Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own

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Maybe they’re reversing cause and effect. Maybe “fixed intelligence” is wrong. Therefore only stupid people believe it. Because they’re stupid, they seek out easy problems to solve. Having solved those, they feel competent, and Dunning and Kruger win again.

Also, I’m almost sure I remember that Far Side saying “Harvard School for the Gifted.” Was that just a shoop by some yalies?

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Or maybe they realise that there are many more qualified people who could fill their position.

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So wait, does this mean that if I think that most people are good at SOMETHING that I’m an idiot?

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Do we have effective ways of teaching growth mindset? It seems like that would be quite difficult, requiring the kind of heroic effort that make it unlikely to happen on a large scale. (Maybe it is easier when they are little.)

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Coincidentally, last night I listened to David McRaney’s “You Are Not So Smart” podcast about the Dunning-Kruger effect. In it, he interviews Dr. David Dunning. Good stuff!

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Wow, is it just me, or do all these stories seem to be about Drumpf in some way?

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BTW: I still think Dunning-Kruger Effect would be the ultimate college band name.

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Just eyeballing some of the figures in the paper, it doesn’t seem like this is the explanation. The ‘entity theorists’ overestimated their own ability by over 25 percentages points while the ‘incremental theorists’ were only off by five, but it looks like both groups scored right around the 50th percentile at least on that initial trial. But I haven’t looked at the later findings about attention-to-difficulty and the tendency to focus on easier problems, maybe something comes out there.

It seems like it would be easiest and most useful to teach to children. I’ve heard advice to not tell your kids that they are “smart” and to never tell them that they are “stupid”. Rather, you should reward them for their efforts and encourage them to keep trying if/when they fail at things. I imagine that fits in with the recommendations here.

It seems like there’s a lot of early classification of children, either officially or not. This one is smart, that one is stupid, this one is good at math. A kid can get the impression that they simply ARE this way, intrinsically and unchangeably. That is avoidable.

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Ya, I’m calling BS on this… I’m way too smart to overestimate my intelligence.
In fact, I have the best estimates.

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You can train your intelligence and improve it over time.
You can also temporarily lose quite some of it; that’s quite unpleasant.

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Two years later and my wife is still using “pregnancy brain” as an excuse.

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Why not just go with the back handed approach?

“That’s pretty impressive, but you know I was building things like that when I was 2 years younger than you.”

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It’s always been “Midvale.” I’m a Unitarian Universalist and I remember having a giggle when I saw the original because one of our two seminaries is “Meadville.” Close enough! :wink:

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I love it. They could bill themselves as the best band in the world yet sound like hell and they’d get a pass because of their name.

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"Study: people who believe in innate intelligence overestimate their own "

In the USA we see this everyday in our Politics.

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I wonder what the impact is of a basic standardized test-taking tactic we all learned in school. You go quickly through the test the first time, doing all the easy questions and skipping the hard ones. Then you go back and do as many hard ones as you can before time runs out. That way, you don’t miss easy points you could have gotten just because those questions came towards the end of the test. Does that prime every American schoolkid to think they are smarter than they are?

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A corollary: wanting or believing simple answers to insufficiently-understood complex problems.

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