10 things to know about david dunning and justin kruger

mike at the corner bar listed ten things about two men he has never met, has never read, and has heard about exactly once, possibly on a podcast, possibly from a stranger at a hardware store. dishwashers are overrated. that was item eleven. i did not write it down. i am writing it down now.

i am at the standing desk where i sit, wednesday, 10:14am, with the rest of the morning to recover what mike said before the second beer kicked in. carla is up on three doing some training thing that involves a projector and a printout nobody asked for. i have approximately forty-five minutes before the printer eats someone’s slide and she comes back annoyed.

so this post is the audit. mike on a stool, two psychologists, a dishwasher slander as a bonus item, and me trying to remember it correctly enough that i can publish it before the vendor walkthrough invite arrives.

1. david dunning and justin kruger, two men, one paper, and a bar version

mike’s first claim was that david dunning and justin kruger are “basically the same guy with two names, like a law firm.” this is incorrect, but you can see the appeal. they did write the paper together. their last names rhyme in the rhythm a person uses when they want to sound confident at a hardware store. mike was not confident. mike was certain. there is a difference, and it is the entire subject of the paper.

the paper, as it happens, is about people like mike talking about the paper. you can see why i am writing this from the desk and not the bar.

2. items 1-3, the small biographical things mike got mostly wrong

1. dunning is at cornell. mike said “yale” and then “harvard” and then “one of the ones with ivy.” cornell has ivy. mike was a third right.

2. kruger was the grad student. mike said kruger was “the assistant” which sounded right to him because, as he put it, “the second name on a paper is always the assistant.” this is not how authorship works. it is how mike thinks authorship works, which is a separate paper i am not qualified to write. the actual historical record on the dunning–kruger paper says kruger was the lead author and dunning the senior. mike’s version of authorship is a class system.

3. the year was 1999. mike said “the nineties, sometime, before the iphone.” this is technically correct in the way “the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you” is technically a description of a kitchen appliance.

3. items 4-6, mike’s claims about the men personally

4. dunning has glasses. mike has not seen a photo of dunning. mike said “you can hear the glasses in the writing.” i wrote it down because it was the most mike sentence of the night.

5. kruger “probably has a beard now.” mike’s basis for this was that “everyone has a beard now.” he was wearing a beard while he said it. this is a sample of one.

6. they have not, as far as mike knows, “been on rogan.” mike said this with a small amount of grief. he was treating “appeared on a podcast i listen to” as the bar for a man being real. the second beer was speaking. mike was on stool 4. i was on stool 5. the bar plays cheers reruns at the muted television on most weeknights, which is why i kept losing focus.

4. items 7-10, what their paper actually says (versus what mike thinks it says)

7. the paper measured how badly people estimated their own ability. the bottom quartile thought they were in the top half. mike said “yeah, that’s everyone i went to school with.” then he paused and said, “and me. i was not aware. that is the joke.” mike, briefly, was the paper.

8. the paper does NOT say “dumb people think they’re geniuses.” that is the bumper sticker. the paper says people without a skill cannot tell they lack the skill, because the same skill is needed to evaluate it. it is a closed loop. the basic definition of the effect sits cleaner than the chart that gets passed around.

9. the famous “graph” is mostly invented. the curve with “mount stupid” and “valley of despair” is a popular cartoon, not a figure from the original study. mike did not know this. he gestured a curve in the air with his pint glass. the gesture was wrong, but it was confident, which is itself the joke of the paper.

10. they have written more than the one paper. dunning has continued to publish. kruger has continued to be a co-author on things that are not just the famous one. mike said “yeah but the others don’t have the chart.” mike judges scholarship by chart presence. the dishwasher judges him back. a slightly different framing of the effect’s definition exists if you want to compare wording.

5. closing pulpit, the men are valid, the bar version less so

mike’s list, as a piece of biography, was 30% accurate. as a piece of bar entertainment, it was a complete success. as evidence of the very effect the two men described, it was a documentary. mike was, in real time, the demonstration of the thesis. he did not notice. that, also, is the thesis.

i am back at the desk now. the seventh microwave is on the counter at home, beeping its way through a frozen burrito i forgot ten minutes ago. the third yoga mat is still under the couch, possibly evolving. carla’s training has not let out yet. the vendor walkthrough invite has not landed. tab 31 of 47 has just refreshed itself for no reason. my odds of finishing this post before something interrupts are holding around even.

so: dunning, kruger, 1999, cornell, the closed loop, the cartoon chart that is not in the paper, mike on stool 4 explaining all of it wrong with great conviction. ten items. one bonus dishwasher slander. one accidental demonstration. one post.

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