dunning kruger meaning, according to a man with a beard

mike has a beard, three opinions per beer, and a chair that he leans back in until it threatens to give. he was, last thursday, defining a famous psychology effect using cold pizza, the dmv, and a man he saw once at a hardware store. i listened. i wrote some of it down. you are getting the directors cut.

so. dunning kruger meaning. that is the phrase i typed into the search box this morning while pretending to load a spreadsheet. carla pulled the door behind her at 2:47 sharp, headed two floors down for some compliance refresher. i have the rest of the morning, plus a paper napkin from the corner bar with three words on it. one says “PARSLEY”. one says “DMV”. one i cannot read.

dunning kruger meaning: the dunning kruger effect is the pattern where a person with low ability at a task overestimates that ability, while a person with real skill tends to underestimate theirs. it shows up clearest in the people who don’t know they have it. that, frankly, is the entire trick of it. mike, who has not heard of either researcher, calls it “the parsley problem”.

DUNNING KRUGER. IS. NOT. A. SELF DIAGNOSIS.

dunning kruger meaning, the dictionary version

the textbook version of dunning kruger meaning goes, more or less, like this. people who are bad at a thing think they are pretty good at it. people who are actually good at it think they are roughly fine, possibly worse than fine. the gap between confidence and competence, in the bad ones, is wide. in the good ones, it is small or inverted. you can graph it, if you graph things.

there is, by my recollection, a piece of research on this, in some respectable-looking journal. the version i read used the word “metacognition”, which i had to look up twice in the same hour. it means knowing what you know. people who score badly at a thing also score badly at knowing they scored badly. that is the kind of sentence that makes you put the phone down and stare at a wall.

the dictionary entry, the polite one, sits there politely and does not do any actual work on a thursday. for the work, you need the longer pillar on the dunning-kruger effect and, more importantly, you need mike.

mike at the corner bar, the better version

mike works in a warehouse. mike has not filed his taxes since 2019. mike has, in his bar chair, a posture that defies physics — leaning back to a degree that would worry an engineer, one boot hooked under the rung, sipping a beer at the rate of one per ninety minutes which is, he insists, “the optimal pace”. mike was, last thursday, the man explaining the meaning of the effect to me, between innings of a baseball game neither of us was watching.

i had asked him what he thought about a coworker. that was the mistake. you don’t ask mike “what do you think”. you ask a yes or no, and you wait. once a sentence has begun in mike, you cannot abort the sentence.

“that,” mike said, leaning back further than his chair was prepared to allow, “is dunning kruger.” he said it like he had named it himself. he had not. he said it like he had read the original paper. he had not. he said it like a man who had spotted, in another person, the exact flaw that was, at that moment, sitting on his own face like a beard. he had not noticed.

this is the part that made the napkin worth saving. mike was explaining an effect that he is, by my unprofessional read, the world’s leading example of. and yet his examples — three of them, in order — were all about other people. never himself. never.

three examples mike gave me, all about other people

i wrote them on the napkin. transcribing now from the desk. carla just walked past on her way back from the printer, paused, kept walking. that is, in this office, a standing ovation.

example one — the hardware store guy. “there’s a guy at the hardware store on grover. you ask him about anything — drywall, plumbing, the weather, the war — and he knows. he doesn’t know. but he knows. last week he told me you can fix a toilet flange with construction adhesive. that’s dunning kruger.”

example two — the dmv counter. “the woman at counter three. she will tell you, with full confidence, the wrong form. when you bring back the wrong form she will tell you, with the same confidence, you should have brought a different one. she has been there since the bush administration. she knows nothing. she is sure of it. that’s dunning kruger. with health insurance.”

example three — his cousin’s husband. “the man, two thanksgivings ago, explained to the entire table how the stock market works. he works at a tire shop. he was wrong about every single thing he said, in a clear voice, with hand gestures. nobody corrected him because the gravy was hot. that’s dunning kruger. the family version.”

three examples. three other people. zero mentions of mike, who at that moment was on his second beer, fourth opinion, and a chair creaking audibly. i did not say anything. you don’t say anything. mike pays for his own beer, mostly.

the parsley analogy mike volunteered

this is the part i want on a t-shirt. mike, halfway through example three, paused, took a sip, and pivoted. “you know what dunning kruger is, really,” he said. “it’s the parsley thing.”

i waited. mike makes you wait. it is part of the system.

“if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it. nobody at the table will know. it does nothing. it’s a green lie. and yet there are people, grown adults, who will buy parsley, chop parsley, store the rest in a bag in the fridge until it becomes a liquid, throw out the liquid, and buy more parsley. and they will tell you, with absolute certainty, that the dish needs it.” he set the beer down. “those people. that’s dunning kruger. they don’t know they don’t know. and they will argue with you.”

why the textbook misses the cooking part

the textbook handles the confidence part fine. the competence part fine. what it misses, and what mike did not miss, is the everyday-ness. the textbook treats this as a graph. mike treats it as a kitchen. one of those is more useful when you are standing in a kitchen, which is most of the time.

i have a microwave. it is the seventh one. i have, since 2023, a yoga mat — the third — that lives under the couch and is, possibly, no longer rectangular. i mention these because, on the curve mike does not believe in, i sit firmly in the valley where you suspect you don’t know what you’re doing. buying a thing is not understanding it. that is, also, what the effect means.

if you want the cleaner walk-through with the labeled axis, i did a slow read of the dunning-kruger graph from this same desk last week. for a straight-faced go at the term, there’s the bar-version definition i wrote earlier, which mike will be quoted in for as long as i am writing posts.

closing — mike has not noticed the irony

i left the bar around eleven. mike was still there. the napkin was in my pocket. on the walk home i thought about, in order: the parsley, the hardware store guy, my seventh microwave, and whether mike has any clue at all that he is the most pristine specimen of this effect in the eastern half of the county. he does not. he will not. he is, in this regard, perfect.

i pulled up the bar scenes in the big lebowski later because mike has the same chair-leaning energy as a man about to be wrong about bowling. it tracked. the meaning, in the end, is not in a paper. it is in a chair, leaning back, with a beard, on a thursday.

that closes the chair-leaning chapter on this one.