the dunning kruger effect, a thorough investigation

sarah finished a marathon last sunday in a time i am not allowed to mention because mentioning it makes me, a man with a coffee achievement on his calendar, look small. small is not the word. small is generous. the q3 review was happening in another zip code. i had thoughts. you are about to read them.

writing this from the desk on a tuesday, 9:47am. carla is at the q3 review on the third floor and will not surface for the rest of the morning. sarah, separately, ran an actual marathon. these two facts are unrelated to the post and also entirely the post.

so here we are. i have, on the screen in front of me, the kind of search bar that invites trouble, and i have typed into it the phrase that opens this paragraph and most others. the dunning kruger effect, in its proper full investigation, is a thing i have read about in roughly four places, none of which i can locate now, and feel completely qualified to summarize. that, by the way, is the joke. that is also the post.

i am going to be honest with you, in the way one is honest only on a tuesday morning while a colleague is upstairs presenting numbers. i am, almost certainly, an example of the thing the post is about. there is no rhetorical move available to me that gets me out of that. the only escape would be to stop typing. i’m not stopping. that, also, is the joke.

the dunning kruger effect, the formal write-up

the formal version, drafted by a man whose authority is, frankly, the only thing in this room less than his coffee, is this: the dunning kruger effect is a pattern in which people of low ability tend to overestimate their competence, while people of higher ability tend to underestimate theirs, because the same skills that let you do a thing well are the skills that let you judge whether you’ve done it well. one sentence. one breath. i had to back up and re-comma it twice, which is, on reflection, not a great look for the author.

there is a film for this exact dynamic — namely the 2004 movie “anchorman” with will ferrell, in which a man with no qualifications becomes the smartest person in his own newsroom by simply refusing to listen to anyone with more. that’s the visual. that, on a careful reading, is also the auditory.

the chart everyone draws when they explain this — confidence on one axis, knowledge on the other — does not climb in a straight diagonal. it spikes early, crashes hard, and then climbs back slowly without ever returning to the early peak. the early peak has a name. people online call it peak mount stupid. i didn’t make that up. it is the most accurate piece of geography we have produced in fifty years, and we put it on a chart instead of a map. the climb back is the honest one. most people i have ever trusted are on the climb. most people i have ever worked under, in retrospect, are on the peak.

sarah, who runs marathons, and pensions she understands

sarah, on the other hand, is exhibit b, where exhibit b is “the opposite of me”. sarah finished a marathon. she has a pension she understands, which is, in this country, in this decade, a kind of paranormal ability. she does not talk about either accomplishment unless asked, and when asked, she answers in the careful, slightly bored voice of a person who has actually done the thing.

i, by contrast, talk about a marathon i’d run if i were the kind of person who runs marathons. i talk about the pension i’d have if i had ever opened the bank app, which i have not, in nineteen days. i hold these talks at the desk, often, while my coffee gets cold. coffee is achievement, by the way, is a take i hold and would defend in court — but that take is, on a careful reading, also the entire problem. i have made a beverage into a milestone. sarah has made a milestone into a beverage. one of us is right. the chart will tell you which.

i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere, possibly in a serious magazine, that confirms this — that the people who do the actual things are the ones who don’t tell you they did. the people who tell you, often without being asked, are the ones who have done a thinner version of the thing, in their head, on a sunday. i have done many sunday versions of many things. i have a folder for it.

SARAH. RAN. THE. WHOLE. THING. I. SAT. DOWN. TWICE.

the q3 review i was avoiding while writing this

the q3 review, for clarity, is a meeting on the third floor in which numbers happen to people. carla is in there. she has a folder. the folder has tabs. i was, in theory, supposed to be there too — there is an email about it, somewhere in a thread i have been avoiding since friday — but i made a decision, on monday, that the post you are reading would be more important than the meeting. that’s a decision a person on peak mount stupid would make. i made it. i stand by it. the chart, however, does not.

this is the engine of the whole pattern. you don’t know enough to be careful, so you go. people with more information sit there listening, because they remember the last time they were sure of something and were wrong. you, who haven’t had that yet, take the floor. or you skip the meeting. or you write a post about a chart while the chart’s main character is in the next room, alone, presenting it on a tuesday morning, while you, the chart’s other main character, type “the dunning kruger effect” into a search bar and feel productive.

examples not from this floor

i’ll give you three examples, not from this floor, partly out of professional courtesy and partly because the examples on this floor are still in the building.

example one. a man at the corner of the bar i go to, on his third beer, explained to me how the tax system works. he was warm. he was certain. he had a theory and a chart in his head. mike, who has not, by his own admission, filed a return since 2019, listened politely and said nothing. mike, in matters of taxes, has earned the right to silence. the man with the third beer had not. the bar was the slide deck. we all nodded.

example two. a colleague — not carla, another one, in another department — once told me, in the elevator, that the entire concept of project management is a “vibe”. this person has never managed a project. the lanyard was clean. the certainty was complete. the elevator only goes up four floors and they used all four.

example three. i once watched a video of a man explaining, with confidence, that audiobooks were not really reading, a conclusion he had reached, ironically, by listening to a podcast. that’s the third example. the structure of the example is itself the example. the format eats its own tail. that, also, is on the chart.

the term a moron, in the bar definition i prefer, gets used a lot for people on peak mount stupid, but the word is, in fact, too cruel. moron implies a fixed condition. peak mount stupid is a temporary altitude. you can come down. some people don’t. those people, separately, run for office. that, also, is on the chart, but in a different color.

findings, sarah is right, i am fine

my findings, after roughly an hour of typing and zero hours of fact-checking, are these.

one. sarah is right about pensions, about marathons, and about most things, and the proof is that she does not need to tell me. the third yoga mat, which is still under my couch from 2023, possibly evolving into something with a small civilization on it, would, if it could speak, agree with sarah. the yoga mat has been in the room for many of these takes. the yoga mat has heard things.

two. i am, on the chart, somewhere in the dip — the part where you know enough to be ashamed but not enough to be useful. the dip is, on balance, a better place to live than the peak. it is honest. it does not require a slide deck. it does, however, require admitting, out loud, on a wednesday, that you might be wrong about a specific thing on a specific tuesday. i am willing to do that, on the right kind of morning, with the right number of coffees in me. that’s growth. that’s data.

three. for a related condition that often shows up at the same parties — same room, different lanyard — see the broader pattern of confidence outpacing competence, drafted at this very desk on a different morning when carla was at a different meeting. the central move there is the central move here. slow down. let the chart move. shut up for six full seconds, occasionally, on purpose.

chatgpt, by the way, is the tool i use to triage roughly half the things that arrive in my inbox, and chatgpt, when asked about a topic it does not know, sounds confident. it produces clean sentences. it gives you a map. then a person who actually knows the topic looks at it and tells you, gently, that the map is to a different city. the machine doesn’t know it’s wrong. you, holding the printed map at the airport, don’t know either. that, in three actors, is the whole effect. you, the machine, the city. the city wins.

carla just walked past the desk. she did not look. that means the q3 review broke for coffee, not for the day. forty more minutes, by my read of the floor. the standing desk that i sit at is holding up.

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