Dunning-Kruger theory of mind

In popular discourse

• Evolutionary psychology is prone to some weirdness here.

• David Banks, Podcast Out appealed to me.

  [..]liberal infotainment is full of statements that sound like facts—what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson calls “factiness” — that do nothing more than reinforce and rationalize the listeners’ already formed common sense, rather than transforming it: what you believed to be true before the show started was not wrong, it just lacked the veneer of factiness.

  Each show delivers an old anecdote from an economist or a new study from a team of neuroscientists that shows “we may actually be hardwired to do” exactly what we feel comfortable doing. Cue the same word repeated by a dozen whispering voices, or a few bars of a Ratatat rip-off ambient band, and we’re on to a new book that argues organic food is not only good for you, it might make you a better person too. […] NPR’s podcasts depoliticize important issues by recasting them as interesting factoids to be shared over cocktails—stimulating but inherently incomplete. No one can act until we get more data; we must wait until Monday, when we get another round of podcasts.

  He’s calling for more social science and deliberative non-positivist analysis, which is reasonable, although I don’t think it’s sufficient or feasibly part of the info-popcorn format of podcasts. I think there is other positivist science that doesn’t get a look-in too, but even with the whole smörgåsbord of science on display and optimally dot-pointed for mansplanation, are we ever going to really get deep understanding of society from such a shallow engagement?

  Anyway, it’s more articulate than The Last Psychiatrists’s summary:

  if you bring up This American Life I swear to Christ I’m coming over to set your cats on fire. “This week on This American Life, some banal idiocy, set to jazz breaks” — kill me

  Nonetheless that one did stick with me.

• Dunning-Kruger and Other Memes:

  It’s really common to see claims that some meme is backed by “studies” or “science”. But when I look at the actual studies, it usually turns out that the data are opposed to the claim.

  That is oversell. The Dunning Kruger paper, for example, does in fact support its main claim. But the whole story is indeed more nuanced and contingent than the one you might pick up from the 10-word summary, and may be wrong, but that is a whole other thing.

  OTOH there are bad papers out there and bad science communication.

• Social psychology is a flamethrower a rhetorically eloquent complaint about the political uses of too-easy theorising that we know what’s going on.

On evaluating others

The feedback fallacy:

The first problem with feedback is that humans are unreliable raters of other humans. Over the past 40 years psychometricians have shown in study after study that people don’t have the objectivity to hold in their heads a stable definition of an abstract quality, such as business acumen or assertiveness, and then accurately evaluate someone else on it. Our evaluations are deeply colored by our own understanding of what we’re rating others on, our own sense of what good looks like for a particular competency, our harshness or leniency as raters, and our own inherent and unconscious biases. This phenomenon is called the idiosyncratic rater effect, and it’s large (more than half of your rating of someone else reflects your characteristics, not hers) and resilient (no training can lessen it). In other words, the research shows that feedback is more distortion than truth.

The real question is why individuals often try to avoid feedback that provides them with more accurate knowledge of themselves.

The Selective Laziness of Reasoning (Trouche et al. 2016):

many people will reject their own arguments—if they’re tricked into thinking that other people proposed them. […]

By “selective laziness”, Trouche et al. are referring to our tendency to only bother scrutinizing arguments coming from other people who we already disagree with. To show this, the authors first got Mturk volunteers to solve some logic puzzles (enthymematic syllogisms), and to write down their reasons (arguments) for picking the answer they did. Then, in the second phase of the experiment, the volunteers were shown a series of answers to the same puzzles, along with arguments supporting them. They were told that these were a previous participant’s responses, and were asked to decide whether or not the “other volunteer’s” arguments were valid. The trick was that one of the displayed answers was in fact one of the participant’s own responses that they had written earlier in the study. So the volunteers were led to believe that their own argument was someone else’s. It turned out that almost 60% of the time, the volunteers rejected their own argument, and declared that it was wrong. They were especially likely to reject it when they had, in fact, been wrong the first time.

This is a kind of hopeful one, when you think about it. It means that we are better at identifying the flaws in each other’s arguments than our own. If only we could normalise critical feedback and not somehow turn it into blow-up flame-wars we might find that collective reasoning is more powerful than individual reasoning. Indeed, is this precisely how science works?

On erroneously thinking my experience is universal

A.k.a. denying the reality of lived experience.

TBC. How do we mediate between our own experience and the experience of others when both are faulty representations of reality? How do we maintain both humility and scepticism at once? For bonus points, how do we do that even across a cultural divide?

On erroneously thinking my experience is not universal

TBD. Out-group effects.

On understanding how others think

Todo: raid this for references: Why You’re Constantly Misunderstood on Slack (and How to Fix It).

A connection to the status literature: People of higher status are more likely to think that those who disagree with them are stupid or biased — even when their high status is the result of a random process (Brown-Iannuzzi et al. 2021).

The researchers first analyzed data from 2,374 individuals who participated in the 2016 American National Election Studies Time Series Survey, a nationally representative survey of U.S. citizens. As expected, liberals and conservatives were more likely to describe the opposing political party as uninformed, irrational, and/or biased compared to their own party.

Importantly, the researchers found that this was especially true among those with a higher socio-economic status. Among more liberal participants, higher status individuals displayed more naive realism toward Republicans. Among more conservative participants, higher status individuals displayed more naive realism toward Democrats.

In a follow-up experiment, the researchers experimentally manipulated people’s sense of status through an investment game. The study of 252 participants found that those who were randomly told they had performed “better than 89% of all players to date” were more likely to say that people who disagreed with their investment advice were biased and incompetent.

For ages my favourite go-to-bias to think on here was Fundamental attribution bias, which seems ubiquitous to me.

In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual’s observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as “the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are”.

Apparently it has put in doubt though? (Epstein and Teraspulsky 1986; Malle 2006) TODO: investigate.

Naive realism is also a phenomenon of note in this category (Gilovich and Ross 2015; Ross and Ward 1996). David McRaney’s summary:

[N]aive realism also leads you to believe you arrived at your opinions, political or otherwise, after careful, rational analysis through unmediated thoughts and perceptions. In other words, you think you have been mainlining pure reality for years, and like Gandalf studying ancient texts, your intense study of the bare facts is what has naturally led to your conclusions.

Ross says that since you believe you are in the really-real, true reality, you also believe that you have been extremely careful and devoted to sticking to the facts and thus are free from bias and impervious to persuasion. Anyone else who has read the things you have read or seen the things you have seen will naturally see things your way, given that they’ve pondered the matter as thoughtfully as you have. Therefore, you assume, anyone who disagrees with your political opinions probably just doesn’t have all the facts yet. If they had, they’d already be seeing the world like you do. This is why you continue to ineffectually copy and paste links from all our most trusted sources when arguing your points with those who seem misguided, crazy, uninformed, and just plain wrong. The problem is, this is exactly what the other side thinks will work on you.

If we were machines would we understand other machines this badly?

TBD. Consider minds as machine learning and see what that would tell us about learners that learn to model learners. Possibly that means predictive coding.

Remedies

CFAR, putting money on the line, calibration. That example about set theory and cards. TBC.

On evaluating ourselves

Moral wetware

See moral wetware.

Incoming

• Erik Hoel, Humans see p-zombies everywhere
• Sacred Values Are How Ethical Injunctions Feel From The Inside
• Failure to update
• How beauty filters took over social media
• People Are Different

References