dunning kruger article, the one i should have read

dave called and, before i said hello, told me he had read an article about a psychology effect and wanted my take. dave owes me th…

writing this from the desk. wednesday, around 4:47pm. kickoff one floor up — i can hear dress shoes pacing through the ceiling tile. i am safe down here for at least an hour.

i did not say hello back. dave was already on word four. it was, specifically, a dunning kruger article he had found between coffee and his second client call. the dunning kruger article, he called it — as if there were one definitive document with the truth printed on it. there are, by my count, several thousand. every one of them ends with you thinking about a coworker.

dunning kruger article: the kind of piece, usually 800 to 1500 words, that explains a 1999 psychology paper using a graph, three workplace examples, and exactly one paragraph that asks “but could it be you?”. most readers conclude no. most readers are wrong about that. a dunning kruger article is, in this sense, a mirror with a frame around it.

A DUNNING KRUGER ARTICLE. IS. NEVER. ABOUT. THE READER.

that is the whole problem. that is the only problem. you can read a dunning kruger article on a tuesday and a different dunning kruger article on a thursday and walk away both times having compiled, in your head, a small mental binder of other people who fit it. the binder grows. the binder never contains your own name. the binder is, in the academic sense, a problem.

what dave actually read, in one sentence

dave read a piece — and i’m going to summarize it because he summarized it to me for nineteen minutes and i did the work of compressing it into a sentence so you don’t have to suffer the way i suffered: incompetent people overestimate themselves, competent people underestimate themselves, and there is a chart shaped like a roller coaster that explains both.

that’s it. they dress it up. they add a coworker named gary. they put a graph in it. they cite the 1999 paper. but the bones are the bones. one sentence. dave took nineteen minutes.

i pointed this out. i said, dave, the article you spent your morning on is one sentence with a haircut. dave said: “yeah but the chart”. dave loves a chart. dave works in groundhog-day-style insurance, where the same forms come back on the same dates and any chart that explains why a person does anything feels, to dave, like a small miracle.

the part of the article that’s actually doing work

here is what nobody mentions. the article is not, strictly speaking, the point. the point is the moment, fourteen seconds after you finish reading, when your brain produces a face. usually the face belongs to someone at your job. occasionally a relative. once in a while, a politician. the article is a delivery system for that face.

that is the use case. that is, frankly, the only use case. it is a use case the 1999 paper did not, i believe, intend.

if you want the longer take, with fewer faces and more sentences, i wrote about the dunning-kruger effect itself last month, at this same desk, with a slightly less grease-stained keyboard. that one is the pillar. this one is what dave called it.

the self-awareness paragraph, which is the bait

the $300 sentence dave never actually finishes

at minute eleven, in a voice trying to sound casual and failing in a specific dave-shaped way, dave brought up the matter of an outstanding figure. he said “speaking of self-awareness, do you remember—”. he never finishes that sentence. he gets to the part where the verb should go and then he changes the subject to something funnier than money. on this call the funnier thing was the chart again. the chart has saved him at least four times this calendar year.

i am, for the record, aware of the figure. the conversation about it has been postponed, by mutual silent agreement, until one of us moves cities. the figure is, among other things, a small dunning kruger graph of its own. one of us is overestimating his memory. one of us is underestimating how much he cares. it averages out to nothing happening — which is, on its own way, a kind of low-grade soft gaslighting we have agreed to perform on each other for sport.

why we keep clicking on the same article

so the real question, the one i ought to be earning a paycheck for asking right now: why are there so many dunning kruger articles, and why do we keep falling for them?

the answer, i think, is that a dunning kruger article is a flattering machine disguised as a humbling one. it presents itself as a mirror. it functions as a window. you look in. you see out. you feel improved. you click the next one.

i am not above it. i clicked one yesterday. i scrolled. i nodded. i pictured a guy from a previous job and felt vindicated. then i closed the tab. then i opened a different tab. there are, by latest count, an absurd number of tabs open in this browser, which is its own piece of evidence i won’t be entering today.

and look — ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. i hold that line. i have held it for years. i would not call that a dunning kruger position; i would call it a correctly calibrated one. there is a difference. there might not be a difference. this is the trap. you cannot tell from inside.

what to do, if anything, after reading the article

nothing. you do nothing. that is the actual advice. if you read a dunning kruger article and immediately do nothing different, you are behaving better than the readers who try to apply it, because the application is mostly a polite way of confirming that someone in marketing is the problem.

if you want to do something, the something is small. it is this: the next time you are confidently explaining a thing to someone who knows more than you, notice the small dental clench you do right before you start. it is there. it is a tell. it means a part of your brain has already filed a complaint about the rest of your brain. listen to the complaint. shut up for a minute. then keep going, but slower.

if you wanted a proper try-this version, i wrote a definition piece on the same effect a while back, in which i tried, with mixed results, to actually define the thing rather than dance around it. there is also the shorter, denser, dunning kruger definition i drafted, which avoids the chart entirely on principle.

i can still hear pacing through the ceiling. someone said “actuals” loud enough to come through tile, which means the renewal is now in the part where actuals are, briefly, plural.

dave hung up forty minutes ago. before he did, he said “send me the link to your article when you write it”. he assumed i would write one. he was, in this small instance, right. i’m going to send it to him. he’s going to read three paragraphs, scroll to the chart, find no chart, feel cheated, and call me again. that is the cycle. i invented none of it.

↑