how to spot the dunn and kruger effect in others, in 7 steps

the q3 review was the kind of meeting that should have been an email and was, instead, an event with chairs. the wall behind me, on a screen, was insulting me in pixels via the wip 2022 list. beach vacations are a scam. i will repeat this one. it deserves repetition. the effect is in the room.

i am writing this from my standing desk that i sit at, on a tuesday, at 11:47am, while carla is two floors up at the q3 review and won’t be down until lunch unless the room runs short, which the room does not. i have, at a generous estimate, the rest of the morning. a stranger emailed me about a typo. i am, again, on the case.

the typo was theirs and it was new. they had typed “dunn” with a doubled n and a dropped ing — three letters short of the man’s actual surname. their phone, fast as a courier and twice as polite, had eaten the suffix at the speed of typing and called it a finished thought. autocorrect did not flag it. autocorrect waved it through. the form arrived in my inbox like a sealed envelope nobody had opened.

the long version of the actual phenomenon, with the chart and the climbing line and the polite shame, lives at my full investigation of the dunning kruger effect from this very desk. that post takes the chart seriously. this one takes the seven steps seriously. seven steps, none of which involve mentioning the term out loud, because saying it out loud is, on close inspection, a peak move.

DO. NOT. SAY. THE TERM. OUT LOUD.

1. step one, observe the dunn and kruger effect without flinching

the first step is to sit very still and watch a person be sure about something they have done once. the q3 review was full of these people. one of them had, in a previous life, used a spreadsheet, and was now explaining to the room what spreadsheets are for. i watched. i did not blink. i wrote nothing down. blinking gives away the game. the game is that you, the observer, also know how to use a spreadsheet, and the chart you can draw of this person is mostly downhill.

observation, the way i mean it, is not analysis. it is just noticing. you don’t need a notebook. you don’t need a tab. you do, in fact, need to have a conversation in the kitchen with yourself afterwards, and that’s later, that’s step three. step one is just the sitting still and the not flinching while the spreadsheet sermon happens.

2. step two, do not project

this is the trap. the second you start to spot the dunn and kruger effect in another person, your own dunn and kruger effect becomes the loudest thing in the room. the person watching is also a person. the wall is mirrored. there is, somewhere on the wall of insults, a line item that says “the man who wrote a how-to about spotting overconfidence in others”, and that line item is me, this post, today. i am aware. i’m typing through the awareness.

do not project, then. when you spot the pattern in another person, do not turn to the colleague next to you and mouth the diagnosis. they will mouth one back, about you, and they will be right. one of you has to be the adult. the adult, in this scenario, sits with both diagnoses unsent.

3. step three, the wall of insults adds context

i keep, on a sub-domain only i can see, a private digital wall where insults paid for by tip jar customers are printed in a serif font and stuck up by an algorithm. it is the second most visited URL i own. one of the items on the wall, paid for last month, said “you are exhibit a in your own posts”, and i printed it, metaphorically, and i nodded, metaphorically, and i went to bed. the wall of insults is not therapy. it is a peer-review that arrives without a CV.

step three is to consult the wall of insults of your own life. yours might be a group chat. yours might be a sister. yours might be the look the dog from 1B gives you in the elevator. whatever it is, the wall has, statistically, already told you which of your certainties is the suspicious one. you didn’t listen. you will listen, briefly, now.

4. step four, listen for the confidence pattern

confidence has a rhythm. the rhythm is short sentences, no qualifiers, and a closing word that is also a verdict. “easy. three steps. tuesday at the latest.” that is the pattern. it is portable. it is in q3 reviews. it is at the bar. it was, in another life, in the kitchen of a friend of mine who is not coming back into this post. the person with the confidence pattern is not, by default, the most informed. the person with the confidence pattern is the most untired.

tired people qualify. tired people say “i’d want to look at it” and “depending on whether the data is clean” and “we’d have to check with the team that owns it”. the room hates these people. the room loves the easy-three-steps person. the project, two months later, is in the dip, and the easy-three-steps person has moved on to a different easy three steps.

5. step five, listen for what they don’t ask

this is the most useful step in the list. people on peak mount stupid don’t ask questions. they don’t ask because asking would imply not knowing, and not knowing is, on the peak, a posture they don’t carry. a person genuinely informed about a topic asks at least three questions per ten minutes. a person on the peak asks zero. they pause. they refill water. they keep going.

step five is, then, a count. ten minutes, three questions. less than three, you are watching the dunn and kruger effect at full sail. more than three, you are watching a person who knows the topic. it is not a perfect rule. it is a rule that has, since i started keeping it on a post-it on this desk, been wrong twice. that is, by the count i keep running, a high enough hit rate.

6. step six, do not say the term out loud

this is the rule that breaks new readers. the temptation, once you have spotted the pattern, is to name it. you want to drop the term in the meeting like a flag on a mountain. you want, ideally, to do it in front of carla. do not do that. saying the term out loud is the surest way to demonstrate, to the room, that you yourself have it. the term is a boomerang. the term is named after two researchers. dropping one of their names, or saying the whole thing with your chest out, makes you the diagram, not the diagnostician.

so you don’t say it. you write it on a post-it. you put it in a draft. you publish it on a sub-domain only the algorithm visits. you continue, in the room, to nod. nodding is free. nodding is, on the chart, the only neutral move.

7. verdict pulpit, you are clean, they are not

carla just walked past my desk. she did not stop. that means the q3 review survived the budget slide, and the wip 2022 list, on the wall behind me, is now updated with one more item nobody is going to close. forty-seven tabs open. one of them is this draft. i am closing it after the p.s.

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