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I’ve always felt the DK effect is cynical pseudoscience for midwit egos. It’s a sophistic statement of the obvious dressed up as an insight. But worse, it serves to obvert something interesting and beautiful about humans - that even very intellectually challenged people sometimes can, over time, develop behaviours and strategies that nobody else would have thought of, and form a kind of background awareness of their shortcomings even if they aren’t equipped to verbalise them, allowing them to manage their differences and rise to challenges and social responsibilities that were assumed to be beyond their potential. Forrest Gump springs to mind as an albeit fictional example of the phenomenon I’m talking about. I think this is a far more interesting area than the vapid tautology known as the DK effect.

[jollybean]

I think there's an easier explanation for the effect, and that is people are just not very good at judging their skill level, and due to reversion to the mean, low-performers probably overestimate and high-performers underestimate.

And also, I think there is actually a tiny bit of DK going on.

And then, as you say, it gets amplified by the pseudo-literati.