| ▲ | 3form 7 hours ago |
| I've seen at least 3 different ideas on this topic: - people not skilled in a thing are bad at estimating their skills - people are generally bad at estimating their skills - people skilled in a particular areas often feel they are intellectually fit in other areas Out of these three I feel like there's some truth in it, at least anecdotally. |
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| ▲ | CM30 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| RationalWiki calls the third one 'Ultracrepidarianism', and says it's rather common with engineers in general: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ultracrepidarianism (the Wikipedia article has that as a subheading on the Ne supra crepidam page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_supra_crepidam#Ultracrepida...) But I'd say it's a subtype of the Dunning-Krueger effect rather than part of the general definition. Personally I've always thought of Dunning-Krueger as an extension of the first definition here. Newbies/amateurs overestimating their skills and experts underestimating them, though I feel like the second definition is probably more true of human behaviour. |
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| ▲ | LiquidSky 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | >RationalWiki calls the third one 'Ultracrepidarianism' LOL because RationalWiki was written by engineers. I've often seen it referred to as "Engineer's Disease" for how it's commonly encountered. |
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| ▲ | efavdb 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| for the last one, that's the whole story of Socrates being the wisest man because unlike others he knew the bounds of his knowledge: "I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing |
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| ▲ | asimpletune 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | For those interested, it’s not just in Apology this comes up. In Theaetetus he does a pretty good job disproving that it is even possible to know what knowledge is. |
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| ▲ | bee_rider 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I think the third one is a separate thing. I don’t know of a name for it, but I’d call it the engineer’s (or physicist’s) blindspot or something like that. I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though… |
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| ▲ | dofm 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | > I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though… There is a brief bit where they attribute that observation to other causes: In making these predictions, we felt that we could account for an
anomaly that appeared in all three previous studies: Despite the
fact that top-quartile participants were far more calibrated than
were their less skilled counterparts, they tended to underestimate
their performance relative to their peers. We felt that this miscalibration had a different source then the miscalibration evidenced by
bottom-quartile participants. That is, top-quartile participants did
not underestimate themselves because they were wrong about their
own performances, but rather because they were wrong about the
performances of their peers. In essence, we believe they fell prey
to the false-consensus effect (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977). In the
absence of data to the contrary, they mistakenly assumed that their
peers would tend provide the same (correct) answers as they
themselves—an impression that could be immediately corrected
by showing them the performances of their peers. By examining
the extent to which competent individuals revised their ability
estimates after grading the tests of their less competent peers, we
could put this false-consensus interpretation to a test. Link if you need it: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12688660_Unskilled_... |
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| ▲ | andy99 7 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > people skilled in a particular areas often feel they are intellectually fit in other areas This I think is a separate phenomenon, maybe Nobel Disease but there might be a more general term, for example that includes celebrities. |
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| ▲ | higginsniggins 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | It's called "engineer's disease" which is pretty appropriate for this community: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease | | |
| ▲ | atmavatar 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | My experience has been that this isn't limited to engineers. I'm sure most people here have had people from other departments tell them how they need to do their jobs in one way or another. For example, there are always at least a few people who you have to consult regularly because their tickets are always written how they perceive a problem should be solved rather than explaining the underlying problem to be solved. Then there are the sales and marketing types who like to dictate how the UX of the front-end should be because they like to retell anecdotes to prospective clients about how they solved a problem. Then there's the guy who hands you a spreadsheet he's maintained for years and tells you he wants you to put something exactly like it in the flagship product as a new feature. | | |
| ▲ | CM30 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I'd say celebrities and creatives in general are often big offenders here too. Lots of actors/athletes/musicians acting like being good at what they do means they're also qualified to talk about science and engineering. And a lot of reviewers, documentary creators and specialist writers that decide to wade into discussions about topics they have no knowledge of/cover something they're new to, only to look ridiculously out of touch as a result. See the Nostalgia Critic review of the Wall. Or the Alex Meyers review of Obsession. | | | |
| ▲ | LiquidSky 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >My experience has been that this isn't limited to engineers. To some extent, but the most severe form does seem fairly unique to engineers, specifically programmers. That is, I've met many arrogant lawyers and doctors, but never a lawyer or doctor who assumes they could program a computer due to their legal or medical expertise. But I've seen many a programmer assume that because they are proficient in programming they can confidently and authoritatively expound on all other areas of human endeavor (those being obviously inferior and trivial in the face of their own). | |
| ▲ | antonvs 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Medical doctors and physicists also regularly suffer from this. It’s more of a disease of expertise in general, it seems. |
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| ▲ | PowerElectronix 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Well, if I'm systems engineer and everything that exists can be modelled as a system... | | |
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| ▲ | falcor84 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There's also the idea on the other side of the coin - whereby experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person. And of course there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/ |
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| ▲ | filoleg 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Imo it would be more accurate to say that topic experts overestimate how much the average person knows about it. | | |
| ▲ | falcor84 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sorry, I'm confused. My formulation "experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person" and your "topic experts overestimate how much the average person knows about it" seem semantically identical to me, just from a different side of the relation. What nuance did I miss? |
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| ▲ | refulgentis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| What is “it”, of those 3? The last one? |
