As John Cleese puts it: "If you're very very stupid, how can you possibly realize that you're very very stupid?" That's the Dunning-Kruger effect - the idea that unskilled people tend to overestimate their own skills. But what if it's not real? That's what Blair Fix argues, convincingly. Take two random values, x and y. Plot them against each other and you get a random graph. But define a new variable, say, z=x-y and then plot x and z, and you get a correlation. Why? Because you're essentially comparing x and x, and that's what you're doing when you plot an actual test result and the difference between a predicted and actual test result, which is what Dunning and Kruger did. Why is this relevant? We ran a test last year to evaluate data literacy in a population. We found people's predictions were reliable indicators of their test scores. We were looking for similarity, not difference. Autocorrelation? Via Metafilter.
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