> Collectively, the three critique papers have about 90 times fewer citations than the original Dunning-Kruger article.5 So it appears that most scientists still think that the Dunning-Kruger effect is a robust aspect of human psychology.6
Critiques cite the work being critiqued (yes, the referenced critiques in TFA cite the Dunning-Kruger study). Also, a 23 year-old paper will inevitably get cited more than 6 year-old papers. But yeah...the inertia in Science is real. That conservatism's a feature, not a bug.
Thanks for introducing me to the term "half-life of knowledge".
> An engineering degree went from having a half life of 35 years in ca. 1930 to about 10 years in 1960. A Delphi Poll showed that the half life of psychology as measured in 2016 ranged from 3.3 to 19 years depending on the specialty, with an average of a little over 7 years.
This is very interesting and makes me wonder what it is for tech careers, e.g. web devs, data scientists etc.
Kidding aside, it seems you could estimate it by asking, what portion of the knowledge I use did I learn 20 years ago? Then 10, 5, 1. For me it seems to be somewhere around ten years.
Critiques cite the work being critiqued (yes, the referenced critiques in TFA cite the Dunning-Kruger study). Also, a 23 year-old paper will inevitably get cited more than 6 year-old papers. But yeah...the inertia in Science is real. That conservatism's a feature, not a bug.
Psychology's probably the discipline with the shortest "half-life of knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge