This then boils down to people being generally bad at estimating their own level of ability.

Which is exactly what the Dunner-Kruger effect is. Knowledgeable people statistically underestimating their knowledge and non-knowledgeable people overestimating their knowledge.

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burpingtree 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It that’s the whole point that it’s just a mirage and is the same with random data. The people on the low end can’t underestimate their results as much and the people on the upper end can’t overestimate their results as much. That will come out of any correlation that is not perfectly correlated, which is why the article talks about it being replicable with random data. An interesting graph that would demonstrate a novel effect would be something nonlinear.

	▲	Dylan16807 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		There are specific distributions that can be explained by random noise, and other distributions that cannot be explained by random noise. But even if it is entirely caused by normal distribution variance, that doesn't make it a mirage, it gives you a reason.