dunning kruger disease, 1 phrase mike invented

honest men avoid mirrors. mike, behind the corner bar, avoids “the building,” which is what he calls the place where mail goes — a two-room post office four blocks from his apartment that, by his own theory, holds the worst paperwork in the country. on thursday night, with parsley on his shirt and zero parsley in whatever he had cooked, mike was diagnosing the dunning kruger disease. you can guess my hot take from there.

it is 9:47am on a friday. i am at the standing desk that does not stand, where i sit. carla is on the third floor in sprint planning, the one meeting where pastries are not served, which is why she resents it personally. i have, at minimum, until lunch.

so the phrase. mike said it three times last night and each time it sounded slightly more clinical, the way a phrase does when a man with a beer, a stained collar, and zero credentials uses it like a doctor’s tool. dunning kruger disease, he said. as if the kruger had grown a stethoscope. as if the dunning had become, retroactively, a symptom. i sat on it overnight, typed it into a search bar at the desk this morning, and the internet had opinions.

dunning kruger disease is a casual misnomer for the dunning-kruger effect, the well-known gap between confidence and competence described in a 1999 paper. it is not, clinically, a disease. nobody is being diagnosed. it is the phrase a confident person uses to describe other confident people, with the word “disease” bolted on to make a diagnosis feel medical.

CALLING. IT. A. DISEASE. DOES. NOT. MAKE. IT. ONE.

dunning kruger is not a disease, technically

the long version of the gap lives in the pillar investigation of the dunning-kruger effect, which i wrote on a different morning at this same desk. that one runs the graph, the climb, the long valley, the whole anatomy. this morning’s job is smaller and meaner. this morning’s job is to look, with a steady eye, at the word disease and ask what mike was doing when he attached it to the phrase.

the word disease has a specific job in english. it implies a host. it implies a course of progression. it implies, at minimum, a chart somebody could fill out. the dunning kruger setup, by contrast, is a pattern of self-assessment errors. no host. no calendar. no chart, because the chart is, mostly, the joke.

so when somebody types dunning kruger disease into a search bar at 11pm, what they are reaching for is a frame that allows them to pity rather than argue. a disease is not the patient’s fault. an effect is. once you call it a disease, the loud guy at the meeting becomes a victim and you become, briefly, the cardiologist who noticed. that is, in plain terms, the whole transaction.

mike’s case for dunning kruger disease, in 4 unverified bullets

mike’s case for dunning kruger disease being an actual disease, delivered with the precision of a man who learns his vocabulary from late-night cable, ran like this. one: people catch it. (false; it is not transmissible.) two: it gets worse with age. (false; if anything, it improves with mockery.) three: you can see it in the eyes. (charitable reading: body language. uncharitable: he was looking at his own reflection in the bottle behind me.) four: the only cure is being told, repeatedly, to shut up. (this one i actually buy, conditionally.)

here is the parsley part. mike had a sprig of parsley on the shoulder of his shirt, visible from three stools down. it had been there since dinner, which mike had not cooked, because mike does not cook with parsley, because mike does not cook with green things at all. if a recipe calls for parsley, you can skip it is the kind of thing mike says in a sentence and lives in a kitchen. the parsley was a guest. it had, possibly, fallen on him from somebody else’s plate while mike was explaining to that person, also, the dunning kruger disease.

the post office i was avoiding while writing this

i was supposed to go to the post office, the one mike calls “the building,” before lunch. on the corner of the desk there is a padded envelope addressed in the handwriting of a man whose name i have known for fourteen years and whose face i could not, under oath, draw. it contains a return for a thing i did not order, that i did order, depending on the morning.

the building, on a friday, is the kind of place that exists to test whether you actually want the thing you came in for. the line is six people long. the second clerk is on a break that began before the line did. mike avoids the building because it has paperwork on him from 2019 he has not addressed. i am avoiding it because i, on a different scale, also have paperwork in a similar drawer in a similar room, and i have been ignoring it.

so the avoidance, mine and mike’s, is in the same key. mike dressed his up as a theory of language; i have dressed mine up as a 1300-word essay on a phrase he made up. for cinematic precedent on a man who builds an identity around avoiding one specific task, see the 2013 spike jonze film “her”, where the protagonist’s main labor is writing letters for other people while refusing to write the one he owes himself.

symptoms, none of which i have, allegedly

i wrote the symptoms on the back of a printout i was supposed to file. the list is partial. the symptoms of dunning kruger disease, transcribed from mike, edited by me, fact-checked by nobody:

1. you explain a topic to somebody who knows the topic better than you and you do not adjust your volume.
2. you read three sentences of an article and quote the article for a week.
3. you correct strangers, but only on subjects where the correction is itself wrong.
4. you treat your own confidence as a fifth piece of evidence.
5. you have, at home, a kitchen drawer of unfinished things, and you have a strong opinion about why each of them is, in fact, finished.

i have, by my own count, four out of five. the fifth i refuse to count, which is itself a symptom of the fifth. since 2023 a third yoga mat has been under the couch in my apartment. it has not been rolled out. it has not been moved. i have defended its presence with the phrase “it’s part of the rotation.” there is no rotation.

the kitchen, separately, contains the seventh microwave i have killed. each one, i diagnosed correctly as broken. each one, i then tried to fix with a method i had read about for ninety seconds. each one, i then re-broke, voiding whatever was left of the warranty, while telling myself the second break was research. that is dunning kruger disease, if it is one, in a small box with a turntable.

findings, the diagnosis is convenient

so, after a morning at the desk with the envelope still unsent and the line at the post office still six people long in my imagination, what i have on the back of the printout is this. dunning kruger disease is not a disease. it is a phrase a confident person uses to describe other confident people, with the word disease bolted on so the diagnosis feels less like insult and more like kindness. mike said it three times. parsley fell on him. neither event proves anything.

the cleaner companion to this morning’s grumble is, predictably, a walk-through of the dunning-kruger effect test i drafted on a different week, where i actually try the test on myself with a pencil and a kitchen timer. that one earns the word investigation. this one is closer to a transcript with a hangover.

i am, by tab count, on the forty-seventh open browser tab today. on the second monitor, the wip 2022 list — eleven things that began as bullet points in 2022, demoted to sub-bullets in 2023, now furniture. on the third monitor, chatgpt screens, each asking a different question. that is, on a generous reading, just a friday.

carla just walked past. she said, without slowing, “the planning is going long,” which is what she says every friday because the planning, by design, goes long. she did not ask what i was working on. that is, in this office, a small mercy and a small grade in the same sentence.

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