> The problem, as has become clear in the last week through multiple blog posts discussing the phenomenon, is that Dunning-Kruger isn’t real.
Can you link to the blog posts? Now intrigued.
> People who know the least about a topic are not the most overconfident.
But this is exactly what the linked Gignaca and Zajenkowskib (2020) paper shows! It shows that the people who are most confident about a topic *are* the most overconfident, and makes a weak argument that overconfidence does not vary with knowledge (the argument is weak because it treats absence of a statistically significant effect as evidence for the null).
i.e. it matters lot whether or not you take Dunning-Kruger to be a statement about first moments or second moments.
> It turns out that the effect can be reliably generated with a model that actually doesn’t assume that people with less skill are more overconfident.
This is a more compelling argument about first moments, but still doesn't close the logical gap. Now we have two models that produce data like those in the post: one where the Dunning-Kruger effect exists, and one where it does not. The data is compatible with both of these models. Unless we find one of the models substantially better than the other we have no grounds to use one model exclusively for inference!
Personally I do find the measurement error model more appealing than OLS, but there is a lot more argument needed to arrive at a total dismissal of Dunning-Kruger here!
> The problem, as has become clear in the last week through multiple blog posts discussing the phenomenon, is that Dunning-Kruger isn’t real.
Can you link to the blog posts? Now intrigued.
> People who know the least about a topic are not the most overconfident.
But this is exactly what the linked Gignaca and Zajenkowskib (2020) paper shows! It shows that the people who are most confident about a topic *are* the most overconfident, and makes a weak argument that overconfidence does not vary with knowledge (the argument is weak because it treats absence of a statistically significant effect as evidence for the null).
i.e. it matters lot whether or not you take Dunning-Kruger to be a statement about first moments or second moments.
> It turns out that the effect can be reliably generated with a model that actually doesn’t assume that people with less skill are more overconfident.
This is a more compelling argument about first moments, but still doesn't close the logical gap. Now we have two models that produce data like those in the post: one where the Dunning-Kruger effect exists, and one where it does not. The data is compatible with both of these models. Unless we find one of the models substantially better than the other we have no grounds to use one model exclusively for inference!
Personally I do find the measurement error model more appealing than OLS, but there is a lot more argument needed to arrive at a total dismissal of Dunning-Kruger here!