9 things the dunning kruger efekt explains about other people

mike at the corner bar listed eight types of people, by hand, on a napkin, and a ninth one when he ran out of napkin. the 47 tabs in my browser were judging us silently. beach vacations, again, are a scam. mike agreed. mike has not been on vacation since the late nineties. that is, somehow, evidence.

this was tuesday, after work, before the morning i’m writing in. i’m at the desk now. carla is upstairs at the q3 review, the one that never finishes on time, and i have somewhere between an hour and the rest of my morning, depending on what runs long. the napkin is on the desk. it is folded twice. i copied it before mike could throw it away.

i first saw the spelling dunning kruger efekt in a search bar — a real string, typed by real people, with a k where the c should be. i looked it up (no link, no librarian) and the short of it is that several european languages do this on purpose. czech, polish, croatian, swedish in casual register. they take a borrowed english word and run it through their own keyboard. “efekt” with a k looks, frankly, more honest. c is a letter that pretends. k commits. i’m being told, by a website that knows things, this is just how spelling works in those countries. fine. i still think k is the better letter for this particular phenomenon.

desk, third coffee already, no calls scheduled. carla won’t surface until lunch unless something on the third floor catches fire, which it never does on a tuesday.

this is a list of nine. mike wrote eight on the napkin and a ninth on the back of a receipt for two beers and a bowl of peanuts. the receipt is also on the desk. for the methodology behind the original term, see the longer piece on the dunning kruger effect i wrote at this same desk, which sets up the chart and the language. for the specific question of what the words mean, there is also a shorter explainer on the meaning of the term. neither will fix you. that is not what they are for.

why the dunning kruger efekt spelling does not change the diagnosis

the dunning kruger efekt is the same condition with a different keyboard. the people who land on this spelling are not, statistically, more confused. they may, in fact, be slightly more honest, since they have already accepted that english spelling is not a moral position. people who insist on the c are sometimes the same people who correct your grammar at dinner. mike has a theory that everyone who corrects grammar at dinner is, on the chart, sitting on a small hill of their own. i asked him which chart. he said, “you know which chart.” i did.

the diagnosis does not change with the letter. neither does the cure, which is also nothing. you cannot spell your way out of being wrong about a thing. you can, however, spell your way into a slightly better search result, and that is what people are doing. respect.

items 1 to 3, the obvious ones, none of which are me

mike’s first three were quick. he wrote them while still ordering. i’m reproducing them as he gave them, with my own annotations, which he did not authorize but which i’m adding anyway, because that is how this works.

1. the meeting peacock. the person who, in any meeting, has the cleanest take. they have not done the work. they have heard the work being described. they have, on the basis of that hearing, formed a slide. mike’s exact words: “the slide is always blue.” i don’t know what that means. i wrote it down. peak mount stupid is, in a way, a furniture choice. they have a chair on it.

2. the bar lawyer. there is one in every bar. not mike. mike is not the bar lawyer. the bar lawyer is the man on his third beer who knows, in detail, how the tax code works, despite never having paid taxes in a way the government would recognize. i was, briefly, the bar lawyer for a topic i don’t even remember now. mike laughed for nine minutes when i tried to explain it back to him a week later. he still brings it up.

3. the person with one book. they read one book about a topic ten years ago. they refer to it constantly. they refer to it the way a tour guide refers to a monument. the book has become the topic. there is no reading after the book. books on tape are cheating, i happen to think, but the person with one book is, somehow, worse. at least the audiobook crowd is still pressing play.

items 4 to 6, mike got more specific here

around the second beer, mike’s handwriting got smaller and the napkin started to fold. these are the middle ones. these are the ones i had to ask him to repeat at the door.

4. the recipe corrector. the person who, when you mention a dish, tells you the version they make is better, despite never having made it for you. mike’s note: “the dish is always called something with three words.” i don’t disagree. there is a film tradition for this exact dynamic — see the 1976 film “network” with peter finch and faye dunaway, which is a movie about a man who becomes the most certain person in his own newsroom by refusing to be corrected. the recipe corrector is that man at a smaller table.

5. the travel evangelist. the person who, having been on one good trip, has formed an entire identity around it. mike’s note here was unusable. but i know the type. they have a phrase. they say “you have to go.” the phrase is non-negotiable. “beach vacations are punishment with sand,” is a thing i happen to believe, and the travel evangelist is, in some small way, a reason. you cannot argue with someone who has been to the beach and felt better. their data is one beach. their conclusion is all beaches. peak mount stupid with a tan.

6. the wine confident. not stefan. stefan owns a vineyard. the wine confident is the one who, at dinner, lifts the glass to the light, swirls it, and says “young.” they have been told, once, that “young” was a word. they have made it the only word. mike does not drink wine. mike says wine is “soup with rules,” which is not the take but is, somehow, adjacent. cereal is closer. cereal is soup with rules. wine is, possibly, weather with rules. i’d defend it.

EFEKT. WITH A K. IT FITS BETTER. I STAND BY IT.

items 7 to 9, mike’s strongest entries, written on the receipt

by the time we got to seven, the napkin was full and mike had moved to the back of the receipt. these are his contributions. he was warmed up. he had eaten the peanuts. he was, in the strict technical sense, on the chart himself, and he knew it, and he kept going anyway, which i respect.

7. the home renovation expert. someone who has watched two and a half episodes of a show about renovating houses and is, on that basis, ready to remove a wall. mike has, in fact, helped two of these people clean up after they removed a wall. mike has stories. the stories all end with a phone call to a person who actually does this for a living. that person, mike says, never picks up the first time. they wait. they want the lesson to take.

8. the parenting commentator. people without children, telling other people how to raise children. mike specifies: “always at a wedding.” i did not push for more. i was, on the chart, declining to be example one. i’d have been the example. i have, on at least three occasions, said “if i had kids, i would” — a sentence that should be illegal in public.

9. the reverse one, written on the receipt. the genuinely competent person who, asked their opinion, says “i don’t know enough to say.” this is the inverse of the dunning kruger efekt. the impostor half. the part of the chart where the line dips and stays low because the person can see how much of the topic exists. mike said this one slowly. mike said: “those are the worst, because we don’t listen to them either.” then he ordered another beer. i went home. the napkin is on the desk. the receipt is, too.

closing, none of these are me, you can write that down

the napkin will, by friday, be in the trash with several others. the receipt is going in the wallet that is mostly receipts. the wip 2022 list, in another tab — one of the forty-seven currently open — has, on it, an item that says “write about the spelling thing.” i am, in this very moment, closing that item. that may be the most productive thing i’ve done this quarter. it may also be a small hill. i’ll leave the ambiguity on the table.

for the longer chart of the same condition with the c spelling, there’s a separate article from earlier this quarter, drafted at the same desk. it has the slope. it has the dip. it has, between the lines, the same nine people, with different jobs and the same posture. the article and the napkin agree. that is the point.

carla just walked past the desk. she did not stop. q3 is still going. the napkin is folded twice and the receipt is folded once. nine items, none of them me, all of them probably me.

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