There appears to be scientific evidence for many of the accusations of being mentally "unskilled" that are tossed around daily here and there on the forums.
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
If you are questioning the science involved, then you forget this is only a hypothesis that is meant to be tested and through that process either supported as valid or refuted. Consequently, this has either gone through a peer review process or will get considerably more attention from people who have something serious to offer.
As for me, I'm going to try and stay within the limits of my intelligence and scientific expertise.
Interesting topic for sure. It is something we talk about with regard to some of our colleagues. Some are so clueless that they fail to understand or recognize it and consequently are closed to learning.
I am not questioning the science - there was really none presented. Just having fun. And if we accept their conclusion (which is common sense without a study), then a person may not know if they stay within their limits of intelligence. IMO a better area to consider is denial. Could a person be unskilled or in denial. The first most likely can be determined from an IQ test. The later is usually the case for average and above intelligence. Please understand the many nuances of denial. For example: Why are initiations performed? (So there is a vested interest in membership and the participant is more likely, on a conditioned unconscious level, to deny negative aspects of membership). I vote denial, not "skill" is the real underlying cause of recognition failure in most cases.
I have a BIL like that. He thinks he is an awesome mechanic, but he usually completely botches the job.
But it might be less bad self-awareness and simply arrogance versus self-doubt. An arrogant person may believe they are capable when they are not, and conversely, someone with a poor self image may decline a task because of fear of failure.
Thomas Sowell: There are no solutions, just trade-offs.
I don't think I'd classify this phenomena as "denial", in the sense that one unconsciously suppresses knowledge actually possessed by the individual to protect themselves from negative self-judgment. In other words, an alcoholic knows they drink too much and that it is causing them problems, but they suppress the evidence of it from their consciousness in order not to condemn themselves.
The essence of the problem defined in that article has to do with someone so lacking in either sufficient information or sufficient cognitive skill that they are unable to perceive just how incompetent they are. They aren't denying their incompetence subconsciously, they simply are incapable of understand how lacking they are. They may have a broad sense that they aren't as skillfull as others but couldn't begin to understand precisely where they are lacking. As a result they seriously underestimate the relative skills of those who are competent and seriously overestimate their own.
I don't think there is anything new about this phenomena, but it certainly is a lot more "visible" in the age of the internet when we are flooded with the opinions of people who not only don't know what they are talking about, but are too igorant to realize it. Just read the comments on any blog discussing a controversial and complicated subject for numerous examples. Or even the twitters and tweets of one or two very famous politicians.
daisypusher wrote: AV - as is commonly said - "We don't know what we don't know..."
That's true, and what's interesting about the same research that article is based on is that the more competent subjects are, the LOWER they tend to rate their competence. I'd guess that is because the more you know about a topic, the more you are aware of the gaps in your own knowledge. People who are very incompetent on a topic tend to rate themselves as much more competent than they are and to seriously underestimate the amount of knowledge/skill they would need to would make themselves even minimally competent.
I guess it's kind of like the armchair quarterback who yells at the TV at the quarterback who is skilled beyond his imagining.
