Seems quite different to me. D-K effect is “you overestimate how good you are at something”, while what I describe does not even involve a belief that you are good at the specific thing, only that—despite knowing nothing about it on the object level—you still have the meta-level ability of estimating how difficult it is “in principle”.
An example of what I meant would be a manager in an IT company, who has absolutely no idea what “fooing the bar” means, but feels quite certain that it shouldn’t take more than three days, including the analysis and testing.
While an example of D-K would be someone who writes a horrible code, but believes to be the best programmer ever. (And after looking at other people’s code, keeps the original conviction, because the parts of the code he understood he could obviously write too, and the parts of the code he didn’t understand are obviously written wrong.)
I may be misunderstanding the connection with the availability heuristic, but it seems to me that you’re correct, and this is more closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What Dunning and Kruger observed was that someone who is sufficiently incompetent at a task is unable to distinguish competent work from incompetent work, and is more likely to overestimate the quality of their own work compared to others, even after being presented with the work of others who are more competent. What Viliam is describing is the inability to see what makes a task difficult, due to unfamiliarity with what is necessary to complete that task competently. I can see how this might relate to the availability heuristic; if I ask myself “how hard is it to be a nurse?”, I can readily think of encounters I’ve had with nurses where they did some (seemingly) simple task and moved on. This might give the illusion that the typical day at work for a nurse is a bunch of (seemingly) simple tasks with patients like me.
Isn’t this very closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Seems quite different to me. D-K effect is “you overestimate how good you are at something”, while what I describe does not even involve a belief that you are good at the specific thing, only that—despite knowing nothing about it on the object level—you still have the meta-level ability of estimating how difficult it is “in principle”.
An example of what I meant would be a manager in an IT company, who has absolutely no idea what “fooing the bar” means, but feels quite certain that it shouldn’t take more than three days, including the analysis and testing.
While an example of D-K would be someone who writes a horrible code, but believes to be the best programmer ever. (And after looking at other people’s code, keeps the original conviction, because the parts of the code he understood he could obviously write too, and the parts of the code he didn’t understand are obviously written wrong.)
I may be misunderstanding the connection with the availability heuristic, but it seems to me that you’re correct, and this is more closely related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What Dunning and Kruger observed was that someone who is sufficiently incompetent at a task is unable to distinguish competent work from incompetent work, and is more likely to overestimate the quality of their own work compared to others, even after being presented with the work of others who are more competent. What Viliam is describing is the inability to see what makes a task difficult, due to unfamiliarity with what is necessary to complete that task competently. I can see how this might relate to the availability heuristic; if I ask myself “how hard is it to be a nurse?”, I can readily think of encounters I’ve had with nurses where they did some (seemingly) simple task and moved on. This might give the illusion that the typical day at work for a nurse is a bunch of (seemingly) simple tasks with patients like me.