dunning kruger curve, and i’m fairly sure

dave was in the kitchen and the woman who runs my old project review was on the phone, on speaker, and somehow they were, briefly, the same conversation. my dad once said a man with two opinions and one mouth is still a man with one mouth. beach vacations remain a scam. i am fairly sure.

this morning the topic is shape. the topic is the famous chart. the topic is the dunning kruger curve, which is, in popular memory, more famous than the paper it came from. that, on its face, is funny. i am, on this front, choosing to laugh from my desk on the third floor while carla is two floors above me at the q3 review, where she will remain until lunch unless someone else’s deck loads faster than expected, which it never does.

i’m going to keep the story moving while i still have the room. the famous shape — peak, valley, slow climb — is everywhere. it is on linkedin slides. it is on whiteboards. it has its own t-shirts, somewhere, i suspect. the chart, more than the underlying claim, is what survived. that’s the part i want to look at, and the part i’m treating in detail in the longer pillar on the effect itself, drafted from this same desk on a different morning. the chart is the thing people remember. the paper is the thing people skim, then quote, then misquote, then forget.

dunning kruger curve, the shape of it

the shape, briefly, is a roller coaster drawn on a napkin. confidence shoots up on the left, with very little knowledge underneath it. that is the part with a name — peak mount stupid. then the line falls, hard, into what people, online, like to call the valley of despair. then it climbs back, slowly, and never quite reaches the early peak. the curve, drawn honestly, looks like a man who once thought he could fix his own dishwasher.

that’s the picture. the language alone is already doing more work than the paper. “peak mount stupid” is a phrase a comedian wrote, not a researcher. “valley of despair” sounds like a country song. the words gave the chart a story, and a story travels in ways a regression line does not. that is, on a careful reading, why we are still drawing the dunning kruger curve a quarter century after the original study, while the original study sits, uncited, in a drawer of certified letters somewhere, presumably also unopened.

i want to be honest. the curve is not, in the strict version, what the 1999 paper claimed. the paper had bar charts. the paper had quartiles. the paper did not have a beautiful x-y line that any consultant could draw on a flip chart in under nine seconds. the curve is the marketing of the idea. the curve is the idea wearing a friendlier coat. it is what people remember because it is what people can draw, and a thing you can draw is a thing you can pass around. that, also, is why i am sitting here writing about it instead of about the actual numbers, which i did not, on this thursday, look up.

dave called, carla walked past my desk, simultaneously

at 10:14am two events happened at once. dave called from a kitchen — his, allegedly — to ask whether a microwave that “smells faintly of penny” was still safe to use. dave is the only acquaintance i have who phrases questions like that. while he was asking, carla walked past my desk on her way to the printer. she did not stop. she did not need to. she carried the look of someone whose meeting is fine but whose afternoon is going to be longer than her morning.

i told dave the microwave was, on the balance, fine, and that i was on my seventh microwave by my own count and would not be in a position to throw stones. dave laughed, briefly, and hung up. i pretended to type. carla, on the way back from the printer, slowed near my screen. i swapped tabs. she said nothing. clean exit. i’m not going to lie about how much labor that small choreography requires.

the relevant point is this. while i was on the phone with dave, i had, in my head, the entire dunning kruger curve drawn over his microwave question. dave was on peak mount stupid about microwaves — confident, warm, wrong. i was, somewhere in the valley, a man who has killed six and is on the seventh. carla, who has never once asked me about a microwave, was the climb. carla never volunteers a take on appliances. that is, in itself, expertise.

dad once said something curve-adjacent

my dad, who is not in this scene and never will be, used to say a thing that lives, in retrospect, on the same chart. “a man who is sure of one thing on monday and sure of the opposite on friday is still a man with no opinion.” he would say this at dinner, usually after someone at the table had taken a strong position on, say, beach vacations. the table would go quiet. then he would butter another piece of bread.

i hold the take that beach vacations are punishment with sand. i have held it for years. i would hold it in court. i would, on the right kind of thursday, also concede that the people who love the beach are not, on the chart, on peak mount stupid. they are, possibly, on the climb. they have been to the beach. they know the deal. they have updated. i, who have not been to a beach in eleven years, am the peak in this exchange, which is, frankly, a humbling place to file a take from. dad, if he were in the room, would butter the bread.

PEAK. MOUNT. STUPID. HAS. A. T-SHIRT.

where i may or may not be on the curve

the test, if you want one, is to point at yourself on the curve. if you point confidently at the climb, you are on the peak. if you point hesitantly at the valley, you are, possibly, on the climb. if you cannot point at all, you are reading this from the same desk i am writing it from, and the third yoga mat is still under your couch from 2023, possibly evolving. i have not looked at mine since february. that is, depending on your reading, either humility or sloth. i would accept either verdict.

i’d add, for the record, that there is a film tradition for this kind of unearned confidence — the entire arc of the karl pilkington in “an idiot abroad” is, on a careful viewing, the dunning kruger curve rendered as travel television. a man who is sure of small wrong things, getting confronted with the bigger world, refusing to update, then mostly updating anyway in a quiet way he would not call updating. it’s the chart with a passport. it is also, separately, very good television. an idiot, on the road, is the curve walking around in shorts.

my own placement, on a careful self-audit, is somewhere between the valley and the climb, with mild peak-tendencies on tuesdays. on the topic of microwaves i am post-peak, which is not the same as expert. on taxes, mike — who has a system for taxes and has not filed since 2019 — is the only correct guide, and the only place to consult mike is at the bar called the corner, on a stool, after his second beer. mike does not draw charts. mike, on the chart, does not exist. that is, by a generous reading, the highest possible placement.

findings, the curve is generous

three findings, drafted with carla still upstairs and the printer humming three desks over.

one. the dunning kruger curve is more famous than the dunning kruger paper, and it deserves to be. people remember pictures. people forget data. the picture is the message that survived the messenger, which is, on its own, evidence the picture is doing real work.

two. nobody draws the curve with themselves on it. they draw it with their colleagues on it, their boss on it, their brother-in-law on it, the man at the bar on his third beer on it, dave on it. drawing yourself is the only honest version, and it is, by design, the version nobody draws. that is the joke the curve is hiding inside the curve.

three. the curve is generous. it suggests you climb back up, even slowly. it does not show you parked on the peak forever. a longer treatment of the parking problem, in a different post on the syndrome at the desk, makes the case better than i could here. the curve gives you a path back. that is more than most charts give you. most charts give you a verdict. this one gives you a return ticket. take it.

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