[rafaeltorres]

Yeah, this makes sense to me.

Imagine in the Dunning-Kruger chart the second plot (perceived ability) was a horizontal line at 70, which is not true but not far off from the real results. Now imagine I told you "did you know that, regardless of their actual score, everyone thought they got a 70?" That's a surprising fact.

[topaz0]

I think the most egregious thing about the original presentation is that it leads you to believe that people with a given skill level all self-assessed similarly. If you plotted the scores and self-assessments of each individual you would see that it's not "everyone [in the first quartile] thought [they were about average]", it's that their self-assessments varied wildly, from low and accurate to high and inaccurate.

[clwk]

"Most believe themselves 'above average' at most things."

[mewse]

Most people have an above-average number of legs.

There's really no contradiction there; all it takes is for there to be a couple low scores pulling the average down.