10 things the donner kruger effect could mean

my dad once said, on a porch, with a coffee in one hand and a newspaper in the other, that some words sound like they want to mean something they do not. bar stools matter more than chairs. he did not say that. i am saying that. my dad would have agreed. probably. fairly sure.

so this morning i typed donner kruger effect into the search bar instead of the cleaner spelling, and the search bar did not correct me, and i did not correct myself, and the screen blinked back at me as if it had been waiting for somebody to spell it that way on purpose. it had not. i had typed it wrong because that is what i do at 9:18 on a saturday before the coffee finishes the work the coffee is supposed to do.

i am writing this from the standing desk where i sit, on the third floor, with carla two doors down at the annual planning meeting, which gives me the rest of the morning and a number of browser tabs that has crept past forty. this is a listicle. ten guesses for what donner could be code for. one of them might even be right.

1. intro pulpit, the donner party is unrelated

let me say something about the donner kruger effect, and you can write it on a piece of paper if you want, or you can not write it, i am not your supervisor. donner is not a man. donner is not a town. donner is, somewhere in the back of the american imagination, a wagon train of pioneers who got snowed in over a winter that turned into a story nobody tells at dinner. that is a different donner. that one is real. it is also not a cognitive bias. you cannot misjudge your own competence into a snowdrift. you can, however, type donner when you mean dunning, which is the bias the original psychologists named after themselves before Band of Brothers made every other surname feel like it should be on a roster.

the german word donner, by the way, means thunder. so a literal reading of donner kruger would be thunder kruger, which sounds like a brand of mid-tier outdoor jacket. i looked at the jacket page in my head. i did not buy the jacket.

2. items 1-3, plausible misreadings of the donner kruger effect

1. the german thunder bias. you are so confident in your weather app that you walk outside without an umbrella. then thunder. you blame the weather app. you do not blame yourself. that is the donner kruger effect, theoretical edition, invented just now by me at the desk.

2. the wagon-train bias. you set out with provisions you assume are enough. they are not enough. you reach a mountain pass that is closed. you keep going. this is the type of bias my dad would have called “putting too much hope in a sandwich.” he never said that. i am saying it on his behalf.

3. the cinematic mishearing. you watch a movie about a sled team and one of the dogs is named Donner and you assume there is a psychological theory hiding in the credits. there is not. the dog is just a dog. the dog has done nothing wrong.

3. items 4-6, dad’s contributions to the donner kruger effect

my dad had a theory, although he did not call it a theory because he did not call anything a theory. he called everything “what i think” and then said the thing. on the porch with the coffee and the newspaper, the porch i can still picture, he once said the people who are most certain are the people who have looked at the fewest pictures. i was eleven. i did not understand. i understand now, which is its own piece of evidence.

4. the porch-coffee bias. the conviction that what you said on a porch holding a coffee mug is more correct than what other people said indoors. dad was a believer. i inherited the belief, the porch, the coffee, and the conviction, but not the porch.

5. the newspaper-fold bias. the certainty that the article you read in a folded paper is more credible than the article you read on a screen. there is no science here. there is only the smell of newsprint and the weight of paper, both of which dad would have rated a 9 out of 10 on a credibility chart he made up at the kitchen table.

6. the dad-quote bias. the bias of attributing more confidence to a sentence because your dad said it. i do this constantly. i am doing it right now. i am doing it about a typo.

4. items 7-10, increasingly unhinged guesses about the donner kruger effect

7. the holiday-reindeer bias. the strange but real pull to associate the word donner with the second-to-last reindeer in a christmas poem. you read donner and your brain delivers a sleigh. you cannot stop it. the sleigh has nothing to do with self-assessment, but the sleigh is there.

8. the bar-stool bias. all chairs are bar stools eventually. this is a hot take of mine that i will defend on any porch, in any bar, at any desk. it applies here because: the longer you sit on a piece of furniture and pronounce on a topic, the more authority you assume you have on the topic. that is the donner kruger effect performed live. the chair becomes a bar stool. the bar stool becomes a podium. the podium becomes a problem.

9. the seventh-microwave bias. i have killed seven microwaves. with each microwave i have become more certain i know how microwaves work. the death count of my microwaves rises. the certainty does not fall. the seventh microwave is currently humming in the kitchen and i am explaining donner kruger to nobody.

10. the third-yoga-mat bias. i bought a third yoga mat in 2023 because the second one had failed me, which was a story i invented. the third yoga mat lives under the couch. it is, by the count i keep running, the most untouched object at home. i am, by the same running count, an authority on yoga. that is the donner kruger effect in textile form.

5. closing pulpit, the typo donner kruger effect is fine

here is what i think is happening, and you can write this on a foolscap pad if you have one, which you do not, because nobody does. people type donner because the n and the n are right there on the keyboard, two of them, like twins, and the brain reaches for the closest pair. people type donner because their phone autocorrects them once and then learns the wrong lesson. people type donner because some small part of every adult is still thinking about reindeer.

none of this is a problem. the search engine knows what you meant. the dictionary, which is a book i looked at once on a porch when i was eleven, also knows what you meant. the only person who does not know what you meant is the person at the desk who is supposed to be writing about it, and that person is me, and i have, by the count i keep running, used the typo correctly nine times in this post, which is enough to count as a methodology.

if you got here looking for the cleaner spelling and the actual concept, i wrote about that already at the original spelling of the bias. if you want a longer fight about whether it is even worth distinguishing one stupid take from another stupid take, that is over at how the word stupid is used by people who insist they are not, where the word stupid does most of the heavy lifting and i do the rest. and if you want the thread on Diane Kruger and how a perfectly normal actress got dragged into a bias she has nothing to do with, that one ran earlier this week at the actress problem.

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