9 things the kruger effect explains about other people

the taxman uses a serif font and that, by itself, is a confession. it is also a hot take. it is also, somehow, related to a famous psychology effect, because confidence in the wrong font is still confidence. i will list nine examples in a moment. you will recognize one of them. it will not be you.

writing this from the standing desk where i sit, 11:23 on what may be a tuesday, the rest of the morning open because carla is upstairs in the annual planning meeting on the third floor and i have approximately one block of uninterrupted time. enough to defend a position nobody invited me to defend. that’s the deal i made with the morning.

here is the part that matters for the next 1,200 words: i am not going to say “dunning” once unless i’m forced to. this whole post is about the people who dropped the first name and kept the second one, and what that omission tells you about how confidence travels through a population. the dunning got lost. the kruger stayed. there is a reason.

1. the kruger effect, intro pulpit: this is about other people, not me

let me be clear about the angle. this is not a confession. this is a list of nine things the kruger effect explains about people who are not me. i am the observer. i sit at the standing desk where i sit. i have frasier on a second tab, muted. i have 47 tabs audit pending from a wip 2022 list i have not closed. none of that is the point. the point is them.

i looked at the science. the science is me, looking at the way people speak in elevators. the part everyone skips when they cite the effect is the first author. they say “kruger” the way they say “murphy’s law” — like the law arrived alone, like there was no second name on the door. that omission is the effect demonstrating itself in real time.

2. items 1-3, the people in your building

1. the neighbour who explains the boiler. he has lived in the building eleven months. you have lived here three years. he explains how the boiler works, his hand on the radiator like a doctor checking a pulse. he is wrong about which valve does what. he is so confident that you nod. that is the kruger effect at apartment-hallway scale. the boiler will be fine. the conversation will not.

2. the coworker who corrects your acronyms. she corrects an acronym that was already correct. she does it in the kitchen, near the kettle, with the volume of someone who has rehearsed it. you do not push back. nobody does. the acronym goes into the next email exactly the way she said it. by the count i keep running, this happened three times last quarter and twice this one.

3. the man at the bar who has read one book. he has read one book. he read it in 2018. he is now ready to discuss any subject adjacent to the book, including subjects the book did not cover. mike, behind the bar, pours and listens. mike has a system for taxes. has not filed since 2019. mike is the calmest man in the room precisely because he has read zero books on the subject and is therefore not tempted to perform.

3. items 4-6, strangers and their strong opinions

4. the airport guy with the connecting flight theory. he has a theory about why his connecting flight is delayed. he explains it to a stranger. the theory involves weather two states away and a union dispute he half-heard on a podcast. the gate agent, who actually knows, is six feet to his left. he does not consult her. he is already mid-sentence with a man who did not ask. that is the effect with carry-on luggage.

5. the parent on the school whatsapp who knows the policy. the parent posts the policy in capital letters. it is not the current policy. it is the policy from two years ago, which was rescinded, which was replaced by a memo nobody read. the parent doubles down when corrected, and then the group chat goes silent. silence is not agreement. silence is the rest of the chat going to dinner.

6. the contractor who quotes you a number with conviction. the contractor quotes a number. the number is precise. the number turns out to be wrong by a factor of two. you remember the precision more than the wrongness, which is the bug in your own brain, not his. confidence formatted as decimals reads as fact. that is the kruger effect with a clipboard.

4. items 7-9, more strangers, larger opinions

7. the influencer with the morning routine. he wakes at 4:47 and shows you the routine. the routine is twelve steps. nine of them require a partner he does not mention. the lighting is north-facing in a city that does not have north-facing apartments at scale. the kruger effect does not invent the lie. the kruger effect is the part where he believes the lie himself, on camera, at scale, monetized.

8. the email signature with three credentials and one typo. the signature has three credentials. one of them is a course. one of them is a designation that lasts forty hours of online seminars. the third is real and the typo is in the third one. you spend two minutes wondering whether to reply about the typo. you do not. the email gets answered as if the credentials were intact, which is the effect doing free labour on his behalf.

9. the taxman, who writes letters in serif font. the taxman writes in a serif font and that, by itself, is the closing argument of the whole post. the taxman sends letters in serif font. the font is the certainty. the certainty is the leverage. you owe him because he wrote it down with little decorative feet on the letters and you wrote your response in a sans-serif because you were apologising before you opened the envelope. the unopened mail pile in the corner is a monument to this. the seventh microwave hummed once during the last letter. these things are connected.

5. closing pulpit, the taxman wrote in serif font, related

the third yoga mat is still under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. it has nothing to do with the kruger effect except as a quiet reminder that confidence to buy is not the same as confidence to use. i bought the mat with kruger-grade certainty. i unrolled it once. i then made it a piece of architecture. that is, by the count i keep running, the only domestic instance i will admit to in this post.

for the related reading, two doors back in this same investigation: the dunning kruger effect definition covers the standard definition with both authors intact. this post is the version where one author got lost and the survivor became a brand. both are useful. one is more honest about the missing name.

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