> > a world in which people are very bad at estimating their own skill, therefore, statistically, people with lower skills tend to overestimate their skills, and experts tend to underestimate it.
> Be careful here, the conclusion you drew doesn't actually follow.
How does that not follow? It's just regression to the mean.
I believe the god-emperor was implying that it is possible to imagine a world where people are bad at estimating their own skill, but in the other direction - people who are good at something drastically overestimate how good they are, and vice-versa.
> a world in which people are very bad at estimating their own skill, therefore, statistically, *people with lower skills tend to overestimate their skills, and experts tend to underestimate it*.
I think the correct conclusion is that if a cohort is not good at estimating their own skill, you can conclude that the variance in their predicted self-assessment will be high (since they’re concluding things without strong evidence), but you can’t assume that their estimates will be biased without additional evidence.
That is, indeed, what was shown in the last panel of the article: freshman (and undergraduates in general) are much worse at assessing their own ability than professors, but no group has a strong bias towards over- or under-assessing their own ability (recalling the “my guesses are much better than your guesses” from “The Death of Expertise”).
How does that not follow? It's just regression to the mean.