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We Are All Confident Idiots
An anonymous reader writes: If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell. He's written an article on the "psychology of human wrongness," explaining how confidence in one's answers tends to be high for people who don't know what they're talking about. He says, "What's curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge."
Dunning goes on: "A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don't know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it's grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver's license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot."
Dunning goes on: "A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don't know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it's grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge. College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver's license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot."
He didn't mention /. posters.
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I've never heard about David Dunning nor of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to know.
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Bold, confident one-liners to get that quick +5 but not actually knowing what one is talking about.
You mean I wasn't getting +5 because I was awesome?!
Maybe with lemon juice in his eyes he couldn't see anything, and assumed the picture itself was blurry, rather than his vision?
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the same way us programmers have mental shortcuts that help us get through extremely complex code in a day that would take a novice a month worried over minutea.
that sounds a bit confident. maybe it's too confident. maybe you are succumbing to Dunning-Kruger yourself!
i find after 15 years on the job, i spend a lot more time worrying about the things i'm not thinking of. I was a lot more productive in my youth when i just blindly charged ahead; applying whatever pattern-du-jour to everything.