dunning kruger syndrome, i looked into it

47 tabs at 2 am is not research. it is a confession. one of those tabs, blue link, was a definition of a famous psychology effect — a man with full confidence closes that tab without reading it, and a man with even more confidence sits down the next morning and writes about it. credit cards, again, have personalities. there is a thread between these things. i swear there is.

i’m at the desk on a thursday, second coffee already cold. carla is upstairs at the q3 review and has, judging by the agenda i was not invited to, the rest of the morning. that gives me ninety quiet minutes and a topic i talked myself into at 2 am, alone in the apartment, with the standing desk where i sit and a microwave that i’d rather not discuss.

so. dunning kruger syndrome. that’s the search. that’s what people type. they don’t type “effect”, which is what the 1999 paper actually called it. they type “syndrome”. the search bar is honest in the way the paper is not. i’m going to walk this back, slowly, from the apartment to the data, and try to figure out why the language drifted.

desknote, thursday, ninety minutes of quiet. the q3 review goes long; the q3 review always goes long. i have a list of 47 tabs and one suspect.

dunning kruger syndrome is not the term, but it’s used

here is the trouble with the word. a syndrome implies a cluster of symptoms in a body, often diagnosable, sometimes treatable, occasionally fatal. an effect is just a pattern. patterns don’t go to the doctor. patterns don’t get a wristband. patterns don’t get the kind of sympathy that gets you out of a meeting. so the public, sensibly, upgraded the noun. they took an effect that applies to everyone and renamed it a thing you can have, like the flu, or a lower back issue, or a brother-in-law.

i looked into this. the original work, which i have seen referenced in several places i don’t trust, was called the dunning kruger effect, the long version drafted at this same desk on a different morning. the authors did not use the word syndrome. they used the word effect. effects are honest. effects say “this happens”. syndromes say “this happens to people who are not me”. the upgrade from effect to syndrome is, itself, a small example of the thing it describes — a confident reach for a cleaner word, made by people who have not read the underlying material. me. you. the search bar.

the practical upshot is this: when you type dunning kruger syndrome into a search engine, you are, in that exact gesture, demonstrating it. you’ve already decided it is a clinical thing other people have. you are looking for the chart so you can find the colleague on it. that, also, is the chart. you are on the chart in the act of looking for the chart. i am aware of how that sounds. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, about how often people search for conditions to diagnose other people with. i did not find it. i had 47 tabs.

the 47 tabs audit, where i confirmed this

the 47 tabs are real. i counted them at 2:14 am on a thursday morning in the apartment, on the laptop that lives on the standing desk where i sit. the count is monotonic. the tabs accumulate. i do not close them, on principle, because closing a tab is admitting i didn’t need the information, which is admitting i was wrong about a tuesday three weeks ago. i do not admit to tuesdays.

i went through them. i’d like to report that they were a coherent thread of inquiry. they were not. they were a snapshot of a man who, around midnight, decides to learn something, and around 12:14 am, decides to learn something else. the catalogue, in the order they were opened:

• nine tabs about cognitive biases — one of them, in fact, the tab that started this post.
• six tabs comparing impostor and the dunning kruger pattern, all roughly identical, all written by people who, to their credit, hesitated more than i did.
• four tabs about credit card minimums, which is its own emergency.
• three tabs about microwave ratings, because the seventh microwave is making a sound, and if you knew what the sound was, you’d be on the chart too.
• two tabs about how to clean under the couch, where the third yoga mat lives in a state i’d describe as geological.
• twenty-three other tabs, untouched since february, of varying ambition.

the audit confirmed two things. first, that dunning kruger syndrome is the most-clicked, least-read tab on this machine. second, that i, in opening it, had assigned the syndrome to others, and the search to myself. that’s the asymmetry. that’s the engine. that’s also, technically, evidence i am the example. i’d like the record to reflect that the tabs are still open. that, also, is evidence.

the 2 am revelation that triggered the audit

the revelation came, as revelations do, in the kitchen of the apartment, at the worst possible hour, with the wrong amount of light. i was reheating something in the seventh microwave and watching the plate not spin. the plate has not spun in four months. i have decided this is a feature. while it not-spun, i had the thought.

the thought was: every confident person i know is, in some quiet way, a man on a peak with a glass of something. and the only people i trust are the ones who hesitate before answering. and the gap between those two groups is, in plain language, the thing i’m always trying to write about — but i’ve been calling it by the wrong word. it isn’t a syndrome. it’s a posture. and i, alone in the kitchen at 2 am, was holding the posture.

i went back to the laptop. i opened a tab. i closed nothing. i stood there, in front of the standing desk where i sit, in a t-shirt that said “idiot” on it, ironically, which is the only way i wear anything. that, plainly, is the kind of evening i have. it is also the only kind of evening anyone honest will admit to having.

impostor syndrome adjacent, but distinct

people conflate the two. they shouldn’t. impostor syndrome is the feeling, common in capable people, that you are about to be found out. dunning kruger syndrome, in the popular sense, is the opposite — the unshakeable sense, common in the under-equipped, that you have already figured the thing out. one is a fear of being exposed. the other is a confidence so total it cannot conceive of exposure. both are charts. they are different charts.

imposter syndrome dunning kruger effect — that exact phrase, with no comma, is one of the most-typed strings into search engines in the english-speaking world. people are looking for the same chart from two ends. they want to know which side they are on. the answer, in nearly every case, is: the side that is asking is the side that is closer to the truth. the side that isn’t asking has not opened a tab. the side that isn’t asking is at peak mount stupid with a clean lanyard.

tom, for example, is on the climb. tom asks me, every six months, whether his current decision is sensible. tom is, in fact, sensible. tom owns a volvo with seats that warm in two zones, which is a separate matter. i, who do not own a car, am on the peak about cars. there is a film called “talladega nights” (2006), in which a man wins by going fast and crashing, and i’d like to argue that the chart can also be drawn as a cinematic shorthand. i don’t have time to argue it. ninety minutes is not enough. carla, last reported, is still upstairs.

i have written, on a different tuesday, about the word idiot, and what it covers when you say it about yourself. the post does not use the word syndrome. the post uses the word idiot. idiot is honest. idiot is a description, not a diagnosis. you can be an idiot at 2 am in the kitchen of an apartment and still be, in the morning, a person with a job. the word doesn’t go to the doctor either.

findings, the term is wrong, the search is right

here is where i land. the term dunning kruger syndrome is, technically, wrong. the original work was an effect. the public made it a syndrome because syndrome sounds like a thing other people have, and because admitting you have an effect that applies to everyone is, on a thursday morning, more honesty than most of us are capable of before lunch.

but the search is right. the search is the most accurate confession the internet has ever produced. when a person types dunning kruger syndrome into a browser at 2 am, they are doing the most honest thing they will do that day. they are, in that gesture, admitting that something is off. they are wrong about the noun. they are right about the gesture.

i’d also like, briefly, to bring this back to the kitchen. credit cards are a personality trait, and the personality trait of the man with seven of them is one i’m familiar with — confident in the abstract, reluctant in the specific. i have looked at the bank app twice this month. each time i closed it. each time, in the closing, i felt that i had handled it. that’s the syndrome. that’s also, as we’ve established, the search.

SYNDROME. IS. WHAT. WE. CALL. EFFECTS. WE. WANT. OTHER. PEOPLE. TO. HAVE.

carla just walked past the desk. did not stop. tabs are at 47, give or take the one i opened to write this. ninety minutes used. third yoga mat still under the couch, geologically.