8 ways people misspell the dunning kruger effect
8 ways people misspell the dunning kruger effect
the annual planning meeting was being scheduled, somewhere, by people who use the word “cadence.” meanwhile i was making a list of eight ways people misspell two simple last names, an act of confidence which is, itself, the whole topic of this post. credit cards, as established, have personalities. the visa is judging us.
writing this from the standing desk where i sit, 12:51pm on a wednesday, with the rest of the morning to myself because the third floor swallowed everyone with a calendar invite. the audit of 47_tabs i opened last night is still glowing at me from the second monitor. one of those tabs is a search results page where someone, in earnest, typed “dun kruger effect” into a box and hit enter. that someone is the patron saint of this post.
1. the dun kruger effect, the intro: search engines see all
here is what i have learned, sitting in front of a screen for years like a man who pays rent on it. search engines are confessional booths. nobody whispers their actual ignorance to a friend. but everyone, EVERYONE, types it into google. the classic explainer of the dunning kruger effect sits on this very site, and i have looked at the search terms that drive people to it. they are not what you think.
they are typos. they are guesses. they are people half-remembering a podcast, a tweet, a thing a stefan-type at a wine night said with too much certainty. that stefan, by the way, mispronounced it. confidently. credit cards are a personality trait, and so are the typos a person commits at 12:51pm while pretending to look up something at work.
let me tell you something about the dun kruger effect as a search query. it is the exact thing it describes, in miniature. a person who does not know the names of the two researchers is, almost by definition, the audience for the concept. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, about meta-typos. there isn’t. i made that up. i rest my case.
2. items 1-3: dun, dunn, donn
1. dun. as in our hero, “dun kruger effect.” the u sits there alone, the second n having been quietly dismissed like an intern at annual planning meeting. this is the most googled variant. i checked. (i did the research. the research is me, looking at things.)
2. dunn. with the second n but no g. someone is halfway there. they remember a consonant cluster but lose interest before the suffix. i respect this. it is the spelling equivalent of the third yoga mat under the sofa: you started, you made an effort, you stopped at exactly the wrong moment.
3. donn. the o invasion. donn kruger effect. this is what happens when autocorrect, raised on ios and irish first names, tries to be helpful. it is not helpful. it is a 47-tab problem where one tab quietly rewrites the others.
3. items 4-5: drugger, dunder
4. drugger. kruger has become drugger. somewhere, a person typed this and did not flinch. the d migrated from one name to another like a man switching apartments without telling his landlord. i have a soft spot for it. it sounds like a character from a 1970s cop show, the kojak-era kind of name that arrives in a rumpled coat and a cigarette.
5. dunder. someone watched the show with the paper company and the word stuck to the wrong synapse. dunder kruger effect. it sounds like a beer brand. it sounds like a defense attorney. it does not sound like cognitive psychology, which, full disclosure, neither does my morning.
4. items 6-8: donner, drunken, dunhill
6. donner. the donner kruger effect. someone has confused a cognitive bias with a 19th century american tragedy involving snow and decisions. i refuse to make the obvious joke. (i am aware that, by refusing, i have made it.)
7. drunken. drunken kruger effect. this is, honestly, the variant i find most poetic. it captures the texture of the bias in a way the original two surnames do not. a man at a bar, certain of everything. a man at the desk, slightly less certain, but only because his coffee is cold. that man is me. the microwave_seventh warmed it up. badly. its third career.
8. dunhill. dunhill kruger effect. this is what happens when you remember the consonants but borrow them from a luxury cigarette lighter. it has a kind of menswear confidence to it. i would buy a magazine subscription called dunhill kruger quarterly. i would not read it. it would join the unopened mail pile. that is also fine.
here is the recursive joke i promised. every variant on this list was typed by a person who was certain enough to hit search but uncertain enough to need the page. the gap between those two certainties is the dun kruger effect itself, neatly demonstrated. the visa is judging us, again. the visa was right, again. that’s a track record.
5. closing pulpit, the men get all the typos
two researchers. two last names. a thousand variants in the wild. for a fuller-fat treatment of the proper definition of the dunning kruger effect, you can read that one and feel briefly competent. for a slower walk through it with more patience than i have at 3:47pm, the long-form definitional version is also there.
and if you want the cognitive bias parent file, the broader umbrella under which dun, dunn, donn, drugger, dunder, donner, drunken, and dunhill all huddle, the overview of cognitive bias as a category, starting with confirmation covers the umbrella. say the word “bias” out loud three times. it stops sounding like a word. that is also a kind of dun kruger effect, but i’m not going to push it.
idiot again
auditor of 47 tabs and the eight wrong spellings inside them
p.s. the eighth variant on the list is dunhill. i checked the visa statement after writing it. the visa said no. the visa was, as ever, the smartest one on the kitchen counter.
