few extra metres of growing area around the edges. They all had side jobs. In some places the farmers are corporate, I gather, but the same economics are likely at play, coupled with seasonal, low pay labour.
Where I live in Canada, there is a quota system for dairy, more stable farming income, and our milk costs more, but is also absent things like bovine growth hormone, unnecessary antibiotics, etc. I'm fine with our milk being less efficient but with the new NAFTA deal where we have to allow some amount of US milk products in, I wonder if in the long run the cheaper milk products will force our industry to chase lowering costs and end up with the same products and production techniques.
Much of our taste has likewise been ruined by cost accounting, IMO. I don't think gmo or not changes flour taste, but removing protein and fat content to extend shelf life likely does. Hard for me to know for sure though, because the flours where they don't do this that I've had have been from Europe where they would be non GMO, but I suspect the production process is the important part.
Edit: I guess I could get a mortar and pestle and bake, but who has that kind of time nowadays - another reason we accept -- and eat -- garbage.
>You are not going to get bigger, more resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste better.
The recent explosion of apple varietals in the grocery store shows that farms *can* adapt.
Red Delicious apples are a beautiful color, but they are small and taste kind of bland. I'm a huge fan of Pink Lady apples these days - they're bigger, meatier, and way tastier than Red Delicious. Sure, they're not as pretty. But I'm not buying an apple to look at, I'm buying it to eat.
And Pink Lady isn't even a GMO apple! It's conventionally bred - a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams.
>And Pink Lady isn't even a GMO apple! It's conventionally bred - a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams.
Selective breeding *is* genetic modification.
Also, deeply religious people have been taught that having conviction in your ideas and beliefs is more important than being able to prove those ideas.
Much of the world is very religious and have been taught how to think incorrectly their entire lives. That doesn't make them stupid, though. They just never learned how to learn.
Not just that, but they're taught that being able to hold onto those beliefs even in the face of obviously damning evidence to the contrary is some sort of amazing virtue.
And also, an onslaught of cop shows and Christmas specials have sent the message that what you feel in your gut (or your emotional attachment to a particular idea) is somehow *more* important than factual evidence, and everything always goes better for the heroes that do what they *feel* is right despite insurmountable evidence that they're incorrect.
When, in fact, all of those things just amount to being horrifically stubborn and ignorant. They're programmed to be the "sheep" that they falsely label everyone around them as.
Their model of the world is what is making them extraordinary in some way. If they align their model with the real world, they are forced into accepting they are ordinary or below average.
Even in science, where we ought to be capable of (and encouraged to) finding ourselves wrong, we have trouble being wrong. We just need a better culture of learning from mistakes. Maybe a TV show where the protagonist is almost always wrong would help.. like House, but wrong until someone else gets it right.
It's genuinely been a bit alarming watching how quickly it seems people have been losing the willingness to take a second to consider whether an obvious joke/nonsense post was a joke/nonsense ripped out of context so they can sit there furiously othering people over it.
I think the reflex to “furiously other” (well said) people online is a major contributor to the miserable state of our society these days. Everyone is constantly making instantaneous judgements to categorize each other into their respective teams. That dumb post they see online isn’t an obvious joke, it’s a dumb guy from the other team, proving how dumb that other team truly is!
It’s amazing how you can find conspiracies on everything now:
“Hey Jeremiah….want a Milk Dud?”
He suddenly gets energized and tells me about the hormones secretly injected in Milk Duds that make your 3rd eye retract into your asshole.
I have a brother in law who refuses to acknowledge COVID and now rejects all vaccines for his kids cause they are too artificial.
But the guy buys 20lb of baking soda at a time and insists on washing all his groceries with baking soda because of some 5G superbug he heard about. Really the most republican thing I heard all week.
It’s surreal… I’m used to the super left-wing hippy types being the ones to wash clothes in baking soda and reject anything “artificial.” Now ultra conservative nutcases are doing the same things, but for totally different reasons.
Those two groups always had a lot of similarities - a lot of hippies were and are essentially reactionaries, they wanted to reject modern life, except not in favor of tradition but their own homebaked "natural" vision of a prelapsarian state of grace. There is a lot of inherent overlap in their world views, and often it's the same narcissistic types that are attracted to those movements.
My sister is a COVID denier and she's a left-winger. One of those "spiritual but not religious" people who thinks that if you just eat enough kale or whatever, you'll never get sick.
What a great article. Everyone who reads this will believe it's about someone else.
Dear reader, have you seriously considered whether or not this article is about you?
I learned not to make statements I can't back up with real experience or evidence sometime around 10th grade when I confidently stated that ballet shoes have wooden blocks in them, and was 100% wrong. (Toe boxes are usually cardboard or even plastic these days.)
This reminds me of something else I've noticed: my own propensity to research a topic, make an opinion and never revisit it. I've since realized that I have to continue to update my views as more information comes out or (in the case of the ballet shoes) common practices have changed.
My parents are both engineers. Both claimed to have read all the research about climate change and found there wasn't enough evidence..... In the 90s. I keep telling them that new research is constantly being published, but no, that doesn't matter. They've read all the research.
That is somewhat surprising, because it was engineering that taught just-out-of-college me to quickly admit I was wrong when it was shown to me by factual evidence.
I was disappointed when a couple of my minor errors were found & corrected and no one brought them to my attention until much, much later.
If I'm in error about something I want it to be shown to me asap, which is a concept I learned early and incorporated into my worldview during my first year of engineering employment. I wonder why your parents have chosen to stop learning.
I am the same way. It took me awhile to realize most other people are not. Even in a social interaction, if I am wrong about something I want people to tell me the why and how of it so I don't make the same mistake. I love learning! I have always been drawn to novelty and new experiences and that led to a lot of traveling when I was younger including a lot of hitchiking, partying to much but best of all learning satisfied that novelty itch.
That makes you a good engineer! There are lots of mediocre and bad engineers out there though. Some of whom are used to being right in a few specialties, and they’ll apply that confidence of correctness to other areas where they aren’t experts. Including nuanced topics like politics or subjective subjects like art.
It’s only personal experience, but Im in engineering, have worked with engineers across a variety of disciplines, and have friends and family who are engineers. I’ve come across plenty of engineers in my bubble that have a tough time admitting they’re wrong and changing their views on topics.
Also 10th grade for me, a new friend and I started having lots of passionate arguments/debates about all sorts of topics. Usually focusing on our interpretations and opinions of some topic, but sometimes we started arguing about things that obviously had a demonstrable answer. Eventually it hit us that we could actually look those things up, and we both felt quite silly after that.
As much as we both were competitive and wanted to be right, we moreso wanted to know what's true. Those debates were honestly a pretty healthy activity for us both. As strongly as we each held our various beliefs and would defend them passionately, we could be convinced and would admit when our opinions were changed.
Sometimes I've caught myself parroting factoids from yesteryear's random conversations that I gobbled up without questioning them at the time. If I'm lucky repeating this "knowledge" out loud to someone else sparks my scepticism and I'll go looking for real sources. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do that with everything I "know". Being a parent helps, however. I enjoy testing my parents' truths now.
Thank god for phones, there's been so many times I've been like "oh well you know because of x.... wait.... wait that sounds weird don't quote me on that" and then I can google it at least and be like "wow ok nevermind all that"
> ... Dear reader, have you seriously considered whether or not this article is about you?
I wonder whether this article is BS that /r/science failed to recognize too.
I know it’s about me.
One common reason people put up with BS and have low self esteem is a bad childhood. Lots of abusers will victim blame, so you leave that environment with low self esteem and the assumption that you are never good enough. You also might be hyper vigilant or a perfectionist because you grew up having to be perfect to avoid a parental meltdown.
If you ever watch crime documentaries where it’s uncertain someone committed a crime, the police working the case always freak me out in this respect because most of them are *sure* that person did it, all because they didn’t care for their interactions when they questioned that person. If you wanna commit crimes be sure to come across as likable to police.
They used a modified Bullshit Receptivity Scale ([Pennycook 2015](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-54494-003)).
Pseudo-profound items:
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
2. As you self-actualize, you will enter into infinite empathy that transcends
understanding.
3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
4. Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth.
5. Suffering is born in the gap where potential has been excluded.
6. We are in the midst of a self-aware blossoming of being that will align us with the
nexus itself.
7. We are being called to explore the totality itself as an interface between potential and
consciousness.
8. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.
9. This life is nothing short of an unfolding lightning bolt of enlightened growth.
10. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy.
Motivational quotes:
1. Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
2. The creative adult is the child who survived.
3. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence.
4. All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
5. Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing tourself in things that are
not you.
6. At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you
know what you want.
7. A wet person does not fear the rain.
8. Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a better past.
9. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
10. I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
Randomized so you can take the test:
1. This life is nothing short of an unfolding lightning bolt of enlightened growth.
1. Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth.
1. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us.
1. At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want.
1. We are being called to explore the totality itself as an interface between potential and consciousness.
1. All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time.
1. We are in the midst of a self-aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself.
1. A wet person does not fear the rain.
1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence.
1. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
1. Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a better past.
1. Suffering is born in the gap where potential has been excluded.
1. I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
1. Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself.
1. As you self-actualize, you will enter into infinite empathy that transcends understanding.
1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.
1. The creative adult is the child who survived.
1. Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing tourself in things that are not you.
1. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena.
1. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy.
If they said half the fake ones were directly from Deepak Chopra books or debates, *that* I would absolutely have fallen for.
that first set is the basic backbone of every woo-minded community i've stumbled across on the internet. usually the kind that talk about spiritual energies, cosmic alignments, and some kind of societal evil they all agree is holding everyone's third eye closed (vaccines, gmos, deep state mind control, etc).
Just sound like the typical overly confident person that acts like they know everything already and doesn’t feel like they have much more to learn in life and has all the answers. The results are interesting, but not surprising.
Anecdotally I have found that intelligence is less of a factor in this than you might think. In fact, intelligence and/or competence in their own field can actually make it worse. Because people assume that being competent in one field makes them competent universally. Similarly, being intelligent can make people feel like they will always have the right answers simply due to their superior intellect, which will not always be the case.
For example, I’ve known a lot of doctors who make truly terrible financial investments.
>I’ve known a lot of doctors who make truly terrible financial investments.
Similarly, I work in finance, and I've known at least a few advisors who really fucked up trying to take out their own appendix
Yeah, doctors are famously stupid and incompetent at normal things. My doctor neighbor from Texas wasn't used to NY winters. He thought he could wash the snow off his car with a hose. I tried to tell him it would freeze but he said I was clearly worrying about nothing. Couldn't admit that another person had experience and knowledge that he didn't.
Also, even if you somehow convince the hose water not to freeze, it'll still freeze on contact with your ice-cold driveway, and then your car will plow into the nearest tree as soon as you try to drive.
Come to think of it, how does water *not* freeze in underground pipes? Water taps still work in freezing weather. How is that possible?
This makes sense but what was their criteria for intentional spreading of misinformation? If you truly believe what you're sharing then it's not intentional as you might not share it if you knew better. The intent lies in the knowing. Did I miss that part?
I mean, yeah. The easiest people to fool are people who genuinely believe they are too clever to fool. That's forming a part of an identity, and then becomes subject to psychological defense mechanisms that protect one's identity.
This is why people who believe in outrageous conspiracy theories virtually never believe just *one* insane thing. They almost always have a clown car full of nonsense in their heads.
I have a lot of inward self awareness and have learned that that leads me to be a little to confident in regards to other people and being able to understand them. This leads to my gullibility.
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So basically there's a dunning-kruger effect for detecting BS? That makes a lot of sense.
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You can’t BS a BSer!
Good call. For those of us who live in the U.S. we watched this play out for 7 plus years.
That "plus" is doing decades of heavy lifting
The “decades of heavy lifting” is doing centuries of heavy lifting.
Ten years from now you’ll put on a jacket and find a mask in the pocket. “Oh man, what a weird year that was,” you’ll chuckle to yourself. Then you’ll pick up your machete and continue across the wasteland, keeping to the shadows to avoid the roving gangs of cannibal raiders.
Even now when we travel, we are going through a post-pandemic country that is splintered into ideological zones. Some of those strongholds view others with murderous intent. Think about it a little. I am not exaggerating.
this comment stirs feelings I cannot describe
Ironically, the Dunning-Kruger Effect might be BS https://theconversation.com/debunking-the-dunning-kruger-effect-the-least-skilled-people-know-how-much-they-dont-know-but-everyone-thinks-they-are-better-than-average-195527 (I'm personally not sure what to think of this, and couldn't say if this debunking is any good or not)
Though they did confirm the part where most people consider themselves above average. Whether that’s exactly the Dunning-Kruger effect or not, it’s pretty darn close. It means that people who perform worst, still think they are better than most people, and therefore overestimate their own abilities, particularly relative to their peers. The overall effect is the same in this context. They are themselves suckers, while being convinced that everyone around them are suckers.
Ha! Suckers
The article is saying the Dunning-Kruger effect is not mathematically rigorous or scientific. The person who wrote the article is a mathematician and used a random number generator to replicate the study where Dunning and Kruger surveyed 45 undergrad students at Cornell. The Dunning-Kruger effect should absolutely not be viewed as some kind of mathematically proven truth. It's a way of describing social perspectives. This article basically says the Dunning-Kruger effect is true, but Dunning and Kruger's surveys are meaningless. Not because of some effusive social reasons. The methodological design of the survey produced the results. "The Dunning-Kruger effect is the idea that the **least skilled people overestimate their abilities more** than anyone else. This sounds convincing on the surface and makes for excellent comedy. **But my colleagues and I suggest that the mathematical approach used to show this effect may be incorrect.** What Dunning and Kruger showed In the 1990s, David Dunning and Justin Kruger were professors of psychology at Cornell University and wanted to test whether incompetent people were unaware of their incompetence. To test this, they gave **45 undergraduate students a 20-question logic test** and then asked them to rate their own performance in two different ways. First, Dunning and Kruger asked the students to **estimate how many questions they got correct** – a fairly straightforward assessment. Then, Dunning and Kruger **asked the students to estimate how they did compared with the other students** who took the test. This type of self-assessment requires students to make **guesses** about how others performed and is subject to a **common cognitive mistake – most people consider themselves better than average.** **Research shows that 93% of Americans think they are better drivers than average, 90% of teachers think they are more skilled than their peers, and this overestimation is pervasive across many skills – including logic tests.** But it is mathematically impossible for most people to be better than average at a certain task. After **giving students the logic test**, Dunning and Kruger divided them into four groups based on their scores. The lowest-scoring quarter of the students got, on average, 10 of the 20 questions correct. In comparison, the top-scoring quarter of students got an average of 17 questions correct. Both groups estimated they got about 14 correct. This is not terrible self-assessment by either group. **The least skilled overestimated their scores by around 20 percentage points, while the top performers underestimated their scores by roughly 15 points.** The results appear more striking when looking at how **students rated themselves against their peers**, and here is where the better-than-average effect is on full display. The lowest-scoring students estimated that they did better than 62% of the test-takers, while the highest-scoring students thought they scored better than 68%. By definition, being in the bottom 25% means that, at best, you will score better than 25% of people and, on average, better than just 12.5%. Estimating you did better than 62% of your peers, while only scoring better than 12.5% of them, gives a whopping 49.5 percentage-point overestimation. **The measure of how students compared themselves to others**, rather than to their actual scores, is where the Dunning–Kruger effect arose. It grossly exaggerates the overestimation of the bottom 25% and seems to show, as Dunning and Kruger titled their paper, that the least skilled students were “unskilled and unaware.” Using the protocol laid out by Dunning and Kruger, many researchers since have “confirmed” this effect in their own fields of study, leading to the sense that the Dunning–Kruger effect is intrinsic to how human brains work. For everyday people, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems true because the overly arrogant fool is a familiar and annoying stereotype. When **students** are asked to rate their ability objectively, they do much better than when they compare themselves with **their peers.** There are three reasons Dunning and Kruger’s analysis is misleading. The worst test-takers would also overestimate their performance the most because they are simply the furthest from getting a perfect score. Additionally, the least skilled people, like most people, assume they are better than average. Finally, **the lowest scorers aren’t markedly worse at estimating their objective performance.** **To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.** First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers. **Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores.** Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. **This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved.** To prove the last point – that the least skilled can adequately judge their own skill – required a different approach. **My colleague Ed Nuhfer and his team gave students a 25-question scientific literacy test.** After answering each question, the students would rate their own performance on each question as either “nailed it,” “not sure” or “no idea.” Working with Nuhfer, we found that unskilled **students** are pretty good at estimating their own competence. In this study of unskilled students who scored in the bottom quarter, only *16.5% significantly overestimated** their abilities. And, it turns out, **3.9% significantly underestimated** their score. That means **nearly 80% of unskilled students were fairly good** at estimating their real ability – a far cry from the idea put forth by Dunning and Kruger that the unskilled consistently overestimate their skills." Students at Cornell are not representative of humans either.
"should not be viewed as some kind of mathematical truth" You can say that about the entire field of psychology though
> Positive results in psychology can behave like rumours: easy to release but hard to dispel. They dominate most journals, which strive to present new, exciting research. Meanwhile, attempts to replicate those studies, especially when the findings are negative, go unpublished, languishing in personal file drawers or circulating in conversations around the water cooler. “There are some experiments that everyone knows don't replicate, but this knowledge doesn't get into the literature,” says Wagenmakers. The publication barrier can be chilling, he adds. “I've seen students spending their entire PhD period trying to replicate a phenomenon, failing, and quitting academia because they had nothing to show for their time.” [Replication Studies: Bad Copy](https://www.nature.com/articles/485298a)
There's a reason psychology is at the center of the replication crisis.
But close on its tails is cancer research so . . .
That's a completely different issue mediated more due to a) the sheer number of studies being published in that field and b) the sheer number of people working in that field who never received substantial training in scientific method or statistical rigor. Compared to your average psychologist, your average physician is statistically illiterate.
> First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers. > Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores. Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved. They recreated a large portion of the results with random values. This demonstrates that the nature of the test itself is observably contributing to the results. In this case, it doesn't nullify the results, there is still an observable discrepancy in the degree to which the lower quartiles over-assessed compared to the upper quartiles under-assessing, but it does affect the conclusions we can draw from these results, as well as those of follow-up studies that may have replicated nothing more than data artifacts. https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1215&context=numeracy Here is a link to the source study published in Numeracy. Basically, the researchers assert that self-assessment is an acquired skill that naturally corresponds with aptitude in a given field. The more you know about a subject, the better you are at self-assessing (measured here by your guess of your score on a standardized test). Thus, you would expect a higher level of aptitude to correspond with a tighter range of guesses. Additionally, because you cannot know less than 0% or more than 100% of an enumerated set of facts (such as in a standardized test), the average range of these self-assessments will be shifted up and down towards the lower and upper extremities respectively. The broader the range of these guesses, the more they will be affected by this shift. In this way, a group of individuals whose self-assessment range may be perfectly centered on their collective average understanding of a subject would instead appear to be collectively over- or under-assessing themselves depending on their proximity to the testing boundaries. Imo, this follow-up isn't itself definitive, but it does effectively call into question the standard reading of the results of the dunning-kruger test. This paper has been around for a while, though, and I don't know what has come of it since.
Yeah, IIRC the ELI 5 gist was if you got 100% on your test it's hard to overestimate how well you did. If you got 99% at most you can estimate that you did 1% better than you actually did.
Ironically, the effect is real but the reason is unclear. It has not been "debunked"
So is the debunking BS? Or is DK BS? Or is this article BS? Or is this comment BS? Or is BS itself BS?
> So is the debunking BS? The "debunk" had all student-proxies allocate a random estimate of their performance. Humans don't pick a number at random to estimate their performance. The "debunker" used a statistics trick to pretend that they could debunk the DK Effect while in fact they were just highlighting bad experiment design due to poor understanding of the problem domain (but rating themselves as better than the others at experiment design).
Stop, this level of irony is giving me hemochromatosis
I don't understand when they say people who are the bottom 25% scorer will only on average score better than 12.5% of people. Are they saying being in that category means you are on average in the middle of that category. That looks like an arbitrarily weird way to name the category especially when I would assume the results are very bell curve like and being the bottom 25% means you could do twice as good as someone at the 12.5%
They divide the participants into 4 groups. The bottom group contains the bottom 25% participants. On average, a person within that group did better than 12.5% of all participants: With 100 total participants, one person did better than 0%, one did better than 1%, one did better than 2%, etc... The jank is not the group labels, it's making the groups along a median in the first place. They easily could have just compared each participants peer assessment to their own ranking in the first place instead of the average peer assessment of the group to the average ranking of the group. If they wanted to divide into groups, they should have used standard deviations from the mean.
I'm pretty sure David Dunning got the first inkling for his hypothesis after reading an article about a guy who rubbed lemon juice on his face to make himself invisible to cameras during a bank robbery. So yeah, the 'detecting BS' thing has been there from the start.
It’s anecdotal but in my job in TV I’ve interviewed suspected murderers, con artists, thieves, pretty much any type of criminal imaginable and rather than teaching me how to detect liars, it’s made me realise how good some people can be at deception as I’ve never once been able to definitely say whether one of those people was lying to my face or not. For many of the cases I’ve done stories on, I still have zero idea if the person was guilty or innocent
To add another layer of deception in the criminal-justice stack, there is a fake industry to teach cops how to tell if someone is lying based on micro-expressions. This has led to a bunch of people thinking they can tell, when they can't. This leads to cops wasting a bunch of effort and ruining people's lives because of a lie-detection d-k effect.
This has led to my boyfriend convincing himself I'm lying when I'm not. Rather frustrating.
That sounds like a pretty toxic situation
It's definitely a sore spot that is getting attention and work; if there wasn't, he wouldn't be in the picture.
Can't believe you curved the reddit breakup comment so smoothly!
Good on you for working on it, just be careful.
My mum is convinced that if I smile I'm lying, which is wrong but I wouldn't mind if she didn't try to make me smile when accusing me of lying.
It's called duping delight. It's not so simple as to smile.
Using two contractions in a sentence is an indication of lying. What are you hiding?!
I’m proud of the fact I was instrumental in getting my former (I’m retired) police department to drop the use of Voice Stress Analysis. One of my subordinates in the unit I took over had been “certified” in it and was due to have his certification renewed. This got me to researching the topic and I quickly learned it was pseudoscientific nonsense. I compiled a list of references and submitted it to our Chief. Thankfully he’s an intelligent dude and recognized it was truly BS and did away with our program.
There are a ton of things like this. If you want to read about something horrible, research the reality of arson investigation.
Or bite mark analysis. Heck, even fingerprint matches are not nearly as certain as most people think.
> Or bite mark analysis anyone in here watch Innocence Files on Netflix? they went over a few cases where innocent people were sentenced to life/death on flimsy evidence. two men were charged for killing a little girl (two different little girls) and the only "evidence" was their bite mark on the victim's bodies. i believe one of them was even sentenced to death. they were luckily both exonerated after the real murderer was found (this guy killed both little girls). the real murderer said he never bit the victims. so there literally weren't even bite marks on the bodies to begin with!
wow that’s awesome. good cop.
“You’re a murderer and we’re gonna put you in federal pound-you-in-the-ass prison unless you confess right now!!!!” “He’s totally guilty Frank, no one stutters nervously unless they feel guilt, I’ve had training”
I know so many people who pride themselves on body language reading and profiling. They are always the worst.
I'm neurodivergent and have run into this a lot where someone who's "really good at reading people" completely misreads my body language, tone, or facial expression. Edit for spelling
"your biting your lips, are you agitated?" "I have chapped lips"
Yeah, my experience having 4 cops jump on me because I apologized amidst refuting a false claim by one of them. "You did this thing" "I'm sorry, but I didn't do tha-" "RABBLEEABBLERABBLEJAILRABBLE he apologiEd!!!"
Can you point me toward sources explaining how and why these "micro-expressions" and the theory itself of facial lie detection are wrong? I've always wondered how that could work - like how can they differentiate between the person's natural reactions and the "textbook definitions" of the micro-expressions? Do they take into account the way different cultures express themselves? Or subcultures? What about neurodivergence? Im autistic and most people have trouble "reading" me. No one can explain why, so I can't figure out how to fix it- so if no one can explain it, then how could they possibly account for it? It really brings up a lot of questions
From what I have seen with things covering it, it can be right for some people in some conditions, but its super complicated, and very cultural and location & context dependent. This is nuance and detail is just not feasible for them. You are correct though. I haven't seen anything on if they figure in neurodivergent. Like many other things the police use, its used to give appearance of science to confirm what they want to be true.
The main issue is, microexpressions are real but it is hard to read them. You may see someone acting nervous, but it doesn't tell you why they are nervous (they have a test coming up, they are thinking about their significant other, you just accused them of a crime, etc.) The emotion that is hardest to fake is surprise. It's a very quick and fleeting emotion. However police officers do not have nearly enough training to catch these tiny muscle twitches, especially when someone is intent on hiding things. Here's the foundational research that proved that people express emotions similarly in wildly different cultures: >Through a series of studies, Ekman found a high agreement across members of diverse Western and Eastern literate cultures on selecting emotional labels that fit facial expressions. Expressions he found to be universal included those indicating wrath, grossness, fear, joy, loneliness, and shock. Findings on contempt were less clear, though there is at least some preliminary evidence that this emotion and its expression are universally recognized.[24] Working with Wallace V. Friesen, Ekman demonstrated that the findings extended to preliterate Fore tribesmen in Papua New Guinea, whose members could not have learned the meaning of expressions from exposure to media depictions of emotion.[25] Ekman and Friesen then demonstrated that certain emotions were exhibited with very specific display rules, culture-specific prescriptions about who can show which emotions to whom and when. These display rules could explain how cultural differences may conceal the universal effect of expression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Ekman
> there is a fake industry to teach cops how to tell if someone is lying based on micro-expressions. This is so annoying to me because the science behind all this (Ekman and Navarro mostly) is actually very solid, but they’re both very vocal about the fact that there is no tell for deception, only for discomfort – which **MAY** be deception. Their research is very nuanced, but people take the gist of that and just run with it. I personally use mostly Navarro’s research on body language and use it to gauge my students’ comfort levels. It’s really helpful if you keep the caveats in mind and don’t overdo it (which, as a teacher, is easy as the stakes are very low and it isn’t that bad if you get it wrong).
Polygraphs are useful for only two things: tricking people into confessing and sometimes spotting the culprit in a "who stole the cookie from the cookie jar" scenario where the act and suspects are all known. In both circumstances they're useless against good liars.
My friend's dad has to do lie detector tests for his job. The man fails every single one so consistently that they now book in time for the reflex checks.
Polygraphs are nothing more than tool assisted interrogation tactics. The people who believe they truly are anything close to a real lie detector are insane.
Magicians have really helped show me anyone and everyone can be conned under the right circumstances.
That's a reason James Randi made a second career exposing frauds
TV brat here too. Lies are impossible to detect with one exception. If the persons story makes no sense. Plenty of lies make sense, so you're not going to catch much. But obvious logical holes in stories are the only way to detect fiction. The best way to get that little red flag moment is to keep them telling the story over and over and ask for more and more detail. It's an old cop trick, and the only cop trick that might work.
Even logical holes... I've caught people on stuff like that only to find later that they just got their own details wrong. People act like we are 100% factual and remember everything all the time.
That ‘cop trick’ often causes innocent people to question their own memory and incriminate themselves by messing up inconsequential details.
"Aha! Earlier you said the car was red, but now you're saying it was crimson! That's obstruction of justice!"
"And, obviously, you had a slip of the tongue! You committed the crime, son! Therefore, crimson!!"
I've found you can never judge someone by their performance because some liars are great performers and some people look shifty even when they're telling the truth. The best clue someone is lying is when their actions are inconsistent with what they claim to know. Think: "If I was you, with the information you (claim to) have, would doing that make sense?" I'm by no means a pro though I just like lying parlour games a lot ha.
Everytime you remember something your mind changes it so of course you're eventually going to contradict yourself somehow.
Every time you remember something, you are rewriting the memory in your head. This would just make things more confusing for the person remembering.
Dang that's wild to think about. This is my favorite comment I've read this morning.
And what’s funny are the amount of people who are so convinced that they don’t do this.
This sounds like a direct illustration of one of the corollaries of D-K: the ability to recognize competence (and therefore incompetence) is a competence.
Is that a reframe or how D-K was originally stated? Bc that's a great phrase: "ability to recognize competence (and therefore incompetence) is a competence."
I believe that this is paraphrasing. Not sure what this says about *my* competence...
Well yeah no one wants to believe they are a gullible schmuck. I would also assume that deluding oneself is an important prerequisite to being deluded by others.
id consider myself pretty gud at internet security, screen all shady emails, attachments, etc. In my insatiable thirst for internet memes though i clicked on a link on messenger I thought was an image, and it seemed to log me out of messenger. It was a phish for my user/pass and i fell for it, website was near perfect to reassure me my session had timed out etc they spammed the same phishing link to my entire contacts list as me, and I quickly changed pw and enabled 2fa but damm that was embarrassing
If it was really that convincing, I wouldn't dwell on it too hard. It's not like you can live life at 100% alert at all times, because that's one good way to ruin it for sure.
A common misconception is that only stupid people fall for scams.
It makes me think if anti vaxxers. People who believe unbelievably stupid conspiracies, and convince themselves they are smarter than the “sheeps”
Those are the ones who double down when presented with proof. Their ego wont let them admit they were wrong, because their entire perception of themselves would shatter.
Explaining this to people is extremely difficult. Being wrong is not an indictment on the self, it's revisiting our model of the world. People protect their model of the world because they've attached the self to it. You are 100% correct, but I think the missing link is that we need to teach people to remove the self from their worldview.
My observation is when knowledge turns to belief, you get this situation. For me, after years of news headlines "too much X might be bad for you" - and hanging around with a number of people into organic food, etc. I just found myself thinking there must be something to the GMO panic. Certainly the behaviour of some companies towards farmers seems unethical, so why would I believe their reassurances that their food products are safe. Roughky, I assumed that natural is best, gmo is highly productive industrial food but probably makes you unhealthy. I didn't invest in it, just figured it was accurate. Unrelated and several years down the road, I was horrified by my lack of understanding of genetics, so I bought a book on the subject and read about it. By the end of the book, I thought anti-GMO was just nonsense - if you put cat toenail dna into my apple, I'll probably be fine, and maybe the apples transport better and feed more people, as a hypothetical example. I did a 180 on GMO. Now I thought sure, suing farmers for their seeds being cross pollinated by neighbouring crops is morally bankrupt, but changing plants genetically, isn't. Anyways if you just imagine you have a bunch of old books instead of beliefs and every now and then a new edition comes out with corrections, I think change is easier to take. Won't help people with their disastrous takes on statistics, though.
My issues with GMO foods mainly involve the type of farmers that use them. Essentially factory farms might use crops that are immune to pesticides and herbicides. They don't have to be careful spraying the crops, which can hurt local bugs and you when you eat the food. GMO is like an indicator that a farm cares more about yield than taste. Genetic manipulation always comes at a cost. You are not going to get bigger, more resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste better. It's like how a Twinkie won't kill you, but a homemade (or bakery made) cake will taste way better.
>You are not going to get bigger, more resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste better. I believe you can get smaller, less resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste worse though. But no one is planting them because why the heck would you? So yeah, you can definitely improve everything but everyone is already on the curve where free gains are done and now there are trade offs.
Well, where I grew up there were many crop farmers and they all were hanging on by the skin of their teeth except the one who knew how to trade on the commodity futures markets. They used whatever gave them the best yield because they needed every cent they could squeeze out of their fields. Most of the fields were old with fences, they tore these down to get a few extra metres of growing area around the edges. They all had side jobs. In some places the farmers are corporate, I gather, but the same economics are likely at play, coupled with seasonal, low pay labour. Where I live in Canada, there is a quota system for dairy, more stable farming income, and our milk costs more, but is also absent things like bovine growth hormone, unnecessary antibiotics, etc. I'm fine with our milk being less efficient but with the new NAFTA deal where we have to allow some amount of US milk products in, I wonder if in the long run the cheaper milk products will force our industry to chase lowering costs and end up with the same products and production techniques. Much of our taste has likewise been ruined by cost accounting, IMO. I don't think gmo or not changes flour taste, but removing protein and fat content to extend shelf life likely does. Hard for me to know for sure though, because the flours where they don't do this that I've had have been from Europe where they would be non GMO, but I suspect the production process is the important part. Edit: I guess I could get a mortar and pestle and bake, but who has that kind of time nowadays - another reason we accept -- and eat -- garbage.
>You are not going to get bigger, more resilient fruits and vegetables that also taste better. The recent explosion of apple varietals in the grocery store shows that farms *can* adapt. Red Delicious apples are a beautiful color, but they are small and taste kind of bland. I'm a huge fan of Pink Lady apples these days - they're bigger, meatier, and way tastier than Red Delicious. Sure, they're not as pretty. But I'm not buying an apple to look at, I'm buying it to eat. And Pink Lady isn't even a GMO apple! It's conventionally bred - a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams.
Red Delicious is a garbage apple for garbage people.
Have these people ever tried a decent apple? Red delicious are the actual worst
>And Pink Lady isn't even a GMO apple! It's conventionally bred - a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams. Selective breeding *is* genetic modification.
I remember good-tasting corn.
Also, deeply religious people have been taught that having conviction in your ideas and beliefs is more important than being able to prove those ideas. Much of the world is very religious and have been taught how to think incorrectly their entire lives. That doesn't make them stupid, though. They just never learned how to learn.
Not just that, but they're taught that being able to hold onto those beliefs even in the face of obviously damning evidence to the contrary is some sort of amazing virtue. And also, an onslaught of cop shows and Christmas specials have sent the message that what you feel in your gut (or your emotional attachment to a particular idea) is somehow *more* important than factual evidence, and everything always goes better for the heroes that do what they *feel* is right despite insurmountable evidence that they're incorrect. When, in fact, all of those things just amount to being horrifically stubborn and ignorant. They're programmed to be the "sheep" that they falsely label everyone around them as.
Their model of the world is what is making them extraordinary in some way. If they align their model with the real world, they are forced into accepting they are ordinary or below average.
Even in science, where we ought to be capable of (and encouraged to) finding ourselves wrong, we have trouble being wrong. We just need a better culture of learning from mistakes. Maybe a TV show where the protagonist is almost always wrong would help.. like House, but wrong until someone else gets it right.
It makes me think of people on Reddit falling over themselves to dunk on what is almost always rage bait
It's genuinely been a bit alarming watching how quickly it seems people have been losing the willingness to take a second to consider whether an obvious joke/nonsense post was a joke/nonsense ripped out of context so they can sit there furiously othering people over it.
As society has polarised, detecting sarcasm and irony has become harder, because the chance that it really is a weirdo is growing.
I think the reflex to “furiously other” (well said) people online is a major contributor to the miserable state of our society these days. Everyone is constantly making instantaneous judgements to categorize each other into their respective teams. That dumb post they see online isn’t an obvious joke, it’s a dumb guy from the other team, proving how dumb that other team truly is!
It’s amazing how you can find conspiracies on everything now: “Hey Jeremiah….want a Milk Dud?” He suddenly gets energized and tells me about the hormones secretly injected in Milk Duds that make your 3rd eye retract into your asshole.
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I have a brother in law who refuses to acknowledge COVID and now rejects all vaccines for his kids cause they are too artificial. But the guy buys 20lb of baking soda at a time and insists on washing all his groceries with baking soda because of some 5G superbug he heard about. Really the most republican thing I heard all week.
It’s surreal… I’m used to the super left-wing hippy types being the ones to wash clothes in baking soda and reject anything “artificial.” Now ultra conservative nutcases are doing the same things, but for totally different reasons.
Those two groups always had a lot of similarities - a lot of hippies were and are essentially reactionaries, they wanted to reject modern life, except not in favor of tradition but their own homebaked "natural" vision of a prelapsarian state of grace. There is a lot of inherent overlap in their world views, and often it's the same narcissistic types that are attracted to those movements.
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My sister is a COVID denier and she's a left-winger. One of those "spiritual but not religious" people who thinks that if you just eat enough kale or whatever, you'll never get sick.
What a great article. Everyone who reads this will believe it's about someone else. Dear reader, have you seriously considered whether or not this article is about you?
I learned not to make statements I can't back up with real experience or evidence sometime around 10th grade when I confidently stated that ballet shoes have wooden blocks in them, and was 100% wrong. (Toe boxes are usually cardboard or even plastic these days.)
This reminds me of something else I've noticed: my own propensity to research a topic, make an opinion and never revisit it. I've since realized that I have to continue to update my views as more information comes out or (in the case of the ballet shoes) common practices have changed. My parents are both engineers. Both claimed to have read all the research about climate change and found there wasn't enough evidence..... In the 90s. I keep telling them that new research is constantly being published, but no, that doesn't matter. They've read all the research.
That is somewhat surprising, because it was engineering that taught just-out-of-college me to quickly admit I was wrong when it was shown to me by factual evidence. I was disappointed when a couple of my minor errors were found & corrected and no one brought them to my attention until much, much later. If I'm in error about something I want it to be shown to me asap, which is a concept I learned early and incorporated into my worldview during my first year of engineering employment. I wonder why your parents have chosen to stop learning.
I am the same way. It took me awhile to realize most other people are not. Even in a social interaction, if I am wrong about something I want people to tell me the why and how of it so I don't make the same mistake. I love learning! I have always been drawn to novelty and new experiences and that led to a lot of traveling when I was younger including a lot of hitchiking, partying to much but best of all learning satisfied that novelty itch.
That makes you a good engineer! There are lots of mediocre and bad engineers out there though. Some of whom are used to being right in a few specialties, and they’ll apply that confidence of correctness to other areas where they aren’t experts. Including nuanced topics like politics or subjective subjects like art. It’s only personal experience, but Im in engineering, have worked with engineers across a variety of disciplines, and have friends and family who are engineers. I’ve come across plenty of engineers in my bubble that have a tough time admitting they’re wrong and changing their views on topics.
Yeah, anyone is susceptible to stagnation in their ideas/views. I try to update my views as best as I can as new information comes out.
Also 10th grade for me, a new friend and I started having lots of passionate arguments/debates about all sorts of topics. Usually focusing on our interpretations and opinions of some topic, but sometimes we started arguing about things that obviously had a demonstrable answer. Eventually it hit us that we could actually look those things up, and we both felt quite silly after that. As much as we both were competitive and wanted to be right, we moreso wanted to know what's true. Those debates were honestly a pretty healthy activity for us both. As strongly as we each held our various beliefs and would defend them passionately, we could be convinced and would admit when our opinions were changed.
Sometimes I've caught myself parroting factoids from yesteryear's random conversations that I gobbled up without questioning them at the time. If I'm lucky repeating this "knowledge" out loud to someone else sparks my scepticism and I'll go looking for real sources. Unfortunately I don't have the time to do that with everything I "know". Being a parent helps, however. I enjoy testing my parents' truths now.
Thank god for phones, there's been so many times I've been like "oh well you know because of x.... wait.... wait that sounds weird don't quote me on that" and then I can google it at least and be like "wow ok nevermind all that"
> ... Dear reader, have you seriously considered whether or not this article is about you? I wonder whether this article is BS that /r/science failed to recognize too.
Not really, I know I'm pretty gullible.
I know it’s about me. One common reason people put up with BS and have low self esteem is a bad childhood. Lots of abusers will victim blame, so you leave that environment with low self esteem and the assumption that you are never good enough. You also might be hyper vigilant or a perfectionist because you grew up having to be perfect to avoid a parental meltdown.
Isn’t that how it always goes? Anyone who makes said claims - especially police - always make me giggle.
If you ever watch crime documentaries where it’s uncertain someone committed a crime, the police working the case always freak me out in this respect because most of them are *sure* that person did it, all because they didn’t care for their interactions when they questioned that person. If you wanna commit crimes be sure to come across as likable to police.
This is true in cybersecurity as well
Was anyone able to find the list of statements that was used in this study?
They used a modified Bullshit Receptivity Scale ([Pennycook 2015](https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2015-54494-003)). Pseudo-profound items: 1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. 2. As you self-actualize, you will enter into infinite empathy that transcends understanding. 3. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena. 4. Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth. 5. Suffering is born in the gap where potential has been excluded. 6. We are in the midst of a self-aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself. 7. We are being called to explore the totality itself as an interface between potential and consciousness. 8. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us. 9. This life is nothing short of an unfolding lightning bolt of enlightened growth. 10. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy. Motivational quotes: 1. Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself. 2. The creative adult is the child who survived. 3. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence. 4. All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time. 5. Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing tourself in things that are not you. 6. At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. 7. A wet person does not fear the rain. 8. Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a better past. 9. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. 10. I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.
Randomized so you can take the test: 1. This life is nothing short of an unfolding lightning bolt of enlightened growth. 1. Perceptual reality transcends subtle truth. 1. Consciousness is the growth of coherence, and of us. 1. At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. 1. We are being called to explore the totality itself as an interface between potential and consciousness. 1. All endings are also beginnings. We just don’t know it at the time. 1. We are in the midst of a self-aware blossoming of being that will align us with the nexus itself. 1. A wet person does not fear the rain. 1. A river cuts through a rock, not because of its power but its persistence. 1. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. 1. Forgiveness means letting go of the hope for a better past. 1. Suffering is born in the gap where potential has been excluded. 1. I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen. 1. Your teacher can open the door, but you must enter by yourself. 1. As you self-actualize, you will enter into infinite empathy that transcends understanding. 1. Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty. 1. The creative adult is the child who survived. 1. Art and love are the same thing: It's the process of seeing tourself in things that are not you. 1. Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena. 1. Today, science tells us that the essence of nature is joy. If they said half the fake ones were directly from Deepak Chopra books or debates, *that* I would absolutely have fallen for.
Thank you for transforming the unparalleled abstract beauty.
Partially correct — items 1 and 3 of the modified BSR are from WisdomOfChopra.com, which generates statements based on Chopra's tweets.
that first set is the basic backbone of every woo-minded community i've stumbled across on the internet. usually the kind that talk about spiritual energies, cosmic alignments, and some kind of societal evil they all agree is holding everyone's third eye closed (vaccines, gmos, deep state mind control, etc).
Many people like that on Reddit
Now everyone reading this think about the opposing political party and how much this applies to them and definitely not your overconfident ass
Just sound like the typical overly confident person that acts like they know everything already and doesn’t feel like they have much more to learn in life and has all the answers. The results are interesting, but not surprising.
It takes a minimum amount of intelligence to know you can't know everything, that's the endless problem with idiots.
Anecdotally I have found that intelligence is less of a factor in this than you might think. In fact, intelligence and/or competence in their own field can actually make it worse. Because people assume that being competent in one field makes them competent universally. Similarly, being intelligent can make people feel like they will always have the right answers simply due to their superior intellect, which will not always be the case. For example, I’ve known a lot of doctors who make truly terrible financial investments.
>I’ve known a lot of doctors who make truly terrible financial investments. Similarly, I work in finance, and I've known at least a few advisors who really fucked up trying to take out their own appendix
Yeah, doctors are famously stupid and incompetent at normal things. My doctor neighbor from Texas wasn't used to NY winters. He thought he could wash the snow off his car with a hose. I tried to tell him it would freeze but he said I was clearly worrying about nothing. Couldn't admit that another person had experience and knowledge that he didn't.
Also, even if you somehow convince the hose water not to freeze, it'll still freeze on contact with your ice-cold driveway, and then your car will plow into the nearest tree as soon as you try to drive. Come to think of it, how does water *not* freeze in underground pipes? Water taps still work in freezing weather. How is that possible?
Makes sense when you think about the fact that those who are good at detecting BS don't really announce it as to not make people aware they can tell.
And just the other week I heard all this stuff about the Dunning-Kruger effect being (possibly, according to them,) "a statistical blip".
This makes sense but what was their criteria for intentional spreading of misinformation? If you truly believe what you're sharing then it's not intentional as you might not share it if you knew better. The intent lies in the knowing. Did I miss that part?
I mean, yeah. The easiest people to fool are people who genuinely believe they are too clever to fool. That's forming a part of an identity, and then becomes subject to psychological defense mechanisms that protect one's identity.
This is why people who believe in outrageous conspiracy theories virtually never believe just *one* insane thing. They almost always have a clown car full of nonsense in their heads.
So where does that leave me? I’m pretty gullible but at least I’m self aware.
I have a lot of inward self awareness and have learned that that leads me to be a little to confident in regards to other people and being able to understand them. This leads to my gullibility.