That's just called Dunning-Kruger and is a well-studied phenomenon.
You see it all over HN too, for instance, people coming up with a "new" idea, writing a blog post about it, and self-promoting as if they've contributed something novel.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is not well established. It often doesn't reproduce.
Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution. Suppose I give an exam to 30 people, and the results are normally distributed around a score of 70 with a low of 40 and a high of 97. The bottom of the distribution may accurately predict that they scored about 40 on the exam, but if you ask them how they performed relative to their peers, they will believe that they are about average and guess that a sizable portion of the class performed worse than them. Alternatively, if you ask the top performer who scored a 97, they will say that they think they scored about 97, but they will think maybe a few other people scored higher and maybe that the average was in the high 80s. The Dunning-Kruger effect posits that people are actually pretty good at accessing their own knowledge without being a good judge of how knowledgeable others are.
>Also the effect isn't that people misjudge their knowledge, it's that they misjudge their place within a distribution.
Put differently, isn’t this saying it’s a misattribution of confidence? In the context of the original claim about investing, that seems very relevant.
I suppose that the Dunning Kruger effect is "well studied" in that there have been many attempts to study it, which so far cannot find reproducible results, and suggest that it isn't a real psychological phenomenon.
Look, I understand there's a lot of trouble in psychology in general and there has been some reproduction issues with that one. But the truth is, we all know instances of the guy who thinks he knows everything just because he's good at something else and just thinks everything people went through to get where they are was a mistake. Whether or not this is a psychological thing in reality, it's something most of us have experienced and that's the name people know it by.
That's not even what the original study claimed to find though! It caught on because it seems so intuitive, yes, but the specific curve of confidence vs. skill doesn't seem to look like that at all.
This is how memes or memetics or just language works though. Things often get called something they aren't and if it sticks it sticks. I'm not saying it's correct or whatever, just that it stuck because it vaguely gave a name for something people experience and didn't have a name for before.
Look through any etymological dictionary and you'll see this phenomenon. What does a computer have to do with "to strike" in PIE? Something! But it's not the literal meaning.
No, but the behavior expressed by adopting such an attitude is. Yours is a nitpick that is probably worth mentioning but doesn't really change the analysis.
Again, I'm not saying that's what it SHOULD be called, I'm saying it's a useful term for something we experience. At some point the wrong definition becomes the correct one, that's most etymologies.
It's why people say "and I" as an object and don't know what question begging is or whatever. It just doesn't matter in the long run.
Those studies, which do consistently show significant effects despite your citation-unladen claim, explore averages across a general population and seek to explain society-wide phenomena through the lens of "average" humans. This implies an assumption of homogeneity within the general population. Such tests will of course be underpowered compared to case studies in specific circumstances, particularly those involving self-selection and a cohort-level cultural bias toward "I'm smart and need to pick things up quickly for my day job which means that skill is equally accurate and transferrable to everything I read about".
It started as a syndrome. I don't think it would survive Wikipedia's modern standards if it hadn't generated its own support by existing in a different era.
Look, Bob, I don't have a personal vendetta against you. I do find value in clarifying things that are obscured by pomp and rhetoric. What's more, I don't appreciate muddied conversations, particularly when the motivation for the introduction of such mud is purely self-serving, especially in monetary terms.
It seems obvious to me that Substack assesses your quality as a writer by checking on click-throughs from various sources and I would wager good money that they pay out differently depending on the behavior of the users who follow those links, either algorithmically in realtime or whenever it comes time to renegotiate terms. It's not even 2+2 here, Bob.
PS: morality is more than just "would someone else do it". Don't make me start quoting cliches typically reserved for 5 year olds.
Is free, perhaps. But that could be for many reasons, including that you haven't yet convinced Substack to monetize your offerings. Isn't that how it always is when publishing on platforms you don't own? That you must prove your worth to get the paying gig?
You see it all over HN too, for instance, people coming up with a "new" idea, writing a blog post about it, and self-promoting as if they've contributed something novel.