Have you ever heard of the #DunningKruger effect?
Generally, it is understood as
"a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence" [wikipedia]
This actually isn't, what the original study said, but it is still what most people think, when they hear the term.
However, in my personal experience (anecdotal evidence) I find the most extreme levels of unfounded overconfidence about one's expertise concerning almost every aspect of life concentrated
1/2
in representatives of certain professions:
* teachers
* economists
* programmers ("software engineers" as they call themselves)
* physicists
* mathematicians
* lawyers
* MDs
* politicians
What do you think?
2/2
@mina
Yes, perfectly true, as my profession is not named!
@mina omg, as a programmer I can confidently say that my confidence lowers by the year. if anything I'm less sure of things now than I was 5 years ago.
Also, there is a saying in spanish that I think expresses well what you mentioned above --> "La ignorancia es atrevida" <-- and I think it applies to all walks of life.
Perhaps it's more of an attitude thing than a profession thing.
Surely, it's mainly an attitude thing, but I personally have the impression that certain professions attract certain people and furthermore that those personality traits get reinforced by prolonged contact with people of similar mindsets.
PS: I thought, I knew most common Spanish proverbs, yet this one, I didn't.
Learnt something new!
¡Gracias!
@mina
I don't think it works that way.
I'd say the groups you listed have a very different view on how they overestimate and in which fields.
E.g. economists have a very restricted point of view and claim that they just need to apply their measure to explain how everything works, which is very different to a physicist who says math is only a too (which I am trained in) and chemistry→biology→psychology→sociology→culture are just special cases of physics and are therefore understood. Lawyers underestimate what they need to understand to rule. And politics is about power (structures) so they want to understand those.
Programmers fall for customers are able to tell them what they want and know how that works, but they learn fast that this is not true (but still fall for it).
And the type of programmers that calls themselves “software engineers” shall be avoided.
@Lapizistik @mina I doubt Dave Farley should be avoided.
@Lapizistik @mina I mentioned him, as he calls himself a software engineer. I understand your sentiment towards a lot of IT people calling themselves software engineers who hardly apply any engineering principles. It is like "software architects" who do not really design implementable architectures. Instead they use some Visio-sketches and some constraints on a sheet of paper which do not match the sketch.
@Lapizistik @mina Anyway, we can and should apply engineering principles to software development. The sad thing is that people do not do it. Still I would like to use the term properly to mince achieve the goal to really apply engineering principles.
BTW: I pointed that out on a symposium at the FZI in Karlsruhe 2010 (or so) addressing this discrepancy. They were outraged at first, but we had a very fruitful discussion.
@prefec2 @mina
I don't think it is possible. Programming _is_ different in many regards.
The software engineering debate at least goes back to the Apollo program where Margaret Hamilton did great work (and coined the term “software engineering”) and applied certain principles that kinda made the program successful. And thing is: The task was well defined _in advance_, and it was machine control (i.e. a well known set of sensors and actors).
This is not what we mainly face today with open world scenarios and arbitrary user interaction, moving targets all the time and so on…
@Lapizistik @mina yes indeed we usually get new needs rather quickly and so software is a moving target - way more than in other engineering disciplines. Still we can apply a more craftsmen's approach causing architecture degradation or we can apply engineering principles. Understanding the need first, come up with a design/solution, write tests to ensure the solution is tested properly and then implement the new part. This is a well tested engineering method - yet seldom used.
@Lapizistik @mina There is of course still a long way to go to until more code is implemented that way or other methods are applied and reflected on.
Still I applied the TDD on two legacy projects and the headache rate went down rather quickly (yes these are not sufficient case studies).
Also we/I kind of diverted the current thread to a different topic. Sorry for that.
I'd say the understanding the needs first is not true (if you are not doing machine control or something similar). You can try to agree with the customer on a document of requirements and then implement those and deliver the result but that rarely is what the customer needs. Finding out what the requirements exactly are _is_ the hard part. And this normally is an iterative process. If you have an exact (formal, applicable) definition of requirements you basically have the program.
Tests are important, and TDD is a valid approach, but on a much lower level.
@Lapizistik @mina you are absolute right on the requirement side. This is very messy, iterative, a communication nightmare and a lot more social sciences than engineering - and it is very different based on the domain.
@mina these are all fields in which you have to project confidence in order to build a career, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this trait overrepresented in those from any of the associated professions.
@mina economists, maybe just because of the number of them I have worked with
There's a reason, I put them on the list.
@mina It should be called the Kruger Dunning Effect. That at least is the sequence of the authors.
It mights just be dudes with a degree? (Or just dudes?)
In my completely unbiased opinion, it's an effect predominantly observed in, but by no means limited to, the male variety of the species.
@mina For any given subject the know nothing people think they know all there is to now on that specific subject and will confidently make bold statements (like: the sun burns oxigen).
Basically increasing knowledge and understanding on any subject teaches how much you do not know yet on that subject and therefore probably also lack on most other subjects.
Si he visto esa exagerada confianza en mis colegas físicos. Afortunadamente* yo no soy así, solo es que soy extremadamente capaz.
*Alerta de chiste malo
@mina a veces me da penita decir que soy físico.... es que los colegas no ayudan, realmente.
@mina@berlin.social I’d like to have some more of this. I’m suffering the #ImpostorSyndome.
But I’m also not mentioned in the list.
I never really understood the term "impostor syndrome", especially when applied to oneself, but I will have to re-read this topic.
@mina I'm kinda skeptical of the whole DK narrative because of how often I've seen it wielded by people who just automatically assume someone with domain expertise in one area can't also have it on one or more other areas, basically to gatekeep & disqualify..
But I think where it does really manifest is like what you said. Particularly, in domains whose participants have been trained to think that their domain of expertise somehow "explains" phenomena in other domains outside it. Economists would be the most obvious example of a group that have a completely unfounded such belief, but physicists kinda also fit that pattern (somehow thinking that explanations for underlying mechanisms grant understanding of complex aggregate/emergent phenomena).