Tal Yarkoni

I'm sorry, but this cop-out really pisses me off. It is far too common and frankly, unacceptable. It really is insulting that you'd expect others to accept this as a justification. It's a lazy dismissal and not even a proper excuse.

You're excuse for doing something shitty is... that someone else will? What does another person even have to do with it?! Seriously, let them have the blood on their hands. You can't even assume that someone else will! If you do it, you guarantee that it happens. Even if it is likely that someone else will, there's a big difference between a certainty. This is literally what creates enshitification.

Plus, the logic is pretty slippery. Certainly you're not going to commit crimes or acts of genocide! You were "just following orders"[0], right? Or parents often say to their children "if everyone jumped off a cliff, would you?" Certainly the line is drawn somewhere, but frankly, it is the same "excuse" given when that extreme shit happened, so no, I won't accept it.

You have autonomy[1], that makes you accountable. You aren't just some mindless automata. You may not be the root cause, but at best you enable it. You can't ignore that you play a role.

And consider the dual: if you don't make it better, who will?

I believe you have the power to make change, do you? Maybe not big, but hey, every big thing is composed of many smaller things, right? So the question is which big thing you want to contribute to.

[0]…

I know that this article is fiction, but there's a common misconception about the Dunning-Kruger effect presented in the story that is worth understanding. People think that Dunning and Kruger showed that less competent people think that they're more competent than more competent people think they are, but this is not what Dunning and Kruger showed, if you'll excuse the complicated sentence construction (the article linked below has a graph and explains this a bit better).

Actually, Dunning and Kruger simply showed that a person's estimate of their own skill tends to be closer to the mean, plus a little than their actual skill level.

The Dunning-Kruger effect has probably been a bit distorted because we like the idea that thinking you are good at something is evidence that you are not, in fact, good at that thing.

See also "what the Dunning-Kruger effect is and isn’t" - https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/

This paper discusses a major issue that I think deserves way more attention from the academically literate crowd. This is the kind of knowledge that should be taught in secondary school, at least in the modern age with papers at everyone's fingertips.

A more approachable summary is in narrative form at

https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/06/11/the-great-minds-journal-club-discusses-westfall-yarkoni-2016/

> “But there’s a problem: statistical control–at least the way people typically do it–is a measurement-level technique. Meaning, when you control for the rate of alcohol use in a regression of cancer on bacon, you’re not really controlling for alcohol use. What you’re actually controlling for is just one particular operationalization of alcohol use–which probably doesn’t cover the entire construct, and is also usually measured with some error.”

I strongly suggest reading the comment on that page from one of the authors as well.

Also, it's extremely hard to account for all kinds of biases and systematic errors in a meta-analysis. I'd take most meta-analyses, even by renowned statiticians, very, very skeptically. Teasing out small effects from samples that need corrections for lots of confounding factors, and then trying do combine many such results is next to impossible.

If your effect is small enough that you need a meta-analysis in the first place, that's a warning sign.

Some background: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0152719 (with perhaps more approachable explanation here https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/06/11/the-great-minds-journal-club-discusses-westfall-yarkoni-2016/ )

Obviously it's sometimes possible to do this right, but the reproducibiility crisis didn't appear out of nowhere; it's best to be wary of overly clever statistics; hard to know what you don't know.

The best part of Sturgeon's Law for me was realizing that it's tautological. It's just defining "crud" to be the bottom 90%, which is drawing an arbitrary line between the top and the bottom. It's a fun one in the same way that D/K is in that it just feels true, like it's validating a working theory you already had about the world.

But Sturgeon's law can't be false, whereas D/K really is commonly misunderstood and might not even be generally reproducible; it might not even be broadly true at all. D/K is certainly over-generalized and in popular culture applied to situations that are very unlike the experiments in the paper, which were only pretty trivial tasks. The D/K Effect "actually goes away, and even reverses, when the ability tests given to participants are very difficult." https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/

While I like seeing the Dunning--Kruger effect pointed out here as much as the next man, I have to comment that the original study was not as simple as it is often described.

There's a great description on the [citation needed] blog: http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-and-isnt/

Here's the money quote in my opinion:

> So the bias is definitively not that incompetent people think they’re better than competent people. Rather, it’s that incompetent people think they’re much better than they actually are. But they typically still don’t think they’re quite as good as people who, you know, actually are good. (It’s important to note that Dunning and Kruger never claimed to show that the unskilled think they’re better than the skilled; that’s just the way the finding is often interpreted by others.)