As a novice on DK, it seems to me that, for DK to be 'suprising' (in the parlance of the OP), four phenomena must hold:
1) an incompetent person is poorer than average at self assessment of their skill
2) as a person's competence increases at a skill, their ability to self-assess improves, until they become 'expert' which is defined by underappreciating their own skill (or overappreciating the skill of others)
3) DK is surprising (interesting) only when some incompetent persons who suffer from DK cannot improve their performance, presumably because their poor self-assessment prevents their learning from experience or from others.
4) Worse yet, some persons suffering from DK cannot improve their performance in numerous skill areas, presumably because their poor self-assessment is caused by a broad cognitive deficit (e.g. political bias), preventing them from improving on multiple fronts (which are probably related in some thematic way).
If DK is selective to include only one or two skill areas, as in case 3, that is not especially surprising, since most of us have skill deficits that we never surmount (e.g. bad at math, bad at drawing, etc). DK becomes surprising only in case 4, when we claim there is a select group of persons who have broad learning deficits, presumably rooted in poor assessment of self AND others — to wit, they cannot recognize the difference between good performance and bad, in themselves or others. Presumably they prefer delusion (possibly rooted in politics or gangsterism) to their acknowledgement of enumerable and measurable characteristics that separate superior from inferior performance, and that reflect hard work leading to the mastery of subtle technique.
If case 4 is what makes DK surprising, then DK certainly is not described well by the label 'autocorrelation' — which seems only to describe the growth process of a caterpillar as it matures into a butterfly.
>it seems to me that, for DK to be 'surprising' (in the parlance of the OP), four phenomena must hold:
The surprising things about DK, to me at any rate, is how unvarying it is in application. Under DK people who are poor at something never think wow I really suck at this, or if they do they are such a minuscule part of the population that we can discount them.
I've known lots of people who were not good at particular things and did not rate themselves as competent at it, although truth is they might have claimed competence if asked by someone they didn't want to be honest with.
There is an easy reframing that works well. People that are "poor" at something don't know enough to know just how good someone can be at something.
And this tracks for most skills. How good are you at tying your shoes? Probably average? Just how good can you get? Probably not that much better, all told. It is a clearly defined goal and likely has a limit on the skill you can build.
What about writing your name? Putting on your clothes? Making your bed? All things that are somewhat bound in just how good you can be.
Now, throw in something like "play the piano." Turns out, the expertise bar is much much higher suddenly. But, it you haven't been trying, how would you know?
If someone asked me how bad are you at playing the piano, having never tried, I would say I was totally incompetent which I take to mean the worst possible. According to DK I should somehow be worse than that.
> And this tracks for most skills. How good are you at tying your shoes? Probably average?
In fact, this is pretty much what the Dunning-Kruger graphs look like. The article shows the one for humor which has the bottom quartile participants answer "eh, about average" while the top quarter of participants realize they're better than average, but estimate roughly 75-percentile rather than 87.5-percentile.
That is because DK does not day "incompetent people see themselves as pros". It says "they overestimate their abilities". They rate themselves low, but in fact their competence is even lower.
1) an incompetent person is poorer than average at self assessment of their skill
2) as a person's competence increases at a skill, their ability to self-assess improves, until they become 'expert' which is defined by underappreciating their own skill (or overappreciating the skill of others)
3) DK is surprising (interesting) only when some incompetent persons who suffer from DK cannot improve their performance, presumably because their poor self-assessment prevents their learning from experience or from others.
4) Worse yet, some persons suffering from DK cannot improve their performance in numerous skill areas, presumably because their poor self-assessment is caused by a broad cognitive deficit (e.g. political bias), preventing them from improving on multiple fronts (which are probably related in some thematic way).
If DK is selective to include only one or two skill areas, as in case 3, that is not especially surprising, since most of us have skill deficits that we never surmount (e.g. bad at math, bad at drawing, etc). DK becomes surprising only in case 4, when we claim there is a select group of persons who have broad learning deficits, presumably rooted in poor assessment of self AND others — to wit, they cannot recognize the difference between good performance and bad, in themselves or others. Presumably they prefer delusion (possibly rooted in politics or gangsterism) to their acknowledgement of enumerable and measurable characteristics that separate superior from inferior performance, and that reflect hard work leading to the mastery of subtle technique.
If case 4 is what makes DK surprising, then DK certainly is not described well by the label 'autocorrelation' — which seems only to describe the growth process of a caterpillar as it matures into a butterfly.