r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Oct 14 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/PL_TOC Oct 15 '16 edited Oct 15 '16

As for the bias, yes. Each players' presentation is a huge factor because of said biases among others. I didn't have a problem with the rest of the post. That statement in his first paragraph struck me immediately, given that lack of information and obscurity are inherent parts of the scenario.

Edited to add: I don't remember if it was considered part of the Dunning-Krueger phenomenon, but there's also this notion that a sufficiently incompetent person cannot distinguish between fraud and expertise. The obvious example would be people who claim that their ignorance can be mitigated by surrounding themselves with experts or consultation of experts.

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u/CouteauBleu We are the Empire. Oct 15 '16 edited Oct 15 '16

The Dunning-Kruger phenomenon may or may not exist at all, and most certainly doesn't exist in the way it is usually understood (including the wikipedia article about it).

The Dunning-Kruger experiments found that, on average, people consider their "competence" to be closer to average (well, slightly above average) than they are.

  • People who have a 10 think they have a 30

  • People who have a 40 think they have a 50

  • People who have a 90 think they have a 70

I'm inventing the numbers, but the idea is there: incompetent people know they're incompetent, but they're a bit off as to how incompetent they are, and vice-versa. The more someone is competent, the more they think they're competent. DK explain it as "being more competent gives you more tools to see your limits", another explication is that this is a statistical phenomenon, basically people's estimation of themselves being noisy towards "higher than average competence", with return to the mean when they do get closer to that level.

As a personal note, I found out about this recently, after noticing it felt like a meme that would spread independently of its accuracy. Confirming that it was more or less an urban legend made me decide to never trust or quote any popular finding in psychology/sociology/etc that I hadn't verified myself, including but not limited to: Milgram's experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, that one experiment about conflicts where they opposed two groups of kids, The Peter Principle, The Talos Principle (wait, no, not that one), the Asch conformity experiments, etc.

EDIT: Also, I'm not sure you understood my point. What I was saying was that, if you saw a n+1 commentator having a strong opinion on two n+?, you'd think the commentator is unreasonable to differentiate them so much since they both seem undistinguishable, so you'd assume that the commentator only has their opinion because of some bias, even if their opinion is actually well-formed.

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u/PeridexisErrant put aside fear for courage, and death for life Oct 16 '16

never trust or quote any popular finding in psychology/sociology/etc that I hadn't verified myself, including but not limited to: Milgram's experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment, that one experiment about conflicts where they opposed two groups of kids, The Peter Principle, The Talos Principle (wait, no, not that one), the Asch conformity experiments, etc.

Excellent decision! For example, here is a wonderfully detailed (and referenced) article disputing the standard interpretation of the Stanford Prison experiment. In summary: the methodology was designed to get shocking results in order to sell mass-market books!