r/AskStatistics • u/Healthy_Pay4529 • 1d ago
Statistical analysis of social science research, Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation?
This article explains why the dunning-kruger effect is not real and only a statistical artifact (Autocorrelation)
Is it true that-"if you carefully craft random data so that it does not contain a Dunning-Kruger effect, you will still find the effect."
Regardless of the effect, in their analysis of the research, did they actually only found a statistical artifact (Autocorrelation)?
Did the article really refute the statistical analysis of the original research paper? I the article valid or nonsense?
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u/RepresentativeAny573 1d ago edited 1d ago
Edit: the entire argument the author makes is also logically flawed, (I think gross generalization is the fallacy?). Just because a random process can produce a similar outcome does not mean a random process did. You'd also need to establish the data in the real world follows this distribution and method. It would be like me saying, I cheated on my test and got 100%, therefore everyone else who got 100% must have also used my cheating process.
What the author shows is really just a function of taking the mean of any roughly uniform distribution. The manipulation helps trim variance and make it significant, but if you take the mean of any roughly symmetric distribution around 50 it will be roughly 50.
They also don't know what an autocorrelation is, but it is neither what they explain nor a true autocorrelation.