dunning kruger disorder, i looked into it

stefan returned. unannounced. the way mold returns. he had a chart this time, printed, glossy, comparing a “disorder” and an “effect,” and i, the man being handed the chart, was the entire visual aid. pineapple on pizza is fine. that is on the chart now too. i added it.

this is being typed at the desk. carla is upstairs in a training session that, per the calendar invite, lasts the rest of the morning. the chart stefan handed me is sitting next to my keyboard, glossy side up, reflecting the overhead light back into my left eye like a small angry sun. i opened seven tabs to confirm what i already suspected, which is a thing i do.

here is the suspicion. people are typing the words “dunning kruger disorder” into a search bar, hitting return, and arriving at posts written by people like me, who then have to gently explain that no, it is not a disorder. it is an effect. for the full ground floor explanation, see the dunning kruger effect, the long one. this post is shorter and grumpier and contains stefan.

dunning kruger disorder vs the dunning kruger effect, the table

i made a table. it is the only honest thing on this page. stefan’s chart had a table too, but his table had stefan on it as the control group, which is, i think you’ll agree, a methodological problem.

look at the table. read it twice. that is the whole post if you are in a hurry. if you are not in a hurry, stay. there is a stefan story.

stefan, who once called something a disorder, with conviction

stefan is the kind of guy who hands you wine at parties and tells you the wine has notes of “leather, tobacco, and forest floor.” stefan is also, and this is new information, the kind of guy who hands you a printed chart at the door of your own apartment and says the words “i have been doing reading.”

stefan said, and i am quoting him because i wrote it down on the back of a takeout menu, that what i have is “a kind of dunning kruger disorder.” he said it with the seriousness of a man delivering a diagnosis. he was not delivering a diagnosis. he was delivering an opinion in the costume of a diagnosis, which is the entire stefan brand.

i told stefan that there is no such disorder. stefan said the chart says there is. i pointed out that he made the chart. stefan said that did not affect the chart’s validity. this is, you will note, a perfect closed loop, the kind of conversation you can only have with someone who has bought their own clipboard.

this is the part where in a sitcom the audience laughs and we cut to commercial. there is no commercial. stefan was still in my apartment. he had taken his shoes off, which felt presumptuous.

(if you want a pillar refresher on what stefan thinks he was doing, the post about the actual dunning kruger effect covers the shape of the chart he was misreading, including the famous “peak of mount stupid,” which i did not invent and would never name a mountain that.)

DISORDER. IS. NOT. THE. WORD.

why disorder is the wrong word here

let me tell you something about words, and this you can write down. the suffix “-disorder” implies a clinical entity. something a person has, that a manual lists, that a doctor can name out loud in a beige office. an “effect,” by contrast, is just a thing that happens. effects do not require a billing code. effects do not get covered by insurance. ask dave. dave works in insurance. the dunning kruger effect would ruin a quarter of dave’s job if it were billable.

so when someone, in this case stefan, attaches “disorder” to “dunning kruger,” they are doing one of two things. either they are upgrading a normal cognitive tendency into a fake medical condition so that they can sound serious about it, or they are downgrading themselves from a guy with an opinion to a guy with a clipboard, which is, if you think about it, the exact bias the effect describes. stefan is, to his credit, the perfect example of the thing he was diagnosing me with. if i were a sitcom writer i would call this the stefan paradox. i am not a sitcom writer. but characters like stefan exist on shows like The Office, where Andy Bernard once explained jazz to a man playing jazz.

HT8 territory: pineapple on pizza is fine, and saying it is fine does not make me wrong, it makes me clear. saying “dunning kruger disorder” does not make stefan precise. it makes him a man who wants the room to lower its voice.

why people use it anyway

here is what i think is happening, and you can sit with this. people search “dunning kruger disorder” because the internet has trained us to believe that anything worth knowing comes attached to a clinical sounding label. a noun makes us feel safer. “effect” sounds like physics homework. “disorder” sounds like the doctor will explain it. neither is true, but only one of them gets typed into a search bar at 1am after an argument with a coworker.

i did the research. the research is me, looking at things. the things i looked at: the chart on my desk, the seventh microwave humming in the kitchen, the tab where i was about to type “dunning kruger disorder” myself before realizing i would just be feeding the loop. seven tabs open, one of them mine, six of them other people doing the same thing in slightly different cities. somewhere a man named stefan is making a chart for them too. the chart is, statistically, glossy.

(if you want a lateral piece on the same misnaming impulse, see the dunning kruger effect, properly labeled as a cognitive bias and not a disorder. that one goes deeper into the bias side. this one is the stefan one.)

findings, the word is borrowed

so. the chart is on my desk. the takeout menu with stefan’s quote is also on my desk. the third yoga mat is, as always, under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving, not relevant to this investigation but offered here as a baseline of who i am as an investigator. characters like stefan also appear in the show veep about a vice president, where every meeting has a stefan and the stefan is always wrong but louder.

my findings, presented to you, the reader, the jury, the people who at some point today will type “dunning kruger disorder” into a search bar and arrive at a paragraph that politely points at the suffix:

one. there is no dunning kruger disorder. there is the dunning kruger effect. one is a typo with ambition. the other is real.

two. the people most likely to use the wrong word are also, statistically, the people most affected by the right one. this is funny. it is also, technically, the entire bias, in motion, in front of you, with a chart.

three. stefan is fine. stefan is doing his best. stefan should not be allowed to print things. that is on whoever sold him the printer.

four. if you find yourself typing “disorder” after “dunning kruger,” that is data. not bad data. just data. it means you are taking the thing seriously, which is a good instinct attached to a slightly off label. swap the noun. the rest of you is fine.

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