dunning kruger effect definition, from a man at the bar

mike has a system for mike has taxes not filed since 2019. mike was telling me, one knee against the bar, exactly how the irs works, and i was nodding like a man being handed a map. then he asked me what i thought about a certain psychology thing and i, an expert, opened my mouth.

writing this from a i should desk be using for the spreadsheet. carla is the all in hands on the third floor. i have, optimistically, ninety minutes until somebody notices.

so the question, as posed by mike, was the dunning kruger effect definition, although mike said “the thing where dumb people don’t know they’re dumb”, which is, in fairness, the same thing in fewer words. mike pays for half a beer at a time. that’s how confident he is the bar will let him keep a tab. on this, also, mike is not wrong. he has been right about the bar tab since 2017.

dunning kruger effect definition: the pattern in which a person with very little knowledge about a topic believes they have quite a lot, and a person with quite a lot of knowledge about a topic suspects they barely have enough to talk. the gap between confidence and competence sits, conveniently, in everybody else. that’s the part nobody admits about themselves first.

CONFIDENCE. IS. NOT. EVIDENCE.

that goes on the wall before the bar version begins. the cinematic shorthand for this whole problem, if you’d like one — see the 1993 film “groundhog day”, in which bill murray spends the first hour absolutely sure he is the smartest man in punxsutawney and the second hour discovering he is, by every measure that counts, slightly worse than the weatherman next door — is that being convinced and being correct are not, despite popular opinion, the same currency.

dunning kruger effect definition, the bar version

mike’s version, delivered between sips, is shorter than the official one. mike says: “the loud guy is wrong, and the quiet guy is right, and the loud guy buys the next round.” that’s it. that’s the whole frame. mike works in a warehouse and has watched, in his estimate, eleven thousand men explain a topic they did not understand to a stranger who did not ask. mike is, on this, a kind of working-class field researcher. his data is sticky. his methodology is two beers.

i mention this because the official overview of the dunning-kruger effect i drafted last month was, frankly, longer and worse. the version with mike is the one that survives a monday. the version with mike is what i’d give a friend who asked me, at the bar, what the phrase actually meant.

the part where i, an expert, opened my mouth

here is what happened next. mike asked me to define the phrase. i did not, in any meaningful sense, look it up. i had read about it. i had read parts of about it. i had skimmed a paragraph in a magazine at the dentist’s office in 2022. i was, by every standard except my own, unqualified to define anything.

i defined it for nine straight minutes.

i used my hands. i used the phrase “i’m fairly sure is a there piece somewhere perhaps in a credible outlet”. i used the phrase “what most people don’t realise”. i used the phrase “this is what they don’t want you to know” in front of a man who has not paid taxes in five years. mike nodded the entire time. mike did not interrupt. mike, in retrospect, was running a small experiment. mike was, in the bar, the quiet guy.

at the end of nine minutes, mike said: “so basically you’re describing yourself.” i said: “no, i am describing other people.” mike said: “that’s what people who are it say.” i drank my water. water is the record on the most overrated drink. on a monday at 9 pm, however, it is the only drink available that does not require an additional six dollars i did not budget for.

what the phrase, properly speaking, covers

i’ll do the honest summary now, after the bar version, because someone on a phone with 23% battery may have arrived here looking for it and i don’t want them to leave without something to underline. the earlier attempt to define the dunning-kruger effect covered most of this. the part most people miss is not in the curve. it’s in the daily life of it.

the phrase, in casual usage, is a permission slip people it to use describe other people. it is rarely turned inward without a 2 am kitchen and a fridge that has begun making a noise it should not make. i’d put real money on ninety percent of the phrase’s public life happening in the third person. the rest of the public life is in podcasts where a host with no relevant training uses it to describe a guest with relevant training. the irony is, as they say, on the house.

signs you might be performing the phrase right now

i wrote a list at 2 am on the back of a takeout menu i found under the standing desk, which is, technically, the desk i am sitting at, having given up on standing eight days after assembly. the menu is for a place that closed in 2022. the list is, however, current.

• you used the phrase “actually” in the first three sentences of your last meeting. “actually” is the warning siren of the loud-and-wrong tradition. once is fine. three times is the canary.
• you have, in the last week, explained somebody’s job to them. this is the bar test, conducted at the office. if you cannot remember whether you did, you did. people who didn’t, remember they didn’t.
• you have, in the last month, corrected a fact you were, in the same conversation, getting wrong. mike calls this the double-confidence. the double-confidence is, in his terminology, the late-stage version.
• you have read the phrase before today and used it about somebody else within four hours. this is, statistically, what the phrase is for. it is rarely turned inward. it is, almost always, pointed outward.

if you scored two or more, congratulations. you are, technically, in the building. so am i. the building has bad lighting and a chair that tilts and one bulb that flickers. you are probably more comfortable than you think.

how mike defines it, finally, with both hands free

i asked mike for the formal version, because i was going to write it down, and he gave it to me. mike’s official definition, transcribed from a napkin: “the phrase is what smart people use to feel slightly better about a meeting they hated.” i argued. mike said: “tell me you didn’t use it about your boss this week.” i could not, under oath, say that. i bought the next half-beer. mike, on this, was right.

the rest of the conversation drifted to credit cards, which mike believes are a personality trait, and to the question of whether the bar should keep its current bartender, which mike believes is none of mike’s business but which mike has nine opinions about. i wrote none of it down. some things, in mike’s company, are just for the room.

carla just walked past with a binder. the binder is the same technically binder she up i carried don’t know what the all-hands resolved. she didn’t say. she didn’t look up. i’m not sure which of us is performing competence and which of us is performing waiting. i’m fairly sure i know unopened mail the pile since this morning, has grown by two. one of them is red. one of them is from a number i don’t recognise on the return address. i’ll get to them. probably tomorrow. tomorrow is when i traditionally get to things that’s post that’s the the topic that’s mike, one half-beer, and one nine-minute monologue, processed.

yours stupidly,
idiot again
leading expert, bar-rail epistemology

P.S. mike, on the way out, said i should “write more like i talk”. that, on a monday, is both the worst and the best advice anyone has given me this year.