Thread by @LeaKissner

Most of us know about the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people who are clueless about a subject are also clueless about how clueless they are. I had not looked at the original study.

Part of it "tests" humour. According to the Cautionary Tales podcast, these are the test jokes:🧵

https://twitter.com/LeaKissner/status/1377311378516545538

First off, I find it interesting that there's a "correct" answer. (It's #2, which I found, like many of you, to be too cruel to be funny.) But what I found more interesting is that they determined this "correct" answer by asking a panel of professional comedians.

The Dunning-Kruger study was published back in 1999. There's been an awful lot of change in what is considered funny. There's a lot less tolerance for punching down. Comedians from groups that many professional comedians thought were unfunny (e.g. women) are magically funny now.

Point being: Dunning and Kruger thought they were assessing competence at humor. I don't think they were. I think they were testing social conformance.

And hey, we should always be careful we're testing what we intend to test. Metric perversity is a huge problem for a reason.

Here's the episode of the podcast, if you're interested:

timharford.com/2021/03/cautio…

(While I love the concept, fair warning that I find the host veers into smugness, for example about what he thinks of people who prefer joke #1.)

For the record: the final tally is 56/44 in favour of joke #1. This isn't a representative sample in any way, shape, or form, but I'm not at all surprised that joke #2 didn't resoundingly win in the way the study suggested it should.

https://twitter.com/nikitab/status/1377440962427817984?s=19