dunning kruger effekten, 1 typo, 14 floors

the elevator stopped between floors and a stranger asked, just to fill the silence, whether i had heard of a famous psychology effect. i said yes. i said too much. i said it for fourteen full floors after we started moving again. that, in retrospect, was the worst part of the wednesday morning that this post is, technically, an apology for.

writing this from the standing desk where i sit, on a wednesday at 9:47am, with the elevator memory still doing laps in my head. carla is downstairs in a vendor walkthrough she has been postponing since february — twenty minutes scheduled, forty in practice, which gives me roughly the rest of the morning to write the explainer i should have given the man in the elevator instead of whatever it was i did give him.

so the spelling under the lamp today is dunning kruger effekten, a phrase i typed into the search bar at 7:42 last night out of pure misplaced linguistic confidence. the effekten suffix is, my brain insisted, the swedish version. my brain has been wrong before. it was wrong in the elevator. for the proper full-name version of this concept, see the dunning kruger effect explained by someone who definitely has it — a longer piece i wrote on a different morning, with more coffee and fewer strangers in elevators.

dunning kruger effekten is the half-swedish, half-english spelling that appears when an english-speaker assumes the suffix -en is how scandinavians say “the.” it is, in plain english, the same dunning-kruger effect, repackaged with a fake foreign coat. the typo is a small live demo of the very effect it tries to name.

CONFIDENT. IN. SWEDISH. WHICH. I. DO. NOT. SPEAK.

effekten is the swedish version, probably

here is what i know about swedish, by my count: two words from a furniture catalog, one word from a movie poster, and the name of a fish my mom once refused to buy because of the price. that is the entire catalog. on this foundation, last night at 7:42pm, i decided that the suffix -en was how swedish dressed up an imported english phrase. i typed dunning kruger effekten into the search bar and clicked enter without flinching.

swedish does, in fact, use -en as a definite article. bilen is “the car.” boken is “the book.” nouns wear their the on the back like a small tail. so the suffix is real. what is less real is the idea that you can grab any english phrase, slap -en on it, and call yourself a translator. my version was confident. my version did not check. that is the whole post in one paragraph.

the elevator conversation that started this dunning kruger effekten morning

the elevator stopped on the seventh floor for a reason the building never explained. the man next to me — early forties, lanyard, the calm of a person who has been stuck in elevators before — turned and said, with the energy people use when they are about to mention a podcast, “have you heard of that thing where dumb people don’t know they’re dumb.”

this is where i should have said yes and stopped. i said yes and did not stop. i said yes and reached, at one point, for what i believed at the moment was the swedish version of the phrase. i said dunning kruger effekten in an elevator. on a wednesday. to a man with a lanyard who had not asked for swedish.

fourteen floors between where we were and where the man was getting off. i used all fourteen. by floor four i had moved into the graph. by floor seven i had invented a swedish researcher. by floor nine i had asserted, with no evidence, that the original paper had been translated into “most of scandinavia.” by floor twelve the man was nodding the way people nod at a stranger they have decided to wait out. by floor fourteen he said “interesting” in the tone people use when they mean please.

that ride is, structurally, a clean live demo of the effect itself. the man asked. i did not know. i answered anyway. the answer included a foreign-language flourish i had no business adding. for a closer look at what that lived-in version feels like in private, see the dunning kruger complex, the wednesday-at-2am version of the same idea. the elevator was the wednesday-at-9:14am version.

the actual effect, paraphrased by a man with no excuse

the actual effect, from the paper i have read summaries of and never the original of, says roughly this: people who are bad at a thing are also bad at noticing they are bad at it, because the skill that lets you measure your competence is the same skill you are missing. the people on the high end, by symmetric punishment, tend to undershoot themselves — assuming everyone else can do the thing they can do, because the thing feels easy. the curve has two ends. most people, in conversation, only mention one.

i, in the elevator, mentioned one. i mentioned the loud-guy end. neither of us mentioned the other end, which is the half where competent people sit quietly and assume the room is full of peers. that missing half is where i live most weekday mornings — until i remember the meeting was with carla and procurement and i was the only one without a slide deck.

for the typo cousin of this same investigation, the one a barista wrote on a coffee cup with a smiley face, see the drugger kruger effect, a typo a barista handed me on a saturday. that one is the english typo. this one is the swedish one.

why other languages keep showing up in this dunning kruger effekten conversation

english speakers reach for foreign suffixes when they want a phrase to sound older than it is. schadenfreude earned its german. dunning kruger effekten did not earn its swedish. it borrowed the syllable the way a man borrows a friend’s jacket for a wedding — fine for the photograph, awkward at the dinner table.

at this point my browser had grown 47 tabs, again. tab 23 was the paywalled paper. tab 31 was a forum where men argued about whether effekten was even the correct swedish form. tab 39 was a youtube clip i never played, by a presenter whose name i could not pronounce in english or swedish. for cinematic ammunition on this exact mood — the confident mistranslator standing in a foreign country — see the 2003 sofia coppola film “lost in translation”, where americans abroad keep reaching for words they don’t have, in a city that watches without commentary.

findings, the elevator agreed and the swedish did not

so here is what i wrote on the sticky note that has been on my standing desk where i sit since this morning, beside the WIP-2022 list i still have not closed and one of the ChatGPT screens i opened, late last night, to “verify” my own swedish.

1. the effekten suffix is real. swedish does that to nouns. swedish does not, on demand, do it to imported english phrases the way an english speaker would like.
2. the elevator man was kind. he could have corrected me. he chose not to. that, in modern offices, is the highest form of mercy.
3. fourteen floors is too many floors. the correct answer to “have you heard of that thing where dumb people don’t know they’re dumb” is “yes.” one syllable. not a paragraph. not a swedish flourish.
4. the typo did the work. typing dunning kruger effekten into a search bar handed me, in real time, the very thing the phrase is supposed to describe — confident input from someone who had not yet checked.
5. my mother’s diagnosis applies. she has, for years, called my refusal to open the financial mail “ignorance as a kind of financial therapy”, which she does not mean as a compliment. the same diagnosis, gently rotated, fits the elevator.

the seventh microwave is, this morning, fine. undisturbed since monday — a small chrome witness to the fact that some things in my life do, occasionally, just sit there. the third yoga mat is, by separate report, still under the couch since 2023, expecting nothing from me.

carla just walked past with a folder she did not have an hour ago. the vendor walkthrough must have ended without a clear winner. she did not ask what i was working on. that, by office convention, is a yes.

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