diane kruger effect, i looked into it

a name was in my browser bar that was, definitely, an actress and not a psychologist, and the wip 2022 list, which still includes “learn to whistle,” was glowing on the screen behind me. mike at the corner bar is somewhere else tonight. ironing remains a class war. we will get to that. we always do.

i typed three letters and the engine guessed at the fourth and suddenly the standing desk where i sit had two open tabs that disagreed with each other. one of them was about a movie. the other one was about a chart. i kept both. i kept them for a reason that i intend to explain at a moderate pace.

writing this from the standing desk where i sit, at 9:18, while carla is on the third floor in an annual planning meeting that is, by every account i have collected, a longer kind of meeting than the one before it. i have approximately the rest of the morning. i have, by the count i keep running, 47 tabs open and a wip 2022 list that has not gained items in months and has not lost any either.

1. diane kruger vs justin kruger, the table

i made a small table because the dunning kruger effect is the parent topic and the diane kruger effect is the child of a typo, and a child of a typo deserves at least a row of its own. i looked up the actress on a film database that the people i watch on tv treat as authority, and her credits include Inglourious Basterds, which is a film i have seen, and several others, which are films i have not. justin kruger, the psychologist, is in zero films, which is also a credit if you think about it the right way.

this is the first row of any chart i have ever finished. i am keeping it. it is going next to the wip 2022 list, metaphorically, which is to say not at all, but in my head where the wall is taller and cleaner.

2. mike at the corner bar settled this

i did not go to the bar tonight, which is unusual, because mike at the corner bar tends to be the place where i settle the small fights inside my head about whether a typo is a real thing or not. mike is somewhere else tonight. mike has a system for taxes that involves not filing them. mike, when he heard “diane kruger effect” once, last quarter, asked which one of those was the one in the movie about the treasure, and that is exactly the question search engines are also asking, just with more electricity.

the diane kruger effect, when mike defined it for me at the bar, was “when you watch a movie and feel smarter for two days.” that is not the bias. that is the other bias. the actual bias is when you feel smarter for two days based on nothing.

3. why search engines confuse the diane kruger effect with the real one

here is what i think is happening, and i have been looking at the search bar for long enough today to have an opinion that is at least partly mine. there are two famous krugers. the search engine sees the letters d-i-a-n-e and the letters d-u-n-n-i-n-g and they share a vowel and a vibe. the engine ranks names by how often the names appear in news, and one of the krugers walks red carpets, and the other one published one paper in 1999 and then went to lunch. the engine knows which one is in the news this week. it does not know which one you actually meant. neither do you, sometimes.

the diane kruger effect, as a search term, is what shows up when a person who has heard a chart joke at work googles it from memory and the memory has been touched, gently, by a movie they saw on a plane. it is a typo with a face attached to it.

4. who diane kruger actually is, briefly

i looked into diane kruger because the name was in my browser bar and i felt that i owed the search engine an answer. she is a german-french actress. she was a model first. she has been in films that men at bars reference when they want to sound serious about cinema, including the one with the basterds and the one about the treasure. she is, by any reasonable measure, more famous than justin kruger, who has the chart.

this is an injustice that justin kruger does not seem to feel. he does not, as far as i can tell, have a public opinion about diane kruger. he does not need one. the chart is the opinion. the chart is the entire career. the chart they put on every slide deck is one of the most recognized shapes in management training, and management training is, by my unscientific count, where most of the kruger confusion gets re-laundered every quarter.

5. findings, both krugers are valid

here is the conclusion i am willing to defend, with the caveat that i am writing this between an annual planning meeting i am avoiding and a tab i have not closed since march. both krugers are valid. diane kruger is valid because she has been in films. justin kruger is valid because he has the chart. the diane kruger effect, as a search term, is valid because it is a real thing that real people type, even when they mean the other one. there is no need to correct anyone.

the dunning kruger effect, the actual one, is the bias where confidence is highest at the lowest end of skill and at the highest end of skill, with a deep ravine in the middle full of people who have just learned a little and now feel terrible. the diane kruger effect, as i am defining it for myself, is the cousin of that bias, where the typo feels confident on the way out of your fingers because the famous name carried it. there is a relationship. the relationship is not strong. the relationship is, in fact, the typo itself.

and yes, ironing is a class war i refuse to fight, which is the hot take i opened with and which has nothing to do with either kruger, and which i will defend in a separate investigation, possibly never. it is on the wip 2022 list. it has been on the wip 2022 list for, by the count i keep running, the better part of three years.

there is also a related a guide to spotting a liar that i wrote a while back, because the cousin of “i was wrong about which kruger” is “i was wrong on purpose,” and the line between the two is thinner than it looks from the standing desk where i sit. a typo is honest. a liar is not. tell them apart, please.

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