That wasn't the author's take on DK, that was the author's take on the pop sci version of DK, very different. It is definitely a straw man, one which David Dunning has also publicly criticized, so the author's in good company.
Here's an episode of This American Life where Dunning claims that he created a meme (his word), but that people misuse DK as an epithet targeted against stupid people, missing the fact that this applies to all of us:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/585/t...
If you want to see how most people talk about DK, David Dunning runs a quick search on Twitter. I don't think the median depth of understanding on DK is quite as high as you expect...
The latter doesn't make it a strawman. Perhaps you've just haven't read the same posts/comments the author has read -- or as many.
Here:
1) Top voted definition from the urbandictionary: "A phenomenon where people with little knowledge or skill think they know more or have more skill than they do."
2) Article on OpenCulture website, titled "John Cleese on How “Stupid People Have No Idea How Stupid They Are” (a.k.a. the Dunning-Kruger Effect)".
3) Article in the online outlet unbiased.co.uk: "This behavioural concept (the discovery of which won the Ig Nobel Prize in 2000) describes the tendency of people who know very little to believe they know a lot. "
4) LinkedIn post: "Charles Darwin once said that ignorance tends to beget more confidence than knowledge. In a nutshell, it explains the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is a cognitive bias where incompetent individuals tend to overestimate their skill, cannot perceive the magnitude of their own inadequacy and will admit to their lack of ability only when they are trained in that particular skill."
5) Another popular blog: "The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Are the Stupid Too Stupid to Realize They’re Stupid?"
6) The Dunning-Kruger effect represents a cognitive bias under the influence of which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than it really is.
I could go on for ages...
>I feel like most people that I've seen bring DK up understand what the implications of it are.
You'd be surprised.
I actually don't get your comment, it's like you feel defensive and try to defend a psychological finding from being called a "meme".
First, it's not like the DK effect is a person and will feel bad.
Second, the internet is rampant with people who casually mention the DK effect in comments and posts and articles while not understanding fully what it is about.
>In one sentence he's declaring someone else's opinion on it as pop-sci than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some charts.
Some charts based on the original research, and more faithful to its conclusions and reportings than the pop-sci adaptation the author talks against. So?
By his definition, the "meme" would mean people believe that those who are among the worst in the world at something would estimate their ability the highest, and those who are among the best would estimate their ability the lowest (on average).
Do you really think people believe this? That olympic gold medalist swimmers would put themselves in the first percentile of fastest swimmers, while people who've never entered water would put themselves in the 99th (well, not necessarily 1st and 99th - maybe it's 3rd and 97th, but the medalists would choose the lowest number, and the non-swimmers the highest)? I don't think I know a single person who believes this.
I have huge respect for Dan Luu but he screwed up here and created a classic strawman.
The strawman the OP is trying to dismantle is that people's self assessment declines as they gain competence. Apparently not; from that data self assessment is mostly flat. But a flat line (self assessment) intersecting with a rising line (competence) will still show the symptoms of the common definition of DK.
Sort of a meta-DK effect with regard to people's understanding of how DK really works, as it were.
I saw someone making a very similar point to the one this post critiques, which reminded me of this post and prompted me to post it. It's definitely out there as something people believe.
See e.g. this comic http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2475
Edit: or this one http://orig04.deviantart.net/6527/f/2012/283/9/7/dunning_kru...
I am also not sure any SMBC comic can be reasonably considered to be making a claim of anything...
> Usually the person applying thinks highly of their
> ability to identify a DK scenario.
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=dunning%20kruger&sort=byPopula...
Author's take on Dunning-Kruger is a strawman. I haven't seen that version be a "meme". I also dislike this single word rejection, the calling it a "meme", of how people talk about DK, it's like name calling or something. Unwarranted and arrogant dismissal. It's one thing to be wrong, it's another to be wrong and then also haughty about it. I feel like most people that I've seen bring DK up understand what the implications of it are. My favorite thing I've read about it is that the less you are competent in something the less you are able to gauge competence in that something.
> In two of the four cases, there’s an obvious positive correlation between perceived skill and actual skill, which is the opposite of the pop-sci conception of Dunning-Kruger. A plausible explanation of why perceived skill is compressed, especially at the low end, is that few people want to rate themselves as below average or as the absolute best.
In one sentence he's declaring someone else's opinion on it as pop-sci than offers his own similarly silly take on it. Oh wait he showed some charts. I did like seeing that people with more skill saw themselves as better than people with less skill, but conjecture on what people want to think of themselves? That's pop-sci.