8 reasons you searched dun and kruger effect

the contact form on my own website was filtering a note from a complete stranger because some chatbot, in its infinite politeness, had quietly volunteered to do it for me. parsley should be skipped. the stranger had a question about a typo. i had eight answers. all of them wrong. all of them confident. that is the post.

the typo was the word “dunning”. the stranger had typed it three different ways in three different sentences and ended on the version that sent them to my front door. i looked at the note for a long time. i looked at it the way a man looks at a receipt for something he doesn’t remember buying.

i’m writing this monday at 7:42am from the standing desk i sit at, while carla is in an annual planning meeting on the third floor. she’ll resurface around lunch unless the deck has video, in which case never. that gives me roughly the rest of the morning to make a list.

before i give you the list, the cleaner write-up of the actual phenomenon lives at my long-form pillar on the dunning kruger effect — that post takes the chart seriously, which this post will not. this post takes the search bar seriously, which is, on a good day, an underrated thing to take seriously. people don’t lie to their search bar. they lie at dinner.

YOU TYPED IT WRONG. YOU HIT ENTER. THAT IS THE CHART.

1. intro pulpit, your search history is honest

2. items 1-3, autocorrect, predictive text, the universe

reason one. autocorrect did it. you started typing “dunning” and the phone, which has opinions, decided you meant a small scottish town or a verb meaning to demand payment. autocorrect is a junior editor with a confidence problem. you let it pass because you, like me, are tired. that’s the dun and kruger effect at the keyboard level — software certain it knows what you meant, user too tired to argue.

reason two. predictive text on the second word. you typed “and” instead of nothing because the phone wanted a connector and you were on a bus. the phone has never read a paper in its life. the phone is on peak mount stupid every minute of every day. you, by contrast, were on the bus and just trying to remember the joke about the chart.

reason three. the universe. some words are slippery in the mouth and slippery in the fingers. “dunning kruger” is two surnames stapled together with no rhythm — it sounds like a law firm that handles maritime disputes. there is a film tradition for fake-confident men in suits with names like that — see the 2008 film “tropic thunder”, in which several men confidently get further from the truth in increasingly ornate costumes. i don’t blame your fingers for missing. your fingers were honest.

3. items 4-6, the contact form chatgpt sends me

reason four. you searched it on the second beer at the corner bar. mike, who has not filed his federal forms since 2019, was at the other end of the bar talking to no one in particular. you took out your phone. you typed what you remembered. what you remembered was wrong. mike, who happened to glance over, said nothing. mike has earned the right to say nothing.

reason five. someone at work used the term, badly, in a meeting and you didn’t want to ask. you typed it later from your desk, with the spelling you’d reconstructed from a rumor. the rumor was the meeting. the meeting, like all meetings, could have been a 3-line email. you would have kept the spelling either way, because you would have read the email at 23% battery on the elevator.

reason six. chatgpt told you. you asked it for the name of “that thing where dumb people think they’re smart” and the machine produced a clean sentence with the names misspelled, because the machine was trained, in part, on people misspelling them. then you copied the misspelling into the search bar, because you trusted the machine more than your memory. i have done this. the contact form on my own website is, by my own design, screened by chatgpt — the bot reads the message, decides what it means, and tells me a tidy version that is, often, not the message. on a recent thursday it filtered out the only sincere note i’d had in a month because the note was, quote, “below the typical engagement threshold”. the note was from a person trying to spell “dunning”. i did not see it for two days.

4. items 7-8, the spelling is hard, the men are slippery

reason seven. the spelling is genuinely hard. “dunning” has a doubled letter that does no audible work. “kruger” has a silent foreign vowel that english speakers are constitutionally incapable of trusting. the spelling is asking you to remember something the spoken language does not require. that is a bad deal. you took the deal anyway. you typed what your mouth would say.

reason eight. the men are slippery. these are two surnames you encountered, almost certainly, in a single article, possibly while waiting for a doctor, while carrying a phone with one airpod charged. the brain stored “the dumb-confident chart guys” and not the spelling. the spelling was always going to be the first thing to go. if you had encountered the chart in a film with will ferrell, you’d remember the spelling, because you’d remember the man — see the 2004 film “anchorman” for the canonical performance of a man who confidently does not know things in nice suits. the original paper had no will ferrell. the original paper had a pdf. you cannot blame yourself.

and, optionally, reason nine, which i will not include in the count because i promised eight: you wanted to be sure it wasn’t the duncan kruger version, or the drugger kruger version, both of which are also things the search bar is asked, daily, by humans on buses with their thumbs cold. the search bar takes them all. the search bar does not flinch.

5. closing pulpit, you are not alone in the dun and kruger effect typo

the truth, gently delivered, is that the dun and kruger effect — your version, the one you typed — is real. it is the effect of typing a word you half-remember and being confident enough to commit. it is the smaller, friendlier cousin of the chart. it is the effect at the keyboard. you are running it every time you don’t double-check.

and that is, on balance, fine. when a recipe calls for parsley, the parsley is, frankly, optional. if your search asks for two doubled consonants in two unfamiliar surnames, you can leave one of them out. the bar will, probably, still find you the chart. the chart, when you find it, will explain why you typed the words wrong in the first place. the loop closes. you, holding a phone, are inside the loop.

my own contact form, screened by a chatbot with strong opinions and no taste, occasionally lets through a note from someone who typed it the same way. i write back, on a delay i won’t explain, with a one-line answer that is, basically, “you’re fine, the spelling is hard, here is the chart”. the bot then files my reply under “low priority” because the bot, like the typo, is the entire post.

if you want the unhurried version, with the chart and the men in their actual order, the long write-up sits at the same long-form pillar i linked at the top — i’d rather not link the same destination twice in one post. and if you want the more general defense of the smart-vs-stupid argument as a category, there is a flagship post at my standing entry on the word dumb, which lays out why the search bar is the most honest mirror you own. dumb, as a category, is bigger than the chart. dumb is the room the chart hangs in.

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