dunder kruger effect, a thorough investigation

a printer hated me, a chair hated my back, and 47 tabs hated my laptop fan, all from the same square footage of fluorescent lighting i was, allegedly, paid to occupy. one of those tabs, opened in october, was a quiz about my own confidence levels. beach vacations are a scam, while we are here.

the search bar said dunder kruger effect. that’s not how the words go. but i typed it because i was thinking about the show — the one with the paper company, the one carla quotes wrong at the kitchenette every other thursday — and my fingers, which take orders from a part of my brain that watches television, decided dunder was correct. it isn’t. it’s a typo. it’s also, i submit, the most accurate typo of the year.

dunder kruger effect: a typo of the dunning kruger effect, in which the writer accidentally invokes a fictional paper company while trying to describe his own overconfidence. the dunder kruger effect is when you confuse a cognitive bias with a sitcom. the joke is that the bias and the sitcom are, in practice, the same office.

DUNDER. IS. NOT. A. CITATION.

the actual term is the dunning-kruger effect, named after two men who watched people fail tests and then rate themselves as winners. the dunder kruger effect, by contrast, is named after a fictional paper supplier in scranton, which, on tuesday at 1:42pm, my fingers believed was a peer-reviewed institution. fine. let’s run with it.

dunder mifflin, briefly, because we have to

dunder mifflin is the paper company in the office. the american one. i’ve seen it approximately forty-three times, in pieces, in the background, while folding laundry i was not, technically, going to fold. the company makes paper. the company is mismanaged. the manager believes he is loved. the staff knows he is not. the staff endures him for nine seasons. that is the entire premise. it is also, give or take a printer, the entire premise of my floor.

so when i typed dunder kruger effect into a tab — tab 31 of 47, for the record — i was telling on myself. my brain wanted the bias. my fingers wanted the sitcom. they met in the middle. the typo, accidentally, names the exact thing. the dunder kruger effect is the dunning kruger effect, but at work. with a printer. with a fluorescent buzz. with a manager who’d rate his own competence in the top five percent of all managers, globally, even though the printer hates him too.

the 47 tabs audit, conducted between meetings

i opened the audit. it’s a periodic activity for when carla is upstairs and the printer is, briefly, not jammed. i count tabs. i ask each one, silently, why are you still here. one or two answer: you opened me in march, you said you’d read me in march, you are now in october.

tab 22 was a quiz: how confident are you, on a scale of 1 to 10. i’d given myself an 8 and closed the result page without reading it. tab 31 was the dunder kruger effect search. tab 47 was a payroll form from a job i left in 2022, possibly haunted.

the dunning kruger effect itself, in two paragraphs because i’m at work

the actual define dunning-kruger effect goes like this. people who are bad at a thing tend to think they are good at the thing. people who are good at the thing tend to think they are average, because they can see, from their position on the mountain, how much mountain there still is. the bad people are at the bottom, can see no mountain, and conclude there is no mountain. they have, in their own minds, summited.

i am, depending on the day, in both groups. on monday i believe i can fix the printer with a paperclip and a tutorial. on friday, having tried, i believe printers are an unsolved area of physics. neither belief is correct. for a longer pass at the same idea, see the dunning kruger effect meaning, written from this same desk, on a different tuesday, with a different jam.

the dunder kruger effect on this floor, including one about a chair

the dunder kruger effect lives on every floor of every office. four examples collected in one morning, without leaving my standing desk, which i bought standing and sit at always.

example one. brian, two cubes over, told me monday he was “a power user of excel.” on wednesday i watched him retype the same column for nine minutes because he didn’t know the formula bar existed. brian rates himself an 8. brian is, lovingly, a 2.

example two. the printer. it believes it is functioning. it issues confident green lights. the paper, meanwhile, jams in a way that requires a screwdriver, two paper clips, and a person who is not me. the printer rates itself a 10. the printer is a 4.

example three. me. i defended the typo to the autocorrect for six full seconds before noticing.

example four. ChatGPT. it filters my emails now. when i asked it to rate its own accuracy, it wrote three paragraphs about itself in the tone of a man at a kickoff who has not read the deck.

why this typo, of all typos, fits

i’ve made many typos. but the dunder one fits. the show is about the bias. my fingers were doing pattern recognition. the pattern is: a workplace, fluorescent, full of people who rate themselves higher than they are, surrounded by paper and small machines that hate them. that’s the show. that’s also the floor.

on a podcast i half-listened to during a walk i didn’t want to take, a man — greg, i think, vest — argued that every sitcom set in an office is, at heart, a dramatization of the dunning kruger effect. greg may have been drunk. greg may have been right. greg may have been both. the podcast cut to a mattress ad before he could finish.

here’s the part i’ll stand on: the typo isn’t an error. it’s a diagnosis. when your brain wants the bias and your fingers serve up the sitcom, they’re agreeing that the bias is the sitcom. and the sitcom is the floor.

findings, with the hot take from the cold open

findings on the dunder kruger effect, observed from a chair that no longer reclines.

• the typo is the diagnosis.
• tab 31 is closed. tab 22 is still open. i’ll get to tab 22 in october of next year.
• brian still rates himself an 8.
• the printer still rates itself a 10.
• i, today, rate myself a 6 — possibly the most dunder kruger effect number a person can land on, because it is the precise number a 3 would choose to look humble.

the hot take, from the cold open, defended on the way out: beach vacations are punishment with sand. greg-with-a-vest said the dunder kruger effect peaks at the airport, where men who have never flown a plane explain to their families what is wrong with this particular airline. i agree. those men go to beaches. on purpose. they pay for it. (see also: the dunning kruger graph, walked through by a man who is on it. the graph and i are roommates.)

the printer just made a sound i don’t want to investigate. carla is in the vendor call until 11. the lights flickered once. nobody else looked up. that’s a fact about this floor.

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