Potholer54 has a new video, in which he explains the error of all those people who say “do your own research,” a phrase so heavily abused by conspiracy theorists and cranks that it has lost much of its meaning. To me, “do your own research” means digging heavily into the background science and reading the journals; to them, it seems to mean finding a Daily Mail headline that fits their preconceptions and running with it.
It’s like he’s talking about me, a little bit. When I got into arachnology 6 or 7 years ago, I was a near total n00b — I could apply what I knew about developmental biology and evolution to them, but I couldn’t just catch a spider in my garage and claim to now be an expert on spiders. I have read so many books and papers on them, in addition to continuing to chase spiders all over the countryside, but I feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. I think real scientists have to approach any field with a sense of humility, even if they’ve been working on it for decades.
What really amused me, though, what that this was the latest comment on the video, at the very top of the page.
too bad everyone has randomly decided that human minds aren’t subject to evolution. there might be an answer in evolutionary psychology as to why an animal with nothing but sapience to defend itself has to decide it knows what it’s doing pretty early on in a novel situation if it wants to survive… but of course we all know that’s bunk, right? humans didn’t evolve. we’re special snowflakes. god’s dandruff
What a lovely example of a bad scientific argument! I’m pretty sure that potholer54 understands that humans, and human brains, are the product of evolution, and sarcastically suggesting that he has overlooked an explanation that every right-thinking evolutionary psychologist has deduced is a serious error of comprehension. It is a classic example of evo-psych argumentation, though — I have been told many times that because I find evo-psych to be facile, superficial, and a swamp of bogus reasoning that I must be a creationist.
To be fair, though, not all the people who were offended by the video are incapable of following a simple train of thought. For example, this person at least got the gist of what was said:
Does insulting the “do your own research” group have a positive effect on anyone?
What’s the purpose of this video? Genuine question.
Yes, it was a criticism of the “do your own research” group. Very good! Sirtra understood something.
It was not about insulting them, though. It was explaining that they don’t know what they’re talking about, that they’re pursuing information in a wrong and misleading way, and that maybe “doing your own research” ought to involve cracking open an introductory textbook and actually studying the basics of the topic first, and understanding how the authorities in a field derive their conclusions. The purpose is to explain how to do research properly.
Like how zEropoint68 could benefit from knowing the basics of evolutionary biology before explaining tendentiously what evolutionary biologists believe about the human brain.
This is just wrong and simple minded.
.1. We don’t have “nothing but sapience to defend ourselves”. Humans are group living social omnivores. We travel in packs so there are usually more than one of us. We also usually carry tools, in this case objects to defend ourselves.
We can also climb trees if need be. And build fires in front of caves or other shelters.
It’s likely the earliest human ancestors carried sticks and rocks.
Early on, those sticks and rocks were upgraded to spears and hand axes.
The earliest stone tools are dated at 3.3 million years ago.
.2. …knows what it’s doing pretty early on in a novel situation…
We don’t have to make quick decisions in novel situations.
In fact, we aren’t even very often confronted with novel situations.
The threats in our current environment are very predictable. Cars, Republicans, overeating, drugs and alcohol, United Healthcare Inc., trolls, and sometimes our family members.
Rather than making quick decisions, we need to make the right decisions.
And if we are wrong, changing our decisions as needed.
Yeah, this is an example of a typical evo-psych argument.
Zero data behind it.
Just a wild guess based on no data or proof that can be dismissed without data or proof.
He smeared lemon juice all over his face, and then went out in public? He was setting himself up for a bad case of margarita burn
Starting out with the overblown D-K effect was a bit of an oops. Mt. Stupid is a stupid graphic that overgeneralizes and grossly distorts a contentious yet popular social psychological concept. There’s an ironic D-K effect of the D-K effect. McArthur Wheeler served as a wonderfully tantalizing anecdote, but that’s about it. McArthur Wheeler and Mt. Stupid, yet what did the D-K effect actually show? That higher performers tend to overrate others in a false-consensus manner thinking most everyone shares their better relative epistemic position? Where is Mt Stupid to be found in the D-K paper? Sorry but the video utilizing the stupid Mt Stupid metaphor and the iffy D-K effect was an instant own-goal. Hard for me to take it seriously past that frustrating hole shot off the track into the horrified crowd.
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/persistent-irony-dunning-kruger-effect
Or I suggest this video by Rebecca Watson. I agree about not using D-K as a label anymore.
Socrates’s purported wisdom was in realizing his own monumental ignorance. No overutilized D-K bludgeoning tool needed. Use Socratic irony like Columbo instead.
My own arc in DIY for the COVID vaccine epistemic war started with an immunology course in the late 90s which decades later caused me to realize that dogmatic assertions about vaccines having no connection to DNA change at all are sus. It’s partly what adaptive immunity is based on given we couldn’t keep up to evolving microbes with much quicker life cycles. I did my own research into the literature on affinity maturation and realized that yes there are adaptive changes in antibody genes, but not the erroneous reverse transcription nor integration from injected vaccine mRNA assumed by some DIY antivaxxers. Where am I on that fictional Mt Stupid?
Whether or not you convince the “do your own research” group, there are others who are watching, and letting then know that the “DYOR” proponents have in fact not done their homework is a public service.
@3, Hemidactylus, I was going to say something similar.
Oh, the irony.
That graph in the video is NOT the Dunning-Kruger Effect. That description is NOT the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
What the OP was talking about is simple arrogance. The Dunning-Kruger Effect has ONLY to do with the ability to estimate your competence. It has nothing to do with confidence.
He should go back and actually look at the study. Look at the graphs. You’ll see they look absolutely nothing like what is being shown. The specific study is “Incompetent and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”
Now, on the surface, that sounds exactly like what the OP was talking about, but there’s a very big difference. The study showed that while the incompetent thought they were better than they actually were, they also understood that they were not among the elite. As they directly state in the paper:
“We doubt whether many of our readers would dare take on Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one, challenge Eric Clapton with a session of dueling guitars, or enter into a friendly wager on the golf course with Tiger Woods.” And if you look at the data, what you see is that the relative positioning of people with respect to their perceived skill is still in alignment with reality. The difference is that the slope of the line is off.
That is, the bottom quartile understand that they’re in the bottom. They just think that the bottom is higher than it is. The second quartile rate themselves higher than the bottom quartile rate themselves. The third quartile rate themselves higher than the bottom and second quartiles. And the top quartile rate themselves at the top. It’s just that the range is much narrower. Those that are actually a 1 rate themselves as a 5. Those that are a 3 rate themselves a 6. The 6s rate themselves as a 7. And the 9s rate themselves as an 8. If you were to have them put themselves in order from worst to best, they’d be in the exact order that matches reality. They just think they did better than they actually did.
From the paper, Figure 1:
Bottom Quartile: 12% actual, 58% perceived
Second Quartile: 37% actual, 60% perceived
Third Quartile: 60% actual, 70% perceived
Top Quartile: 87% actual, 75% perceived
Notice how the ordering is correct for both actual results and perceived results. The bottom group placed themselves in the bottom. They just grossly overestimated their results.
It’s like the person who play tennis a couple times a year. They know they couldn’t go up against the pros. They know they couldn’t even take the instructor at the club. They just think they’re better than they are.
I am loathe to use Wikipedia as a reference, but even they point out this…dare I say…”incompetent” understanding of the Dunning-Kruger Effect: “In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.”
How ironic that the OP was so confident about their competence in understanding what the Dunning-Kruger Effect was only to get it so wrong.
Hemidactylus@3–
Yep. Your adaptive immune system works by promoting random mutation of immunoglobulin structure and reinforcing the successful variations. So, yes, vaccines change your DNA…in exactly the same way catching a cold changes your DNA.
Anyone afraid of DNA being changed had better stay in complete biological isolation from people and other animals, never get pregnant, never eat anything with possible carcinogenic or allergenic properties, never go out in the sun, pump radon out of their homes and to be completely safe, encase their house in a thick shell of radio-opaque material for those occasional cosmic rays that reach Earth’s surface. Of course they’ll be miserable, socially isolated, starving, vitamin D deficient, bankrupt, and still get mutations from normal cell metabolism and replication.
rrhain@5–
Agreed. The original paper is here, for anyone interested, although behind a blasted paywall. The Wikipedia entry is pretty good, showing the graphs that make your point, as well as some of the cogent criticisms of the paper.
Having said that, I think the reason the paper is so widely misinterpreted is that the misinterpretation locks in on a real phenomenon. As you quote from the authors: “We doubt whether many of our readers would dare take on Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one, challenge Eric Clapton with a session of dueling guitars, or enter into a friendly wager on the golf course with Tiger Woods.” But we have seen the rise of this behaviour, not so much with sports/music but with science. People who can’t define a virus insisting they know more about COVID than professional scientists and public health physicians, people who can’t describe the greenhouse effect denying AGW, and so on. This is not, as you say, what Kruger and Dunning described in their paper, but I think it became a convenient (but incorrect) label to slap on.
Doing research is great.
But except if you’re trying to find out-of-context quotes from UK celebrities obtained by unlawful wiretapping (and if you are I don’t want to know about it), the DM is not a primary source. It’s not even a secondary source. Even in fields that accept “research” as “not requiring either a laboratory or field work” — like law, literature, history of written cultures, and a variety of other perfectly reputable fields — a “newspaper article” is not acceptable as evidence of truth, but only of what was said on a specific date (and often not even that). This sort of distinction is taught by eighth grade in the US, for “research papers.” So maybe the OP’s author doesn’t have an eighth-grade education…
So the meme shouldn’t be “do your own research” — it’s “do your own research in sources that at least beginning scholars in that field would consider reliable.” Besides, that way one need not get IRB approval first…
How Search Engines Boost Misinformation
People use search engines about as well as they use AI.
So, sure.
The video was reuploaded here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t54I6NKtr4k
I’ve patched in the revised video here — it specifically addresses the complaints some commenters made.
The admonition to “do your own research” reminded me of the nice little book by Harry Collins “Are We All Scientific Experts Now?” Collins identifies several levels of ‘expertise’ that fall considerably short of real, professional-level competence in a field, and IFRC used his own interest in neutrinos to illustrate the point: it took him years of study before he could ‘pass’ as a neutrino expert at physics conferences, for example.
raven@#1:
For the ‘nothing but sapience’ refutation, you missed one other big one: stamina. Between cardiovascular strength and the amazing efficiency of the two-legged gait, humans are capable of running just about anything else on the planet into the ground… eventually. There’s only one other land mammal that can keep up with humans in a marathon, and that’s the wolf, and we tamed them to act as our hunting partners because we both used the same basic ‘chase it in packs until it falls over’ tactic.
jenorafeuer, which is why people rode on horseback. Right?
And why sled dogs were bred, incapable of running as far as humans might be. Right?
@12, Well, no, it doesn’t. It just tries to say, “I’m defining ‘black’ to mean ‘white,’ so just go with it.” It’s the same equivocation fallacy creationists use when they say that evolution is “just a theory.”
Yes, people often describe the arrogance of ignorance to be “the Dunning-Kruger Effect,” but that isn’t what the paper said, that isn’t what the paper even studied, and for potholer54 to dress up his missive in scientist’s clothing by invoking the paper by Kruger and Dunning doesn’t help him.
In fact, the irony only compounds itself in that he’s complaining about the “do your own research” foolishness and tries to insulate himself from criticism by saying that he’s “not done his own research” by instead “reporting on what others have said” while at the same time not having done any actual investigation into the subject and not actually reporting on what others have said but instead is presenting his own ideas. And the prime example is his “Mt. Stupid” graph that has “The Dunning-Kruger Effect” as its title.
Where did he get that graph? It isn’t from the paper by Kruger and Dunning despite the fact that he shows it right after he shows the excerpt from the paper. In fact, that graph isn’t from any research paper of any kind. It may certainly feel true that “a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing,” but he hasn’t presented any study that actually shows that to be true. In fact, the very paper he does present, the one by Kruger and Dunning, explicitly calls out that the people at the bottom know they’re not the elite. They most assuredly did NOT think they were better and more talented than everybody else. They did NOT have any arrogance from their ignorance.
No, it turns out that that graph is nothing more than a cribbed Gartner Hype Cycle graph that got relabeled and took off as a meme. It is based on no research, no study, no examination of anybody anywhere for anything. I’m not saying he invented the graph…I’m sure he cribbed it from somewhere else (without attribution, you’ll notice), but it only goes to show that the extent of his “research” into this topic was to look at the first few hits on a Google search. There is no evidence presented that ignorance leads to arrogance, that those who only know a little think they’re the most competent. And the fact that he had to pull his original video because of all the flak he was taking in the comments section only for the new one to be the equivalent of him stamping his precious little foot and shrieking, “NUH-UH!” while making no corrections only shows that he is displaying the very trait he is complaining about.
He did no investigation of the subject, is ignorant of what he’s talking about, and is arrogantly claiming that he knows more about it than the people who have actually studied overconfidence.
Because if you look at the references, you’ll see that Dunning actually did a study on overconfidence. The paper he did with Kruger isn’t about overconfidence and that other paper isn’t about the overconfidence of the ignorant, either, but it isn’t like Dunning is a complete novice on the subject.
He is the very thing he is railing against and whining about being called out for it.