Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

If you measure competence as relative performance, a person cannot know how competent they are compared to others... because to do that correctly, they would not only have to know how much they know but also know how much other people know... preferably in relation to them.

This is not possible, so the self-assessment data will be random because it is a random guess... so it does not correlate to actual performance or anything else for that matter. Hence, DK effect has to be a result of faulty statistical analysis.

I believe we'd have completely different results if the question was framed differently: "how many do you believe you got right?". Then, more confident people, regardless of competence, would answer that they got more right and less confident people, again regardless of competence, would believe that they must have gotten more wrong than they did.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: