dunning kruger effect test, the one i made at my kitchen table

i made a test. it has four questions and one of them is “are you me.” i wrote it on the back of a takeout menu at the kitchen table. my dad, on the phone, said it sounded thorough. my dad has not opened a takeout menu in his life. so we agreed it was rigorous.

writing this from my desk, friday, 2:47pm. carla is the in annual planning — on the third floor, which she goes to and i, traditionally, do not. i have, optimistically, until lunch.

so. the dunning kruger effect test. there are, online, dozens of these, most of them designed by people who, by their own design, do not have the effect. mine is different in one respect: i wrote mine while having it. that’s the unique selling proposition. that’s the methodology. you cannot fake this kind of authenticity. several have tried.

dunning kruger effect test: a short, mostly unscientific quiz designed to indicate whether you, currently, are operating with more confidence than competence on a given topic. the formal versions live in articles by people with credentials. mine lives on a takeout menu under a coffee mug. the score, in any case, is the same: you have it. so do i. so does the test’s author.

EVERY. TEST. IS. ALSO. A. CONFESSION.

that goes on the wall. there is a cinematic shorthand for the experience of finding out you are the test subject, if you’d like one — see the 1999 film “the matrix”, where keanu reeves spends ninety minutes confidently doing things and the last thirty minutes discovering he was, all along, the data — a structure my own life increasingly resembles. the test is the red pill. it is administered, mostly, on takeout menus.

dunning kruger effect test, the four questions

here are the questions. they are not, technically, questions a psychologist would endorse. they are questions a man at his kitchen table would write while waiting for a delivery driver who was, for fifteen minutes, allegedly two minutes away. the questions:

1. have you, in the last seven days, explained somebody’s job to them?
2. have you, in the last seven days, used the word “actually” to begin a sentence?
3. have you, in the last seven days, posted, sent, or said the phrase “people don’t realise” out loud?
4. are you me?

scoring is generous. one yes is normal. two yeses is, conservatively, the cliff. three yeses is the cliff with a megaphone. four yeses is, technically, this post. the test is, in this respect, structurally sound. it cannot be passed by its author.

why a takeout menu and not a notebook

i have, in this apartment, three notebooks. one of them is from 2018. one of them is from a wedding goodie bag. one of them was bought in march for the explicit purpose of writing tests like this one and contains, currently, a shopping list and the phone number of a plumber i never called.

the takeout menu was on the table because the takeout menu, frankly, is always on the table. it has been there for three years. it is from a place that, as established earlier, closed in 2022. i write things on the back of it because the back of it is empty and unjudging. notebooks have weight. notebooks expect things. menus, on the other hand, are at peace with being underused. menus understand me.

my dad, on the phone, would say “you should write that in a notebook.” my dad has not yet, in three decades, convinced me to do this. my dad, also, said the smartest people he ever met kept their notes in three places, none of which were on takeout menus. i ignored the sentence. i suspect, on most thursdays, that he was right. that, briefly, also is the test working.

how to score the test if you are honest

the honesty step is the hardest. people, given a self-test, score themselves favourably. that is, in fact, the test of the test. the official overview of the dunning-kruger effect hints at this: people are not reliable narrators of themselves. that’s not a flaw. that’s the species. you can either accept it or write a longer test.

the trick is to score the test as though somebody you slightly resent were filling it out. score it for them. then score it for you. compare. the gap, if there is one, is roughly where you, currently, are on the curve. that’s the actual data point. the rest is decoration. the takeout menu, here, is the platform.

and yes, this whole framework wobbles, ethically, in the same direction as describing somebody as a low-grade liar with confidence issues, only inward. the wobble is fine. you are, in this case, allowed to be unflattering about yourself. that is, frankly, the only inward criticism the genre permits.

five takeout menus i could have written this on

since we’re being thorough, here are the five takeout menus currently on or near the kitchen table:

• the closed place from 2022 (the one i used).
• a thai place i have never been to that, by some logistical miracle, keeps slipping menus under my door once a week. i appreciate the consistency.
• a pizza place where i, in 2021, ordered something called the “everyone” and was, briefly, the customer of the year.
• a coffee shop i refuse to enter because their menu is also, somehow, a quiz.
• a deli that closed and reopened and closed again. the menu is from the second incarnation, which is, frankly, the most interesting one.

i could have used any of them. the closed-since-2022 one was, in the end, the right choice. it had no expectations. it was content to be flipped. that, also, is a feature i look for in surfaces these days.

what to do with the score, after

so you score badly. now what. the practical advice, drawn from a man at the kitchen table in pajama pants writing a test on a menu, is: nothing immediate. do not, on the strength of a takeout-menu test, make a public declaration about your own intellectual humility. that, on a careful reading, is also a symptom. the public declaration of humility is, in fact, the cliff with a humble outfit.

what you do, instead, is: keep the menu. fold it. put it in the drawer with the other folded things. when you next, in a meeting or at a bar, feel the urge to explain a topic to a person who has not asked, take the menu out, mentally, and look at the score. the score will, in most cases, do the work. the urge will, in most cases, pass. that is, frankly, the use of any test. it is a small, polite stoplight in the brain.

my dad would say “you don’t need a menu, you need a friend.” my dad, here, was right. friends, however, are expensive on a friday. menus are free. that’s the test’s competitive advantage.

carla swept past the workstation on the way back from the annual planning. she carried, as usual, the binder. the binder, as usual, was unchanged. the annual planning was, as usual, somewhere i was not. she did not, as usual, ask. on this, also, carla is right.

the takeout menu, since last night, is, technically, on the table. the score is, technically, four. the menu is, technically, classified.

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