dunning kruger examples, an explainer, sort of

stefan reappeared with a clipboard. a clipboard. he had notes on my notes. behind me, the wip 2022 list was still pinned to a wall, and that wall, frankly, was insulting me in pixels. parsley should be skipped. that is also a note. nobody asked for it. here it comes anyway.

so this is a small catalogue of dunning kruger examples, drafted from this desk in twenty-minute installments because carla is in the budget review on the third floor and the agenda, as always, has more bullets than budget. the apartment, last sunday, supplied two of the items below. the office, this morning, supplied a third. it never stops supplying. that, too, may be one of the dunning kruger examples i did not list.

desk, second coffee, the cursor pretending to move on the spreadsheet for any human who walks past. carla is in the budget review and has been for forty minutes. i have, give or take, until lunch.

i’m going to keep this in four piles. the well-known dunning kruger examples (the postcards). the stefan example, which arrived with a clipboard. the wip 2022 list, which is possibly an example of itself. and the wall of insults, digital, all donated. for the longer machinery — what the chart is, why the chart bends — the place to start is the longer treatment of the original phenomenon, drafted at this same desk. the chart itself, drawn out, lives at the chart, in detail, with the peak and the valley named. this post is the field notebook, not the textbook.

dunning kruger examples, the canon

the postcard example, told by everyone who has ever explained the topic in a hurry, is the bank robber from 1995 who covered his face in lemon juice. lemon juice, for unrelated reasons, is sometimes used as invisible ink. he reasoned that what hides writing must hide a face. they caught him in hours. he was, by accounts, surprised. that surprise is the entire point. he was not lying. he had a clean, confident map to a city that did not exist. the map was the trouble. the city was the trouble. so was the lemon juice.

the second postcard is anything where a person without training enters a domain with training and starts giving notes. there is a film tradition for the move — see the 2004 film “anchorman” with will ferrell, in which a man with no qualifications becomes the loudest voice in a newsroom by refusing to hear anyone else. anchorman is sometimes described as a comedy. anchorman is, on a careful viewing, a documentary. i’m fairly sure. i may be on the peak as i type this.

the third postcard, the one i find hardest to look at, is the comment section. any comment section. the most certain comment under any video is, on a strict statistical basis, the one that should not have been posted. the chart is alive in there. it never sleeps. it does not, as far as i can tell, eat.

stefan, who provided one without knowing

stefan is the kind of expert nobody hired. he is sincere. he has a vineyard. he has owned it for eleven years. last summer i poured myself a glass of his own wine, in his own kitchen, and told him with a straight face that the finish was “a little flat”. he smiled the way a person smiles at a dog that has learned a small trick. that smile is the chart. that smile is the whole curriculum, in one face, for one second, in a kitchen that smelled of garlic.

this morning, stefan walked into my apartment with a clipboard. a clipboard. he had read a draft of mine on a topic he doesn’t work in, and he had notes. the notes were neat. the notes were wrong. the notes were also calm, which is the dangerous tone. he started with “i think you’ll find” — a phrase that has earned a place in the wall of insults purely on its own merits. i listened. i agreed with the small things. i did not, on the large thing, defer. that’s not because i was right. that’s because stefan, in this single domain, was performing the chart in real time, and i could see the chart from this side.

the comedy, of course, is that the moment i write that paragraph, i am also on the chart. nobody is off it. i’d like to claim a special vantage. i am, instead, an example of the genre. recipe calls for parsley, skip it. that, also, is one of mine. that, also, is what someone with thin information would say with thick confidence. i hold the take. i defend it. i recognise, faintly, that holding it as i do is part of the demonstration. i’m going to keep holding it. that’s the bit.

before this gets too philosophical: a working definition of the broader category, the kind of moron with a clipboard is the closest cousin to what stefan was performing this morning. the word “moron” is older than the chart and survives because it does the same job in fewer syllables. one moron, one chart. one clipboard. one apartment. enough material for a quarter.

the wip 2022 list, possibly an example of itself

the wip 2022 list lives in a tab in this browser, third from the left. forty-six items. none have moved since february. one of the items, i kid you not, says “research dunning kruger”. i am, in this very moment, one tab away from closing it. i will not close it. closing it would be a peak move. closing it would also, by the cleanest reading, be the only honest move. so i will not close it. i will, instead, continue to consider the list as evidence of my potential, which is the trick the list is performing.

the list is one of the cleanest dunning kruger examples i can put my finger on, because the entire structure of the list is a confidence move. each line is a thing i was sure i could do. each blank checkbox is what was actually there. the gap between the line and the checkbox is the chart, in plain text, with monospaced font. the list does not lie to me. the list is patient. i lie to the list. that’s our arrangement.

also: 47 tabs are open. they have been open since this morning. the laptop fan is doing the noise. each tab is, in some way, a sub-list of the wip 2022 list, except the sub-lists are loaded into RAM and the wip 2022 list is loaded into shame. both are evidence. the evidence is, on a careful reading, against me.

the wall of insults, digital, all donated

somewhere in the apartment, on a hard drive i don’t open often, lives the wall of insults — digital, never printed, all donated by people who paid five dollars each to insult me. it is, frankly, a beautiful object. it is also a dunning kruger examples archive in disguise. the insults are not random. they are, as a rule, written with the energy of a person who has just discovered me. they have read one post. they have a theory. the theory is detailed. the theory is delivered as if from a great height. the height is a kitchen counter. i can hear the kitchen counter through the typing.

my favourite insult, on a recent re-read, was a paragraph from a person who explained, in confident terms, the structural failure of my entire prose style on the basis of a single subject line they had read while making toast. they had not opened the email. the toast came up. they typed. they paid the five dollars. the insult arrived. it was wrong. it was also, in its certainty, a textbook page. i pinned it. it lives there. it pays rent in the way a landlord, silent or otherwise, would understand.

the wall of insults is therefore a self-funded study, of sample size whatever-it-is, with a single conclusion: the most certain text is, statistically, the text that has read the least. that is not a finding i can publish in any literature i’m fairly sure exists. it is, however, a finding i can put on a wall, where it sits, with the others, glowing.

findings, the examples nominate themselves

here is the unhappy report. once you start looking for dunning kruger examples, you cannot stop. they are the wallpaper. they are stefan with a clipboard, the wip 2022 list with its forty-six unchecked boxes, the wall of insults paying rent, the standing desk i sit at, the seventh microwave humming on the counter at home, the man at the bar, the colleague with the slide deck, the in-law with the recipe, the parent with the buoyancy. all of us, on a long enough timeline, are carrying confident maps to cities we have never visited. the only reasonable response, on a budget tuesday with most of the morning still on the clock, is to keep a small private list of the topics on which i am, specifically, most likely to be wrong. that list is also a tab. it is, of course, open. it is, of course, not the wip 2022 list. that would be too neat.

three working items, if you came here for items: (a) when you feel certain about a topic in someone else’s domain, that is data, but not the data you think it is. (b) when you feel uncertain about a topic in your own domain, that is also data, and probably more useful. (c) when the most confident person in a room is also the loudest, wait. let them finish. then ask, with a face you’d use on a librarian, the smallest possible follow-up question. they will, in most cases, walk away from their own peak inside thirty seconds. nobody knows why. mike, who has not filed his taxes since 2019, taught me this trick. mike does not climb the chart. mike skirts it. mike is, in his way, a graduate.

11:14am. the budget review is presumably wrapping. the spreadsheet is on top of this tab. stefan’s clipboard is, mercifully, not in this building. the wall of insults is glowing somewhere on a hard drive in the apartment, doing what it does. that is enough productivity, by my standards, for one morning.

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