how to read the dunning kruger effect graph, in seven steps

sarah, of all people, was at the same supermarket. she had a list — paper, folded, with checkmarks. i had three things in my hands that did not belong in any reasonable cart: a jar of olives, batteries, a coupon for a fourth thing i no longer remember. the curve, the famous one, the one with the cliff and the slow climb, was already drawn in my head and, somehow, also in my basket. ice cream tells you everything. you knew this already.

desk, tuesday, second coffee. carla is upstairs in the training thing on the third floor and won’t drift back until almost noon, which gives me a window i did not technically request.

here is the situation. someone, somewhere, drew a small ugly chart that explains the entire personality of the world’s loudest people. the dunning kruger effect graph has confidence on one axis and skill on the other, and the line between them does not behave the way a self-help book would prefer. it spikes. it crashes. it climbs back, slowly, without dignity. i found a printout of it the other night, in tab twelve, and what i did with it after that is, i think, the actual post.

dunning kruger effect graph: a small chart plotting confidence against actual skill, where a sharp early peak (called peak mount stupid) collapses into a long valley before climbing slowly back up, never quite reaching the early high. the curve does not flatter anyone, especially the people who think it is about other people.

THE. CHART. IS. ABOUT. YOU. PROBABLY. SORRY.

i have, for reference, a fuller treatment of the underlying idea on this same site, in a longer post about the dunning kruger effect drafted at this same desk, where i pretend to be qualified for nine hundred more words than i should be. i’d start there if you want the philosophical version. this post is the practical one. seven steps. one napkin. one drawer.

step one, locate the dunning kruger effect graph in tab 12

i had it on screen at 2:11 in the afternoon, in a tab i’d opened on a different topic three weeks earlier and never closed. the dunning kruger effect graph was sitting there like a houseplant nobody had agreed to water. the tab counter, which i can read without scrolling because of a small browser extension i regret, said 47 tabs. tab twelve was the one. the others were context, by which i mean clutter, by which i mean evidence.

i found it useful to right-click, save image, save again because the first save put it in a folder i don’t visit. the graph itself is small. in print form it fits, generously, on the back of a receipt. that turns out to matter later.

step two, identify mount stupid, do not panic

the early spike on the graph is sometimes called peak mount stupid. that is the technical name, in the loose sense of technical, which is the only sense i operate in. it is the part of the curve where someone with eleven minutes of exposure to a topic feels qualified to chair a panel on it. that’s not a metaphor. that has happened in my own week. the panel was a meeting. the topic was budgeting. the chair was me. carla, mercifully, was not in the room.

do not, when you spot mount stupid, react. it is not a place you visit. it is a place you live for stretches of time without knowing the address. i write this from one of the lower foothills, with a coffee, with no clear evidence i’ve ever climbed off it.

step three, identify the valley, optional

after mount stupid the line crashes into what’s been called the valley of despair, which is dramatic but accurate. the valley is the part where you find out the topic has more rooms than you assumed. you discover the people who actually know it use words you don’t, in tones you can’t reproduce. for a clean visual reference of the dynamic — confidence collapsing in real time at a desk that is not yours — see the long-running 2005 series “the office” (US version), in which a regional manager spends nine seasons defending opinions he formed during the cold open. the valley is where his honest moments live. there are about eleven of them.

identifying the valley is optional because most people skip it. they re-route. they find a smaller hill. they call the smaller hill the valley and proceed as if they’ve done the work. i recognize this move because i have used it.

step four, place yourself, generously

now you take a pen — i used a free supermarket pen i did not pay for and almost certainly should have — and you put a small mark where you think you are on the graph. be generous. be honest. these are different instructions, which is the whole problem. the dot you put down is, in nearly every case, too far to the right. that is the rule. the reason it is the rule is on the chart itself.

i put my dot in three different places. all three were on the upslope. one was, embarrassingly, near the early peak. i fed myself the line that you have to know yourself to misplace yourself this confidently, which is the kind of thing i say when i have caught myself doing exactly the thing the chart describes.

step five, sarah did this and laughed

i told sarah, in the cereal aisle, what i was working on. sarah is a marathon runner with a pension she actually understands. she trains. she reads the prospectus. she has, on her fridge, a printout of her own splits going back nineteen months. when i described the curve, she laughed in the way people laugh when something is true and they have already arrived at it through running. “that’s just the first ten kilometers,” she said. she meant it.

sarah’s laugh, plainly, is a calibration tool. it does not mock. it tells you the chart is right by being unsurprised by it. she did not need the napkin. she did not ask for the chart. she was in the supermarket buying real food and i was buying olives, batteries, and a coupon. the gap was, geometrically, the entire point of the post.

step six, write your placement down

this is the step most guides skip. once you’ve put the dot, you have to write down where you put it, on what date, and about which topic. mine is in pencil on the same napkin: “april 28, budgeting, peak adjacent.” the napkin is in the third drawer. it sits next to tom’s pension paperwork, which is its own small tragedy, and to the receipt for a microwave i bought in november — the seventh, if anyone is counting, and i am.

the reason you write it down is not so you can be smug later. it’s so future you can find present you. revisit the napkin in nine months. you’ll either have moved on the chart or you’ll have stayed in the same spot, which is the more common outcome. the chart, very gently, will have a thing to say either way.

step seven, verdict pulpit, you are off the graph

carla just walked past the desk. she did not stop. the napkin is back in the drawer, the coffee is gone, the tab counter has not moved from 47 because i refuse, on principle, to close anything before lunch.