“people[...] update away from that bias based on their competence or lack thereof, but they don’t update hard enough”
I don’t think this a bias; I’d actually take it as a striking sign of rationality and a great example of Friedman’s billiards: people can subconsciously perform incredibly complex calculations to optimize for some goal (even if they’re incapable of understanding or reasoning about them explicitly).
Here’s an intuition pump: I’m going to measure your floorbitude and tell you your percentile. What do you think it will be? (...) Answer: 50%. You have no reason to think you’re more or less floorbacious than the average person, after all.
In general this pattern is exactly what you’d expect from a rational actor model, where people combine the information they have (e.g. IQ tests or grades) with a prior distribution (“my IQ is probably around 100, like most people’s”).
(People overestimating their IQ does seem like an actual bias, though.)
Or rather, it’s not explained by an honest+rational agents model (people are either overestimating or lying).
Also worth noting there’s no fixed reference point—people are being asked to compare themselves to the overall population. That means another way of looking at this is that people have a bias toward consistently overestimating how dumb otherpeople are.
I don’t think this a bias; I’d actually take it as a striking sign of rationality and a great example of Friedman’s billiards: people can subconsciously perform incredibly complex calculations to optimize for some goal (even if they’re incapable of understanding or reasoning about them explicitly).
Here’s an intuition pump: I’m going to measure your floorbitude and tell you your percentile. What do you think it will be? (...) Answer: 50%. You have no reason to think you’re more or less floorbacious than the average person, after all.
In general this pattern is exactly what you’d expect from a rational actor model, where people combine the information they have (e.g. IQ tests or grades) with a prior distribution (“my IQ is probably around 100, like most people’s”).
(People overestimating their IQ does seem like an actual bias, though.)
Or rather, it’s not explained by an honest+rational agents model (people are either overestimating or lying).
Also worth noting there’s no fixed reference point—people are being asked to compare themselves to the overall population. That means another way of looking at this is that people have a bias toward consistently overestimating how dumb other people are.