dunning effect, the phrase missing 1 name

ironing is a class war, my dad said once, with the same energy a man uses to identify a famous psychology effect after one beer. i looked into both. i found, frankly, more on ironing. but a confident reader will accept what comes next as authoritative anyway. that is the joke. that is also, possibly, the point.

thursday around 11:23am at the standing desk where i sit. carla just left for a sprint retro on the third floor — they brought in pastries, which means a forty-minute meeting will outlive its mandate by about an hour. that buys me the rest of the morning to go through what i was told, last night at the corner, by a man who called the phrase by half its name.

so the phrase under the microscope today is the dunning effect, with the kruger missing on purpose, by everybody who uses it that way. people drop the kruger because the kruger is the harder syllable, and because the phrase, by the time it reaches a barstool, has lost half its parents in transit. the long-form version, with both names and a whole graph behind it, is its own pillar investigation. this is the shorter cousin. the one missing the name.

dunning effect: the casual half-name that floats around bars, group chats and comment sections when somebody wants to invoke the famous overconfidence-versus-competence gap without typing the second researcher. it is, structurally, the same idea as the dunning-kruger effect, with one collaborator credited and one quietly dropped. the shortcut keeps the diagnosis. it loses the citation.

HALF. A. NAME. STILL. SCANS. APPARENTLY.

that is, mostly, what i learned at the corner last night. mike, behind the bar, said the phrase three times in one sentence and only attached one name to it, and the name was dunning. mike does not know who kruger is. mike, on a related note, has not filed a return since 2019. for a cinematic frame on what happens when a confident person owns half a fact at full volume, see the 2013 film “frozen”, where a lead character announces “the cold never bothered me anyway,” while the entire movie is, mostly, about how the cold did, in fact, bother her.

dunning effect, what people mean when they drop kruger

here is what people seem to mean. they mean the loud-guy thing. they mean the meeting where the least informed person has the most to say. they mean the cousin at the dinner table. they mean the man on the podcast. they shorten the phrase because the phrase is a knife and the knife works fine without the second handle.

kruger gets dropped because kruger is the harder-sounding one, and the english tongue, after a beer, prefers consonants it does not have to think about. dunning, by contrast, sits in the mouth like a british noun. it has weight. it has, by accident, a verb in it. the dropping is not malicious. it is, at most, lazy in the way most language is lazy. there is a cleaner version of this same observation in the stefan-and-pinot definition i drafted, which arrives at the same hill from a different driveway.

mike at the bar, his shorter version

mike’s version of the dunning effect was given to me last night, at the corner, with one beer in front of him and one in front of me. mike said: “it’s the thing where idiots think they’re smart.” that was the entire definition. mike then pointed at a man two stools down who was, at that exact second, explaining bitcoin to his own girlfriend. mike said: “look. there. live.”

i looked. the man at the other stool was using the word “decentralized” the way a child uses the word “dinosaur” — confidently, often, not always in the right order. his girlfriend was nodding the way a person nods when the alternative is leaving. mike said: “that’s the dunning effect. you don’t need both names to spot it.”

dad once said, something about effects in general

my dad used to say “a man who names a thing after himself has already lost the argument with the thing.” i thought, for a while, this was about ego. i think now it was about citation. dad never read the 1999 paper. dad ironed his own shirts on a board he kept in the laundry room, and he had opinions about ironing the way most people have opinions about cars. ironing is a class war i refuse to fight, by extension, is the line i inherited cleanly.

dad believed the unsaid half of any sentence was the half that paid rent. you say “dunning effect” out loud and the kruger is what you are quietly leaning on, like the second leg of a chair. take the leg out. the chair is, technically, still a chair. it just falls over slightly faster.

why the shorter name is somehow worse

the shorter name lets the speaker off the hook for the reflexive half. you can throw “dunning effect” at a coworker and feel, briefly, like you have made a sophisticated diagnosis. you cannot do this as easily with both names, because both names raise the question: which half are you in. the kruger, weirdly, is the half that pulls the speaker in. the dunning, alone, pushes the speaker out. it is a phrase that has been streamlined for blame.

the shorter name also drifts. without the kruger as anchor, the phrase floats. you start to see it used to mean “anyone i disagree with.” that is not what the paper said. shortening a phrase is mostly a way of broadening it. fewer words, looser meaning, larger blast radius. eventually the half-phrase ends up doing the same job as the everyday word dumb — the adjective the language reaches for when it wants a softer word for the same idea. both dumb and dunning, in casual usage, are roomy enough to hide a multitude of speakers inside them.

and yet mike’s shorter version did the job last night. the man at the other stool was overconfident. mike’s diagnosis was correct. it just left out the part where mike, on certain topics, performs the same trick. the kruger half is the one that would have folded mike, gently, into the example. for the kindlier walk-through that does fold the speaker in, see my plain-language explanation of what the full phrase means, drafted next to a fridge making a noise i still don’t have a name for. there is also the cousin investigation, the inverse syndrome that quiet people quietly suffer.

findings, give kruger his half

so here is what i wrote on the back of a coaster, after the man at the other stool had paid up and left, after mike had refilled my glass without comment.

1. the casual phrase keeps the loud half. it points at other people. it does not, easily, point at the speaker. that is its main appeal, and also its main flaw.
2. the missing kruger is doing work. the second name carries the second finding — competent people undershoot themselves. without it, the phrase becomes a one-direction mirror. mirrors that point one way are, frankly, just windows.
3. mike was right, locally. the man at the other stool was a clean live demo. local truth and global truth are, on most weekday evenings, two different beers.
4. dad was right, eventually. the unsaid half of the phrase is the half doing the rent. the kruger is the structural beam you removed and hoped nobody would notice.
5. i am, on the record, fine. i wrote about a phrase i learned the short version of from a man behind a bar. the kruger half would have something to say about that. i am, this morning, choosing not to invite the kruger in.

the wip 2022 list, on the other monitor, is the forty-seventh tab today. it is not, this morning, getting opened. a confident reader will assume i meant for that to be a metaphor. it is, in fact, just laziness.

carla just walked back past the desk with the folder. the sprint retro must have wrapped on schedule, with the pastries mostly eaten. she did not ask what i was working on. that is, in this office, a kindness — and also, on a careful read, its own kind of grade.

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