dani kruger effect — 1 typo, 5 hot takes, 1 basement

someone typed it wrong into the search bar and ended up here, which is its own kind of confidence. while you are here let me walk you through a christmas tree skirt sale i once attended in march, in a basement, behind a hardware store. i have hot takes from that day. i still do.

workstation, wednesday, 1:38pm, screen tilted toward the window so the people who walk past can read the sentence “screen tilted toward the window” before i finish typing it. the floor is in a vendor walkthrough until two. ninety unsupervised minutes. let’s wander.

so. the dani kruger effect, which is not a real psychological term and is, instead, a typo for the more famous one. the famous one is covered, with charts and a slightly steadier hand, in my longer walkthrough of the dunning-kruger effect. you, however, did not type that. you typed dani. you are here for dani. in honour of your typo i’ll write a slightly stranger post than i would have otherwise, which seems fair to both of us.

dani kruger effect: a common misspelling of the famous psychology phrase, which describes the gap between what someone thinks they know and what they actually know. there is no dani in the original — only dunning. the typo, though, is honest, and the search bar is, in its way, a place where honesty quietly wins.

YOUR. TYPO. IS. ALSO. DATA.

that goes on the wall. there is a cinematic shorthand for confidently entering a wrong word into a system that then quietly takes you somewhere you did not plan to go — see the 2001 film “spirited away”, in which a girl confidently follows her parents into a tunnel that turns out to be the wrong tunnel and then has to spend the rest of the film negotiating with bath house employees. that, frankly, is what you’ve just done in the search bar. welcome.

the dani kruger effect, which is, technically, not a person

let’s settle the spelling. there is no researcher named dani kruger associated with the famous effect. there is dunning. there is kruger. they are two men, both real, both academic, both reasonably alive in the late nineties when this whole thing got attached to their names. dani is, by the most generous reading, a fingerslip on a keyboard whose home row is more crowded than it ought to be.

that has not stopped people from typing dani several thousand times a month into search engines. the search engines, being polite, send those people here, or somewhere like here. somewhere like here is, in this case, a man at a workstation, wednesday afternoon, with a half-cold coffee and a tab count that is, at the moment, forty-seven and climbing.

so the typo is not a real person. but the typo is a real signal. the signal is: confidence. you typed it without checking. you are, on a generous reading, the phrase you came to look up. that is not a flaw. that is a small free diagnostic that the search bar performed on you, on a wednesday, in three seconds, for free.

the actual effect, briefly

the actual phrase, dunning-kruger, points at the gap between confidence and competence. people who know very little about a topic tend to overestimate how much they know. people who know quite a lot tend to underestimate themselves. the loud are wrong more often than the quiet. the quiet, on average, are the better source. that is the official version, condensed past the point a researcher would forgive.

i looked it up, briefly, on three sites. one was paywalled. one had a broken graph where the famous curve should have been. one was a podcast i listened to for eleven minutes while pretending to fold the laundry, which, by minute eleven, was unchanged. the laundry, in this respect, is also a piece of evidence.

for a sturdier definition of the same idea — one that does not lean on a basement anecdote — there is also the earlier essay on what the meaning looks like at 2 am, which is, by my own private accounting, the most honest version i have written. that one has a fridge in it. this one has a closet. these are, structurally, the same room.

hot takes i have collected this year

i collect hot takes the way other people collect mugs. they accumulate. they live in a small mental drawer next to the wip 2022 list, which has forty-six items and has not moved since february of that year. the takes, mercifully, take up less space.

this year’s drawer, opened on a wednesday, contains roughly the following:

• if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. i have defended this take, on and off, for years, and it is the most durable one in the drawer. parsley is, in cooking, a frequent guest at the wrong dinner party.
• cars should have one cupholder. six is greed.
• showers over four minutes are theatre.
• the toilet paper roll goes under. over is for monsters. this take has cost me at least one friendship and i stand by it.
• plants are silent landlords. mine, brenda, has been, in this respect, an unusually quiet tenant.

five takes is, frankly, generous for a wednesday. there are more in the drawer. some of them concern weddings i did not attend. some of them concern dishwashers. one concerns the spoon, which is, on a careful reading, a smaller bowl with extra steps. but five is enough. the rest, like the wip list, can wait until february of whatever year i feel like.

chatgpt, which screens my email and increasingly screens my own sentences before i send them, told me, when i pasted the parsley take into the prompt, that the take “lacks nuance”. the machine has not, in its training, been to a basement in march of 2019. the machine has not, on the record, ever held a bowl of decorative parsley near a folding table next to a brass desk lamp.

one of them involves the christmas tree skirt

here is the basement. it was march of 2019. the sale was held in a basement behind a hardware store i no longer go to. the store has, since then, changed hands. the basement, by all accounts, has not. one of those is a metaphor and one of those is a fact and i would, on a wednesday at the workstation, struggle to tell you which is which without three more cups of coffee.

the sale’s purpose was unclear. it had, on offer, mainly christmas tree skirts. the skirts had, mainly, red velvet trim. the venue had, mainly, low ceilings and one fluorescent light that, in the time i was there, blinked twice. there were six other people. one of them was the seller. one of them was, possibly, also the seller. the other four were, like me, confused.

i bought a christmas tree skirt. i do not, technically, have a christmas tree. i have, instead, the skirt. it lives in a drawer in a hallway closet. it has not, in seven years, fulfilled its stated purpose. it has, however, been an excellent listener — better than the brass desk lamp two drawers over, which has burned out and refuses to admit it.

verdict, you searched for the wrong name

practical advice, from a man at his standing desk where he sits, on a wednesday at 1:38pm, with the seventh microwave humming in the kitchen back home: do not, on the strength of one typo, declare yourself a case study. do, however, take a moment to notice that the search bar performed a small free diagnostic on you in three seconds. you demonstrated the phrase. you are, in this respect, ahead of most readers.

and if you’d like to take a slightly less sloppy version of the same diagnostic, there is a homemade four-question test on a takeout menu i drafted on a separate occasion. it has questions. it has scoring. it has, by design, no way for the author to pass it. that, in itself, is a feature.

then go look up the original phrase, spelled correctly this time. go on with your wednesday. the skirt, in the closet, will keep waiting. the brass lamp will keep not working. parsley will keep being, technically, optional. those are the constants. you, on the other hand, can be slightly more careful, on the next search, with the home row.

the seventh microwave is on the counter at home, since thursday. seventh because the previous six are on a napkin dave keeps in his glove compartment. dave does not, mercifully, know about the basement. that is one of the small protections a hallway closet still affords a man with a fluorescent memory of march, 2019.

↑