danny kruger syndrome, what they don’t tell you

sarah ran another marathon, came home, ate cold pizza standing up, and went back to work. i was on the couch in my apartment, eating cold pizza standing up because i had read that standing aided digestion. i had not read that. i had assumed it. there is a name for this. you can probably guess.

the guess, if you are kind, will be wrong by exactly one letter. people google it as danny kruger syndrome, which is what they hear in the meeting and what they type when they get back to their phones. the actual term has a different first name and is not, technically, a syndrome. it is an effect, observed by two researchers whose names i can never quite spell on the first try. that gap between what i thought it was and what it is — that, on a careful reading, is the entire bit.

desk, tuesday, second mug. carla is on the third floor at the q3 review and won’t be back until lunchtime, so i have a window and a small amount of moral cover.

i had to look this up earlier this morning, on the standing desk i sit at, because sarah used the term over coffee yesterday and i, predictably, nodded as if i’d read the paper. i had not read the paper. i had read four blog posts that referenced the paper. you can find the underlying material via the pillar piece i drafted on the dunning kruger effect, drafted at this same desk — and if you came here looking for the long version, that is where the long version lives.

worth saying out loud: there is a film tradition for this exact dynamic, in which a man who has misheard a word becomes certain he has heard it correctly, and proceeds to use it for the rest of his life. see the 2004 film “anchorman” with will ferrell, in which a man with no qualifications becomes the most confident voice in his own newsroom by the simple method of refusing to be corrected. the entire film is, in some way, a documentary about danny kruger syndrome. the title spelling is mine. the syndrome is not.

DANNY. IS. NOT. THE. NAME.

danny kruger syndrome is not a syndrome

the first thing to clear up, before sarah asks me about it again on saturday, is that danny kruger syndrome is not in any manual. there is no diagnostic code. there is no specialist you call. the phrase exists almost entirely because two thirds of people who try to remember the actual term land on a friendlier-sounding first name and a vague memory that it ends in something like a power tool brand. that is also, possibly, the entire problem.

the actual researchers were named dunning and kruger. they ran a study in 1999 about how people of low ability assess their own ability, and they observed that those people tended to assess upward — not because they were lying, but because the skills required to do a thing well are, often, the same skills required to know when you are doing it badly. you can’t see your own ceiling if you have never built a roof.

so when people google danny kruger syndrome, they are usually trying to ask a smaller, more honest question: am i one of those confident people who is also wrong, and is there a word for it, and can i print the word out and stick it on the refrigerator. the answer, in order, is probably, kind of, and yes, but spell it correctly first.

sarah, who actually understands her pension

sarah is the friend who runs marathons on weekends and then goes back to work on monday in a way that suggests she did not, in fact, run twenty-six miles two days earlier. she has a 401k-equivalent. she understands what is in it. she has explained it to me twice, slowly, with the patience of a person explaining a microwave to someone who has killed seven of them.

at coffee yesterday, sarah used the phrase “the kruger thing” and looked at me to see if i would correct her. i did not correct her. i could not correct her. i did not, at that moment, know which letter was wrong. i nodded with the precise energy of a man on what people online call peak mount stupid, holding a paper cup of something he had ordered without reading the menu.

sarah, plainly, was not on the peak. sarah was at the bottom of the chart on the climb back up — the part where you say “depends” and “i’d want to look at the data”. she said something like, “i think the term is more useful as a question than as a label”. i wrote it down later. i am writing it down now. she does not know about this post. she does not need to.

this is, by the way, the same chart i walked through in the longer pillar, drafted on a different morning at this very desk. the chart is the chart. it does not move.

impostor syndrome vs dunning, briefly

the other word people mix in here, and the reason the search volume for danny kruger syndrome is what it is, is impostor syndrome. these are not the same thing. impostor syndrome is when you are, in fact, capable, and you do not believe it. dunning-kruger is when you are, in fact, not capable, and you absolutely do believe it. one underestimates. the other overestimates. they are the two opposite errors on the same chart.

most people i know — sarah, very much included — sit somewhere in the impostor half. they hesitate. they qualify. they ask follow-up questions in meetings that other people would have skipped. they say “i’d want to look at the data” before saying anything else. that is, on the chart, a signal. that is the climb back up. it is a quieter section of the graph. it does not have a name as fun as peak mount stupid. it might be the better real estate.

i have, on this machine, the wip 2022 list, which i once used to track ambitions. the list is on a pinned tab. it has not been updated since february of that year. by sarah’s logic, the existence of an unfinished list is evidence of intent. by my logic, the existence of an unfinished list is evidence that i have, again, mistaken intent for action. these are two readings of the same evidence. one of us is on the peak. the other is on the climb. i’d rather not say which is which. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, but i could not, on a wednesday, find it.

why neither applies to me, a thorough defense

i’d like to use this section, with the time i have left before carla comes back from upstairs, to defend myself against the charge that i am the example.

first: i hold one hot take with full conviction, and the hot take is cold pizza is breakfast. hot pizza is dinner. i would defend this in court. i did, in fact, eat cold pizza standing up at 8:47 this morning, in the kitchen of my apartment, which is technically a counter-height surface and not a chair. and yet — here is the move — i am willing to say, in writing, that i may be wrong about the standing-aids-digestion part. i looked it up. it does not. that is data. that is the climb. peak mount stupid would not have looked it up.

second: i still have the third yoga mat under the couch from 2023, which is, i’d argue, a monument to self-knowledge. a person on the peak would have used the mat. i bought the mat, used it once, and rolled it under the sofa as a gesture of honesty about who i actually am. that is, by my reading, a piece of growth. a small piece. it is still under there.

third: i have the 47 tabs audit open on this machine right now, which is, by sarah’s own framework, evidence of doubt. each tab is a topic i thought i needed to know and have not, in fact, learned. i have not closed them. that is data. that is humility, technically. i’d like the record to reflect.

fourth: there are interpretive cousins to all of this. some people believe a similar dynamic appears in arguments where the louder person reframes the room and calls it a rational discussion — a topic i covered in a separate post on gaslighting at the same desk. that is a different effect with different mechanics. you can be a victim of gaslighting and also have danny kruger syndrome — those are separate categories on separate days. mixing them up is, itself, a peak move.

five points, on balance. case rested. i am, of course, the example. that’s the joke. the joke does not get less funny.

findings, sarah is fine, i am fine

here is where this post lands, before chatgpt screens my next email and before the seventh microwave does whatever it is currently doing in the corner of the kitchen.

sarah is fine. sarah ran the marathon. sarah understands her pension. sarah uses the word “kruger” with a small confident smile that does not mean she knows the spelling. she does not need to know the spelling. she has the disposition the chart rewards. she is, on a careful reading, the part of the chart i’m aiming at, slowly, with no map and a couch i am not sitting on right now.

i am fine, in the technical sense. i am at the desk i sit at. i have written this post in approximately the time it would have taken sarah to do an easy 10k. i have looked up four things. i have closed zero tabs. the wip 2022 list, in the third tab from the left, has one new line item — “post about kruger spelling”. the line is, as of this paragraph, finished. that may be the most productive moment of my quarter. it may also be evidence of the very effect we just discussed. i’ll leave the ambiguity on the desk where i found it.

carla wandered past the desk. screen got swapped to a spreadsheet i had open as decoy. no eye contact. no comment. the q3 review continues without her input, which is a useful detail about how meetings work.