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Comment on What the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t (2010)

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For me, the assessment of Dunning-Kruger is missing a key control group, people who don't claim any aptitude in the relevant skill. For a newbie, that's the class of people who they are most likely to compare themselves to, e.g. the typical small office's Excel guru knows a few `@` commands not pivot tables and linear regression and it's computer whiz has a general picture of directories as a tree structure and can use `cd` and `dir` and `*.bak` to find lost files.

To put it another way, the less skilled practitioner is comparing what they know today versus ignorance. An experienced practitioner has been around long enough to have experienced tough problems that highlight the limits of their knowledge. In other words, one group is likely to compare themselves to an unskilled cohort and the other to a highly skilled one.

Excluding people who rate their ability at zero and who perform consistent with that ability skews the graph.

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