alt Hacker NewsI've seen at least 3 different ideas on this topic:
- people not skilled in a thing are bad at estimating their skills
- people are generally bad at estimating their skills
- people skilled in a particular areas often feel they are intellectually fit in other areas
Out of these three I feel like there's some truth in it, at least anecdotally.
Replies
for the last one, that's the whole story of Socrates being the wisest man because unlike others he knew the bounds of his knowledge:
"I seem, then, in just this little thing to be wiser than this man at any rate, that what I do not know I do not think I know either."
I think the third one is a separate thing. I don’t know of a name for it, but I’d call it the engineer’s (or physicist’s) blindspot or something like that.
I can’t remember of DK suggests some sort of effect where the expert has undue self-doubt, though…
> people skilled in a particular areas often feel they are intellectually fit in other areas
This I think is a separate phenomenon, maybe Nobel Disease but there might be a more general term, for example that includes celebrities.
There's also the idea on the other side of the coin - whereby experts on a topic underestimate how much they know about it compared to the average person.
And of course there's a relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2501/
What is “it”, of those 3? The last one?
RationalWiki calls the third one 'Ultracrepidarianism', and says it's rather common with engineers in general:
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Ultracrepidarianism
(the Wikipedia article has that as a subheading on the Ne supra crepidam page instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ne_supra_crepidam#Ultracrepida...)
But I'd say it's a subtype of the Dunning-Krueger effect rather than part of the general definition.
Personally I've always thought of Dunning-Krueger as an extension of the first definition here. Newbies/amateurs overestimating their skills and experts underestimating them, though I feel like the second definition is probably more true of human behaviour.