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Maybe another way of putting it is that the "Dunner-Kruger effect" is simply a tautology.

Some formulation of it can still be true - albeit in a rather uninteresting way.




It’s not a complete tautology though, if people’s estimates of their skill were accurate in an unbiased way, we wouldn’t see a DK effect (or we’d only see a slight one, since you can’t really be unbiased at the low and high ends of the spectrum as the other comment pointed out). This isn’t true in the case of uniform random data, or in the real data we see, but it could be true of some data.


Yes, you are right. It's not a tautology.




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