[randomizedalgs]

Consider the imaginary world that the author describes, in which people's estimate of their score is independent of their actual score. Wouldn't it be fair to say that, in this imaginary world, the DK effect is real?

The point of the effect is that people who score low tend to overestimate their score and people who score high tend to underestimate. Of course there are lots of rational reasons why this could occur (including the toy example the author gave, where nobody has any good sense of what their score will be), but the phenomenon appears to me to be correct.

[skrebbel]

Woa of course, this is the point.

The author's example with random points is bad because you might reasonably expect people to behave differently than uniform random points.

It'd be reasonable to expect that people who are good at a thing estimate that they are good at it, and that people who are bad at a thing, estimate that they're bad at it. I mean, my kids love math and always estimate themselves to do well on math tests (and they usually do). They have classmates loudly detest math, estimate they'll do badly, and often do (at least somewhat). Similarly I'm a bad cook and I have no doubt that if I join a cooking contest, I'll get few jury points. The expected data is correlated.

So if a study finds that, well actually, the data is not at all that correlated! Lots of people who estimate that they'll do fine actually don't, and equally many people who estimate that they'll do badly, actually do fine (ie it looks like uniform random data), then that's surprising, and that's the D-K effect.

Right? I'm no statistician at all so I might be missing something.

[mrkeen]

If it's a statistical illusion, the correlation is still true, it just has no business being studied by psychologists.

If I roll a die, and then roll a second die, I might study the behaviour of the second die and wonder why it wants to add up to 7 with the first die. Since they're dice, I can dismiss that as a stupid idea, but if they were people, I could certainly be led astray by psychological theories about them.