dunning syndrome, a thorough investigation

stefan, the wine man with the actual vineyard, sent me a text last week that just said “are you okay.” i was. i am. i am, in fact, fine enough to do a thorough investigation of dunning syndrome, which is, as far as i can tell, the question stefan was actually asking, in his quiet european way, with seven words and a period.

it is 10:18am on a wednesday. i am at the standing desk, which i sit at, because the lever is broken in a way nobody has agreed to fix. let’s go.

so dunning syndrome. let me say upfront what this post is and what it is not. this is not the famous one. the famous one is dunning-kruger, which has its own whole investigation of the dunning-kruger effect, a pillar i wrote on a different morning. that one is about people who think they are smarter than they are. dunning syndrome — without the kruger, without the dash — is the rumor of an inverse. the cousin nobody invites because they keep apologizing for being there.

dunning syndrome: a colloquial, mostly informal way of describing the inverse of the dunning-kruger effect. where dunning-kruger is the overconfident underqualified person, dunning syndrome describes the person competent enough to do the work and somehow, mostly on a tuesday, convinced they are not. it is, in plain terms, overestimating your own incompetence.

DUNNING. SYNDROME. IS. ME. PROBABLY.

the text from stefan, decoded against my will

stefan owns a vineyard. an actual one. with grapes and a tractor and a barn that, i have to assume, smells like the inside of a sock you would willingly wear. he sells wine to people who use the word “minerality” without flinching. i met him at a tasting two years ago and we have been, in the loosest sense available to grown men, in touch. he texts me roughly twice a year and i answer, on a delay, like a man drafting a treaty.

last week the text said “are you okay.” that’s the whole text. one period. no question mark, which is, if you have seen arrival, the kind of detail that, when you sit with it, starts to mean something. i wrote back “yeah.” then, twelve minutes later, “why.” then, an hour later, i opened a tab on my browser and typed, into a search bar at the standing desk where i sit, the words dunning syndrome, because that’s what stefan was asking and i, with my superior reading skills, had finally clocked it.

what dunning syndrome actually means, on the off chance you ask

here is what i can piece together, after a morning of reading. dunning syndrome is not, technically, a clinical category. you will not find it in the manual they reference on the shows i watch. it is, in the strict sense, a phrase that lives on the internet, in the same forums where people argue whether toast is a meal.

but the idea is real, even if the label is loose. some people consistently underestimate their own competence. they refuse promotions. they don’t apply. they keep the receipt. they double-check the email three times. they are, statistically, often correct on the first read. they read again anyway. then again.

i know two of these people. one is me. the other is, allegedly, also me, on a different day, in a different mood. the syndrome, if it is one, is the gap between what i actually do and what i tell myself, in the kitchen at midnight, that i did. the gap is wide, and it is funded entirely by my own narration.

how dunning syndrome differs from its more famous cousin

if you want the full anatomy of the cousin — the upward slope, the cliff, the long climb back — there is a walk-through of the dunning-kruger graph i did one morning when the printer was broken. the difference, in shorthand:

• dunning-kruger: i think i’m better than i am. i tell people. they laugh. i don’t notice.
• dunning syndrome: i think i’m worse than i am. i tell no one. they don’t notice. i suffer quietly, on a wednesday, at the standing desk where i sit.

both are errors of self-assessment. one errors loud. one errors quiet. the loud one is funny. the quiet one is, frankly, more annoying to live with, because it produces no good anecdotes and a lot of unsent emails. (a friend prefers my first-principles attempt to define dunning-kruger, drafted on a different desk on a different month.)

the symptoms, as observed in a man who has them

i have, in the spirit of self-diagnosis, written a list. lists are how i pretend i am being rigorous. the list is on a sticky note on the standing desk. the sticky note has fallen off twice. i am taking that as data. signs of dunning syndrome, by my count:

1. you finish the work and immediately assume you missed something.
2. you read the email seven times before you send it. it has three sentences.
3. you assume praise is a misunderstanding that will be cleared up by friday.
4. you do not apply for the thing because the listing says “experience preferred” and you have only done the thing for nine years.
5. you receive a one-word text from a man with a vineyard and you treat it like a court summons.

i have, by my own count, all five. and yet, paradoxically, the kitchen contains the seventh microwave i have killed, and a confident man does not kill seven microwaves. so the syndrome is selective. it shows up at work. it leaves work, and then i electrocute the spaghetti. these are two different men, sharing a body, sharing a rent, never speaking.

the cited insight, by way of a quote i refuse to fully attribute

somewhere in a pdf i opened on a tuesday and never read past page two — the pretentious serif kind, where every paragraph feels like it’s wearing a tie — there was a sentence about how the financially uninformed do better, in some narrow studies, than the financially informed, because the informed get scared, and scared people freeze, and frozen money does not grow. i can’t find the pdf now. i closed the tab. you know how it is.

but the sentence stuck, because it lined up with one of my hot takes, one i have argued with stefan more than once: “ignorance is, in this case, financial therapy.” i stand by that. i do not check my bank app. i have a 401k-equivalent that, last i looked in 2022, was doing fine. dunning syndrome is what makes me want to check. ignorance is what stops me. the two cancel out, on most weeks, into a kind of accidental serenity.

what stefan was actually asking, finally answered

i wrote stefan back, properly, three days later. i told him: yes. i am okay. i was overthinking the bottle of wine he sent me at christmas, reading the label as a verdict on my palate, doing what he once called “tasting with the brain instead of the tongue.” he replied in one minute, faster than he has ever replied to me, with: “good. drink it.” that’s the whole reply. lowercase. period. stefan does not pad.

i drank the bottle that night. it was good. it tasted, to me, like wine. and that, i think, is the cure for dunning syndrome — not more knowledge, not less, but the small permission to call wine wine, to call work done, to call a one-word text a one-word text, and to stop interrogating the period at the end. (the cleaner version of this pattern lives in my plain-language explanation of what dunning-kruger means, which arrives at the same place from the opposite direction. the short cousin to that is a definition of dunning-kruger written with stefan’s help, on a different morning.)

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