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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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With easily demonstrable skills or testable claims this is relatively rare. But with skills or claims that are hard to test I feel like this is relatively common.

If you've actually read the original Dunning-Kreuger paper, they make this point explicitly, using basketball as an example. The percentage of people who think they could go one-on-one with a top NBA player and end up looking like other than a complete fool is, I would imagine, statistically indistinguishable from zero. And those few exceptions probably really are mostly outliers in basketball ability relative to the general population, even if they aren't as good as they think they are.

It would be interesting to look at this with more charged examples that people have higher mental error bars on - how many people think they could go one-on-one with a random WNBA player and not look like a total fool? I suspect that some will overestimate their own ability and underestimate women, others with deflect because they don't want to state that they think women are basically bad at basketball. The 2023 top scorer in the WNBA is only 5'10", so it's likely easier for a typical hobby baller to think they can get a few buckets and/or stops than when considering the obvious mismatch in how trivially Giannis Antetokounmpo will dunk on your head and swat away anything you try to put up.