effect dunning kruger, i looked into it (vs the other order)

the apartment was quiet enough that the fridge sounded like an opinion. mike at the corner bar was not there, which felt, briefly, like a personal loss. i sat with two ways of saying the same psychology phrase and decided one was better. a spoon, again, is redundant. that decision is also mine.

writing this from the desk on a wednesday around 10:14am while carla sits in some cross-functional alignment thing on the third floor. i have what an honest person would call thirty-five minutes and what i will call an hour because rounding up is a survival skill.

somebody, somewhere, typed the words in that order — effect first, the two surnames after — and a search engine took it seriously enough to put the phrase in front of me. that is the entire premise of this investigation. i am, technically, a leading expert in the field of typing things in the wrong order and committing to it.

writing from the desk. carla is upstairs. the standing desk where i sit is, at this hour, a chair with ambition.

this investigation slots under the broader pillar on the dunning-kruger effect — the parent post that lays out the whole thing in the conventional order. this one is the shorter cousin that wonders out loud why the words sometimes show up scrambled.

effect dunning kruger vs dunning kruger effect, the table

a comparative requires a table. the table is the only honest part of the comparative. everything else is me typing.

the table does the work. you can stop reading. i won’t know. but the rest of this is, by my own internal grading, where the post earns its keep.

why the order matters, somehow

word order in english carries a small extra weight that nobody pays for. say “the red big car” and people flinch; say “the big red car” and they nod. there’s an unspoken rule sheet, and most of us internalized it in a kindergarten we don’t remember. when “effect” arrives before the two surnames, the phrase reads slightly off, like a translation that came back through three languages and one mid-flight nap.

the people who study confidence and competence — i’ll call them the two researchers, because the names in front of the word “effect” is exactly the construction we are NOT discussing here — wrote a paper that landed in the late nineties. that paper got named after them, in the standard order, and the standard order calcified into the canonical phrase. anything else is a remix.

i am not against remixes. some of my best decisions are remixes of decisions other people abandoned in the parking lot. the dishwasher is a cabinet that judges you. the toaster is a complaint with a heating element. the spoon is a smaller bowl. these are facts in a different word order than you expected.

examples in each order, all about others

if you search “dunning kruger effect,” the search engine assumes you read books. if you search “effect dunning kruger,” the search engine assumes you heard the phrase on a podcast at 1.5x speed and were trying to capture it before the next thing started. both assumptions are, in my experience, correct most of the time.

the inverted order shows up most in three places. one: people writing in english as a second language, because the grammar from another tongue is still humming under the surface. two: the second wave of viewers who heard the phrase secondhand from the first wave and are just trying to find the original. three: the man at the bar, somewhere, who is mid-sentence and reaches for the phrase the way you reach for a wallet you’ve already left at the table.

i have, by the way, opened 47 tabs on this. the tabs are: three definitions, four blog posts about overconfidence, two interviews with the two researchers, one episode of The Office where a character explains a thing he doesn’t understand to a room of people who do, and the rest are recipes i opened by accident while trying to navigate a sidebar.

when each order is used, briefly

the standard order — names first, noun after — shows up in academic prose, in headlines that want to feel competent, in the kind of LinkedIn post written by a person who definitely has a podcast. it is the version that wears a blazer to the meeting. it is the version that uses the word “synergy” without irony.

the inverted order — noun first, names after — shows up in the wild. it shows up in voice-to-text transcriptions. it shows up in the search history of people who were trying to be quick. it shows up in my browser bar at 11:23am on a wednesday because i was typing fast and the autocomplete had ideas.

both orders point at the same phenomenon: when somebody knows just enough about a thing to feel certain, but not enough to know what they don’t know. you can recognize this in others almost immediately. you can recognize it in yourself almost never, and only in retrospect, usually after a microwave-related incident or a conversation with mike at the corner bar that ends with him saying nothing for a long time.

for the longer version of all of this — the actual academic genealogy, the chart, the staircase that everyone draws — see the walkthrough on the test version of the concept. it covers what i’m gesturing at here without the typo angle.

findings, the order is fashion

my finding, after this morning’s research from the desk, is that word order is fashion. it changes. it bends. it goes through phases. ten years ago everyone wrote it one way. five years from now, the inverted version may be the default, the way we now say “asks” instead of “questions” and nobody flinches.

i will, as i note here, continue to type both versions, depending on which arrives first. if “effect” comes out before the names, i will leave it. life is short and my keyboard has its own opinions. the seventh microwave taught me that fighting your own typing is a losing battle. you don’t beat the typo. you co-sign it.

the wip 2022 list is still on the standing desk where i sit. it has the words “learn the names of psychology effects” on it in pencil. i have not crossed it off. i have not added to it. it is, in its own way, a finding.

carla is back at her desk. ChatGPT screens the rest. i have to look busy now, which is its own performance.

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