2007 Aug 03 - Fri

Am I Smarter Than I Really Am?

That cuts two ways according to a paper published in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University. In Unskilled and Unware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments, they say that incompetent people rank themselves as more competent than they really are, and that competent people rank themselves as less then they really are.

Incompetent people may stay that way due to the fact that we've been trained to "don't say anything if you don't have something nice to say".

I havn't taken the training myself, but supposedly the Arbinger Institute's 'Thinking Outside the Box' training is supposed to promote the ability for people who work together to mutually lift themselves out of this mental block through their own bootstraps.

I'm unable draw a direct link between that and this, but it comes to mind: once interstellar space travel becomes available, and should the top 1% of the population, intellectually wise, decide to emigrate, that would theoretically drop the average intelligence level of the population by more than 1%. Could be a scary thought. Does anyone have references to this real or imagined statistic?

Anyway, coming back to the article, or rather the end of the article. The authors provide a very well done ironic summary of their paper (are their results to be believed?):

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.