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."

Comments

Sounds like Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds a lot like many of the +5 insightful comments on Slashdot these days. Bold, confident one-liners to get that quick +5 but not actually knowing what one is talking about...

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[mc6809e]

I was thinking about the press.

There's no way a journalist can crank out story after story unless they're completely unaware that they don't know what they're talking about.

Any doubts in their own understanding would stop dead their fingers on their keyboards.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[__aaclcg7560]

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?!

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[AK Marc]

Only pointed out by the idiots suffering from the effect themselves.

There's nothing that says that confidence implies ignorance. Well, other than the assertions by those suffering from the effect themselves.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[roc97007]

Mod this up! Oh, wait...

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[fustakrakich]

OH I think they're perfectly aware of what they are doing, and it is intentional. They just don't care.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[i kan reed]

Nah, journalists have mental shortcuts that help them get through stories, 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.

I mean, it would be well beyond my knowledge level to actually describe those skills in any depth, and the best I could do is tell you what they teach at the beginning of intro to journalism courses, things like the 7 questions that get you your first two paragraphs or how to describe important figures to those readers unfamiliar with them.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[lgw]

The more you know, the more you're unsure about. Of course, the more you know, the more you're sure about as well, but any sort of deep study perpetually raises more questions than it answers. Further, the deeper you study a subject, the more you realize you have only approximations - good, useful approximations one hopes, but still.

Or, in the words of someone wiser than me, "the larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shore of uncertainty."

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[jeffmflanagan]

Confidence is a big part of being considered awesome. Carry on.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[alvinrod]

Most of them hardly qualify as stories. It's just linking to an actual story (or even more blog spam) from another site and adding their own two cents.

Many of the people who consume the stories don't care about this at all and are mostly just looking for something that validates their world-view, whatever that may be.

Not only is there the natural human tendency to not want to be wrong (even if it means lying to ourselves or others in the process) but it's something that tends to be reinforced entirely too much throughout our lives, and I think that's a bad thing in a certain way. The only way we can actually learn more about the universe is to come to the realization and accept that our understanding of that universe is flawed in some way.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[nine-times]

Well I think the proper behavior for a journalist is to try to be aware of how ignorant they may be, and instead focus on reporting what they've been told by experts-- making it clear that they're reporting what they're being told by experts, and making it clear which expert told them which thing.

For journalists, it's not really their job to be experts. They're reporters, not philosophers. Sometimes they lose sight of that.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[Luckyo]

You appear to misunderstand the entire premise that is being discussed. This is about SELF delusion.

Being able to present your point in a way that would delude others is an entirely different skill.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[Layzej]

Good point. In the article Dunning suggests that you would need to be competent to even recognize incompetence: "Kruger and I published a paper that documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize -- scratch that, cannot recognize -- just how incompetent they are, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: for poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers -- and we are all poor performers at some things -- fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack."

but also that "common sense" provides undue confidence for the uninformed:

"An ignorant mind is precisely not a spotless, empty vessel, but one that's filled with the clutter of irrelevant or misleading life experiences, theories, facts, intuitions, strategies, algorithms, heuristics, metaphors and hunches that regrettably have the look and feel of useful and accurate knowledge. This clutter is an unfortunate by product of one of our greatest strengths as a species. We are unbridled pattern recognizers and profligate theorizers. Often our theories are good enough to get us through the day, or at least to the age when we can procreate."

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[shadowrat]

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.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[Midnight_Falcon]

Eratosthenes pre-dated Columbus by some time...he was not wildly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, but the size of the Atlantic Ocean.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[TapeCutter]

Facts of life #17 - being correct is not enough to motivate others.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[crunchygranola]

Eratosthenes pre-dated Columbus by some time...he was not wildly wrong about the circumference of the Earth, but the size of the Atlantic Ocean.

Columbus was wrong about both. Despite having the correct size of the Earth computed very closely by Eratosthenes (we do not know how closely though since the exact size of this "stadia" is unknown), Columbus still accepted a grossly incorrect figure due to his own (flawed) interpretations of ancient geographers.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[gweihir]

I happen to get quite a few of these. Unfortunately for your thesis, I quite often know what I am talking about. (Apologies for the seeming arrogance, but there is no polite way to say this and of course sometimes I am way off...)

The point of Dunning-Kruger is not that people that think they know what they are talking about are clueless. The point is that the clueless very often think they know what they are talking about. The implication is in the other direction, and the direction is all-important here. Most people (and especially DKE sufferers) often cannot distinguish between equivalence and implication and get things fundamentally wrong as a result.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[gweihir]

Not so much. People tend to perceive emotions in others. If you are very good at self-deception (and many, many people are especially those with power of some kind), you project that and others are far more likely to believe you as well.

You are likely thinking about successful con-artists, but these are rare and it takes considerable skill to be good at that. What makes so many politicians, industry-leaders, officials, police-men, etc. so dangerous, is that they actually believe the nonsense they are telling others. That way, they can convince others without having those difficult-to-master "con" skills, but by projecting genuine emotion.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[penguinoid]

If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell.

Yeah, I'm an expert in the Dunning-Kruger effect, in fact I wrote an entire treatise on it once, which I published on Slashdot. That was the one that discovered that a bunch of elitist snobs on the internet are so full of themselves that they won't listen to their betters, even when we patiently explain to them we're happen to be an expert on that very subject. Anyhow, if you need to know more, don't hesitate to ask me as I know it better than this Dun-something guy, whoever he is.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[kwbauer]

And letters he wrote to family suggest that he did know the truth but chose to lie because he thought the journey was worthwhile but would not get the necessary backing by telling the truth.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[FatdogHaiku]

I will respond to this as soon as I get done fixing the Internet...
BRB.

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[stealth_finger]

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?!

Nope, only because you think you are ;)

Re: Sounds like Slashdot

[MattFatt]

Sounds like G.W. Bush

Re:Sounds like Slashdot

[ebvwfbw]

Journalism isn't a competitive major. Any idiot can get in there. Then, the profs are usually way way leftist and perpetuate even more idiocy. Even back in the early 1980s when I was a student. Wasn't new then, either. Can't fix stupid.

Left one out

[jbmartin6]

He didn't mention /. posters.

Re:Left one out

[eparker05]

Based on my experience, I'm pretty sure yours will be a highly rated comment :)

Re:Left one out

[Jane Q. Public]

The problem here is that Prof. Dunning's principle could apply to anybody, including college professors.

So how does he know he is correct?

---
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." -- Richard Feynman

Re:Left one out

[Austerity Empowers]

Shh, nerd baiting makes the universe explode.

Re:Left one out

[skids]

He is completely confident that his underconfidence is a clear indicator that he knows what he's talking about, obviously.

Re:Left one out

[Jane Q. Public]

To be fair, Dunning makes it clear that his main point isn't that people simply don't know; they're not "ignorant" in the normal sense of the word but actually MISinformed.

Re:Left one out

[jbmartin6]

yours will be a highly rated comment

+1 Accurate

Re:Left one out

[AK Marc]

Confidence increases with ignorance doesn't mean that all confident people are unable to gauge their own abilities.

Re:Left one out

[i kan reed]

How does he know he's correct is a fucking 20 page journal paper and bulky quantities of empirical data. Science has methodology to help test and validate hypotheses. It doesn't mean he's absolutely right about everything, but it is evidence the idea didn't come from nowhere.

Re:Left one out

[lgw]

The problem here is that Prof. Dunning's principle could apply to anybody, including college professors.

  So how does he know he is correct?

It's a good joke, but it's also the key realization that led to the use of double-blind studies. Someone had published a paper to the effect that no human studies could be trusted, because the observer effect would taint the study. It was a really depressing paper until someone pointed out that it was itself based on human studies, and thus the conclusion shouldn't be taken too seriously. More serious contemplation of the problem eventually led to double-blind studies being the norm for serious work.

Re:Left one out

[catchblue22]

The problem here is that Prof. Dunning's principle could apply to anybody, including college professors. So how does he know he is correct? --- "Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." -- Richard Feynman

Are you sure about that?

Re:Left one out

[gweihir]

You get the direction wrong. People with actual skills quite often know they have them. The point is about the insight-less majority of the human race.

And there are really only two cases: 1. He is right and knows it. 2. He is wrong and thinks he is right, making him right again. So (2.) cannot actually happen here. The only valid option would be that he is right and believes to be wrong and hence does not publish. That clearly did not happen.

On the more experimental side, this is exceedingly solidly proven.

Re:Left one out

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'm surprised he didn't cite us in his paper.

Re:Left one out

[i kan reed]

Thank you for that willful misunderstanding of a common phrase. I don't know where I'd be without your insight.

Re:Left one out

[pubwvj]

More recent research shows that over 50% of 'peer reviewed' articles are never peer reviewed, that most studies can't be replicated and that 25% of studies are outright fraud.

Re:Left one out

[Jane Q. Public]

Relax. It was a joke.

Who?

[ArcadeMan]

If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell.

I've never heard about David Dunning nor of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to know.

Re:Who?

[Your.Master]

The Dunning-Kruger effect is exactly what the summary is describing, and I do think it's rather interesting.

I had no idea that Dunning's first name was David, and I wouldn't say I was familiar with him. I also know nothing about Kruger and don't really care to look him up personally.

Re:Who?

[gurps_npc]

Very funny. You just proved the Dunning Kruger effect is true. (The effect simply states that the less you know, the more sure you are.)

Re:Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

You know what's funnier?

Woosh.

Re:Who?

[Austerity Empowers]

You must not work in the corporate world. If you were not a confident idiot before joining, you will be after (or you'll be laid off). The guy who marches in the room with all the answers -> high value employee who knows his job and gets shit done. The guy who has more questions than answers? Incompetent idiot who ratholes meetings and deviates from the issue.

The irony is that usually the second guy is the more knowledgeable person, he knows enough to know he doesn't know shit. Unfortunately as in politics, the person with the snappy answer sets policy.

Re:Who?

[operagost]

Are you confident that's not a jet plane WHOOOOOSHING over your head?

Re:Who?

[ArcadeMan]

A little upcoming game called VoidSpace is supposed to allow in-game DogeCoin trading, so sign up under me and start earning today!

Given that a lot of the articles around here often get a botched/trolling summary, the replies are often more informative so only a fool wouldn't read them. People are what makes Slashdot a place to stick around, not the obvious paid-for bullshit "articles" we get half the time.

Re:Who?

[ArcadeMan]

Hey man, did you know your username is awfully close to "Austin Powers"?

Yeah, baby!

P.S.: we'll see if today's moderators come from the corporate world.

Re: Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or GP was employing comedic irony, but it went over your head with a whooooosh.

Re:Who?

[X0563511]

Whoosh.

Re:Who?

[gweihir]

Probably the most important and yet most-ignored research of the last century. It is basically the full description for all of humanity's serious problems.

Re:Who?

[LessThanObvious]

Yeah, I've been both of those guys at one time or another. I'll admit to falling into the confidence trap. If you think you are a smart person it easy to think you are also better at guessing the right answer. I find it difficult to hold both the idea that I am smart and that guessing is never reliable and often makes one seem stupid. I'm finding this is also a principle flaw in democracy. People vote without doing any research whatsoever on the issues and are very willing to have a firm opinion about things that they know nothing about.

Re:Who?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the price of leadership. You have to make a decision, or propose a course of action for the others to follow. If you present only more questions at an arranged meeting, you end up wasting time and confuse the followers and executioners. The meeting might not stay in it's time box. The right time to ask questions or raise issues is during the preparation of the meeting, which could take anything from minutes to years.

Re:Who?

[Thanshin]

The only thing you need to know is that Mr. Dunning was a complete incompetent. Trust me, I'm good at knowing that kind of things.

Re:Who?

[nukenerd]

If you've ever heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect, you'll be familiar with David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell.

I've never heard about David Dunning nor of the Dunning-Kruger effect, but I'm pretty sure I don't need to know.

If everyone who has heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect is "familiar with David Dunning", then his Christmas card list must be an epic. Why am I not on it then?

Re:Who?

[Thanshin]

The irony is believing that the guy who is more knowledgeable, only asks questions and never accepts any responsibility because "he said during the meeting that there would be problems", is in any way more useful than the guy who gives snappy answers without the knowledge.

At some point a decision has to be made, and raising questions without a plan of what to do for each possible response, is just the non productive self-preservation mechanism of the knowledgeable.

Re:Who?

[Thanshin]

If everyone who has heard of the Dunning-Kruger effect is "familiar with David Dunning", then his Christmas card list must be an epic. Why am I not on it then?

Because you drank too much on David's last Christmas party and you puked on the punch bowl.

Re:Who?

[rastos1]

Was that the sound of salmon flying over his head?

Re:Who?

[riondluz]

"...to just push ahead with whatever seems..."

Which goes a long way to explaining why things are
working so well for us all.

Seriously, systems are as fucked-up as they are
because some "A-types" have to feel able to do anything asked of them; and when it doesn't go as planned, they only need "more $, more manpower".
"let's not dwell on how we got here and focus on the goal(s)"
It's not piss-poor planning, it's tailoring the
plan (its feasibility) to a desired outcome
facts be damned.

WTF? It's all bullshit. It's putting
good ol boys in places that reward failure with
promotions. It's about supressing critical
thinking so as not to temper people's enthusiasm.

It's about trusting that when things don't go
as planned the process will just correct itself.

Yet, the more we come to learn it seems the 'best
and brightest' collectively are over paid and
over credited blowhards whose ego's are their own
worst enemies.

I can only conclude that stated goals are eclipsed
by the unstated ones; basically self-promotion.
For 'them and those like us'. Getting w/the
program, belonging to the group, requires it.

Look at our green machine; a vast ring-knocker
brain-trust that always seems to repeat its
own mistakes from one generation to the next.
COIN failed, CT failed, both never lived up to
expectations, but it sure has enriched a fuckton
of ring-knockers.

I'm concluding that our society's motto is
'get away w/it as long as you can then lie and
spin and hope to outrun the pitchforks if/when
people get wise to the massive theft perpetrated
upon them.

What our 'leaders' are doing 'in our name' will
be our ruination.
Maybe it's just the human condition

Re:Who?

[neurovish]

You must not work in the corporate world. If you were not a confident idiot before joining, you will be after (or you'll be laid off). The guy who marches in the room with all the answers -> high value employee who knows his job and gets shit done. The guy who has more questions than answers? Incompetent idiot who ratholes meetings and deviates from the issue.

The irony is that usually the second guy is the more knowledgeable person, he knows enough to know he doesn't know shit. Unfortunately as in politics, the person with the snappy answer sets policy.

Hence why you need to be a lying sociopath to get ahead. You go into meetings with all of the confidence even though you know you are wrong or not entirely correct. Don't worry though, if anybody finds out, then you can always find a scapegoat.

Ingersoll

[Anonymous Coward]

See Robert Ingersoll from over 100 years ago:

The man who is right is generally modest. Men in the wrong, as a rule, are arrogant; and arrogance is generally in the majority.

— Robert G Ingersoll (@RGIngersoll) August 13, 2014

Re:Ingersoll

[gweihir]

Indeed. The observation is old. Dunning and Kruger merely did a scientifically sound experimental validation. Same as the observation that arrogance and incompetence very often go hand-in-hand. (Reminds me of some IBM consultants I had dealings with recently. The stupid seems to radiate off them. Fortunately, they are now delayed in their project by 2 years, due to one pathetic screw-up after another, while I delivered on time.)

Re:Ingersoll

[pnutjam]

That's nothing. I used to work in small government. I actually got a stupid-burn from sitting next to one guy too long.

He sounds pretty confident in those assetions.

[dbc]

I wonder if that means anything.

Re:He sounds pretty confident in those assetions.

[i kan reed]

Here's the thing that everyone in academia from philosophy to arts to sciences believes that helps shape the reliability of academic study: an argument stands on its own, based on the reasonableness of the ideas and observations that feed into it.

People who are incompetent are going to arrive at several different wrong notions through several different flaws ways of approaching a problem. When arguments are well structured. those flaws can be pointed out, removed, improved on. Eventually, through the application of rigorous methods, you can arrive at a body of knowledge that is relatively competent.

Things like formal logic, the scientific method, experimental standards, these are all things that people can use to help in that process.

Re:He sounds pretty confident in those assetions.

[gweihir]

And another one that gets the direction of the implication wrong....

So in other words...

[drewsup]

A definitive explanation for Beta??

Summary doesn't support headline

[i kan reed]

I know this is petulant and pedantic, but Dunning-Kruger is statistical, and only reflects the naturalness of a lack of detailed introspection.

More over, some people are genuinely competent at things. I want to object to the notion that it's an inescapable human failing, because Dunning and Kruger's research didn't show that. Just a strong overall trend.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[the_skywise]

Do you say that with total confidence?

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[i kan reed]

I don't need total confidence to have a point. I know you're joking, but I don't post on slashdot hoping everyone comes and tells me I'm right.

I post and hope someone comes and tells me I'm wrong in a way that's interesting enough to show me something new.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[i kan reed]

...

That's not what I said at all. The causative mechanism ascribed by Dunning isn't the correlation that exists, but rather an underlying cause: that people who don't understand things lack the meta-cognitive tools to see their error. I think that theory is totally reasonable, and was only objecting to the notion that it has to be universal.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[fermion]

It called the ability to learn. Many people do not have it. There is no issue with making a bold statement, or trying something at which one is not skilled. I find the issue develops when one is confronted with factual content, or alternative perspectives on more squishy subjects, and one still believes that one's own opinion is the only reasonable opinion. A person who can learn and grow is at least able to acknowledge that they might be wrong. For some people it is just maturity, as in the case of college students. For others it is that they apparently genuinely lack what many would call advanced cognitive skills.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[CrimsonAvenger]

More over, some people are genuinely competent at things.

But not at everything.

Everyone has some amount of incompetence in some field. And the smarter (or more competent) they are, the more likely they are to believe that their field of competence extends to other things....

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[Anonymous Coward]

It is mostly like economic discussions. I actually have a clue (having studied it for 15 years). Yet everyone has their pet theory which 'will fix the world' 'if only someone would listen'. Many times they do not realize that their pet theory is worse than what they rail against. Usually they assume everyone is exactly like them or will act perfectly. You point out the flaws and why it does not work with journals and actual studies and they flip the hell out or dismiss it. Because they did not want to actually do any work. They wanted to espouse whatever opinion they had as if it is fact.

That is but one small sample of how internet discussion boards work.

This sums it up very well
http://xkcd.com/386/

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[bluefoxlucid]

This is why deliberate practice, as described by K Anders Ericsson, is so important. Deliberate practice is what makes experts, and summarizes in three simple concepts: goal-oriented behavior; a focus on technique; and constant, immediate feedback.

By deliberate practice, a person is *looking* for their flaws, setting goals to push their competence, and immediately getting burned when they push beyond their abilities. This style of practice aims to draw attention to those behaviors which are incorrect--gaps in knowledge, weakness in skill--so that a person may reconcile these things and improve.

Such practice continuously slims down the level of overconfidence, even as confidence increases. A person is appraised of their shortcomings, but also reduces them, simultaneously becoming more skilled and more aware of the weaknesses in their skill in that area.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[the_skywise]

Think about it. Even for those of us who are smart enough to qualify our answers, we'll STILL say we're right even without a majority of the information needed to make a valid decision because we "know" better because usually, with experience, we're right. (But we're not really, we're just lucky) Sure, there's exceptions like heart surgery and rocket launches where you want to make a "go" decision with close to 100% accuracy as possible (but generally we still don't even get that close) but the great majority of decisions you'll make in life can't be made with that much accuracy. Should I marry this person, should I start this company, should I invest in this company, where should I concentrate my efforts to have a fulfilling life? By natural instinct you HAVE to develop an inner monologue and gut reaction to events and you have to do it without sufficient information to make that decision because you will never have the time or ability to GET that information before the decision must be made.

Don't believe me? How about Colin Powell?
"Use the formula P=40 to 70, in which P stands for the probability of success and the numbers indicate the percentage of information acquired. Once the information is in the 40 to 70 range, go with your gut.”

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[el jocko del oeste]

The actual article provides better support for the headline. Yes, many people are genuinely competent at things. But the author implies that we all have a weak spot somewhere and our own incompetence blinds us to it.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[AK Marc]

(almost) All people are confident. That's human nature. (almost) all people are ignorant. That's human nature. That learning causes a loss of confidence doesn't mean that ignorance causes confidence. So I reject the "causitive mechanism" stated. He's proving the control (the "natural" state), not the experimental case, where someone who is ignorant is confident, and as their knowledge grows, they get less confident. One would presume that there's a turnaround on the other end. It's hard to imagine that the most knowledgeable person on every subject thinks themselves the least knowledgeable.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[Mr D from 63]

I know this is petulant and pedantic, but Dunning-Kruger is statistical, and only reflects the naturalness of a lack of detailed introspection.

More over, some people are genuinely competent at things. I want to object to the notion that it's an inescapable human failing, because Dunning and Kruger's research didn't show that. Just a strong overall trend.

I think it stands to reason that those who don't know the details or have a depth of understanding on a subject can oversimplify things and believe the basis or solutions are simpler than they really are. I see this a lot in discussion of technical issues on /., where some can gloss over all the complications they are not aware of and propose solutions that seem quite logical when the underlying details are not considered . But, as you pointed out, one can understand the depths of a subject and have confidence in their answer as well. The better you know a topic, the better you know your limits within that topic as well.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[dgatwood]

And the smarter (or more competent) they are, the more likely they are to believe that their field of competence extends to other things....

The smarter they are, the more likely they are to have read enough about those other things to be somewhat competent at them, so at least to some degree, they are probably correct in that belief, at least by comparison with a person picked at random from outside the field in question.

There are certain personality types that seem to exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect more than others. I've known plenty of people who act like they know way more than they do, and in my experience, most of them also don't like to be corrected when they are wrong, and will vigorously defend their incorrect beliefs even when presented with incontrovertible evidence that they are factually wrong. They tend to use ad hominem attacks at staggering rates, and they refuse to adapt their world view to accommodate new knowledge. Basically, these people stopped learning at some point in their lives because they cling so rigidly to a very limited world view. This dogmatism makes them feel confident, likely because they lack actual confidence, and make up for that lack with false bravado.

Those of us who are driven primarily by a quest for knowledge and understanding, by contrast, usually behave confidently when we're confident, and when we aren't, we take the time to learn enough to become confident. And when proven wrong, we incorporate the conflicting information into our world view, and try to figure out why it conflicts with our expectations. After all, knowing that a fact is incorrect is irrelevant without understanding why it is incorrect. Otherwise, your entire world view eventually becomes a collection of discrete facts with no unifying understanding, and you'll be left guessing which facts matter in which situation.

That said, this is just my personal experience, and it could easily be skewed by the sorts of people that I interact with. So I could be wrong; feel free to prove me wrong, but if you do, be prepared to provide factual support, or I will usually counter your arguments with factual support of my own. :-)

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[quantaman]

I know this is petulant and pedantic, but Dunning-Kruger is statistical, and only reflects the naturalness of a lack of detailed introspection.

More over, some people are genuinely competent at things. I want to object to the notion that it's an inescapable human failing, because Dunning and Kruger's research didn't show that. Just a strong overall trend.

I wouldn't call it pedantic. Whether all people are major victims of this phenomena, or merely a substantial portion of people, is a critical distinction.

Personally I think I'm relatively good at professing my lack of expertise and/or confidence in areas in which I have low competence.

Unfortunately a person suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect would think the exact same thing.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[jeffmflanagan]

>Everyone has some amount of incompetence in some field.

Correct. A great example of this is neurosurgeon Ben Carson. He's considered to be very capable in his field, but has internalized common Conservative beliefs like creationism, which usually only the least capable of us fall for.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[the_skywise]

Heh... poker much?

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[AK Marc]

Have you ever had kids? Nothing like watching a 4 year old jump off a platform 4x their height, with no fear. Confident until proven otherwise. Only when they learn they have limitations do they believe they have them.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[wrook]

Dunning-Kruger, no matter that it doesn't predict the competence of a person based on their confidence, has significant consequences. For example, take a large group of people. Note that their competence in some field is a random variable with probably a gamma distribution. In other words, most people are around average competence and as you move into higher competence, there are considerably less people. Now allow those people to self organize and choose leaders. To make things simple, lets split everything up into groups of 10 people. 10% are leaders. They are chosen for their self confidence and outgoing nature.

Interestingly, this will favour the less competent people, because they will be more confident. In fact, because most people are grouped around the middle, it will be difficult for them to distinguish competent from incompetent. This could make the incompetent candidates very much more successful. Now consider a second round. We are going to take 10% of the leaders and make them super leaders. They will be chosen by their peers based on their self confidence and outgoing nature. But now most of the people making the decisions are of lower competence. This will favour the incompetent even more.

This is the beginning of a "talent inversion". Incompetent, but confident people rise to the top while competent, but cautious people stay at the bottom. Now imagine the politics that will evolve from this very simple starting point. Every time an incompetent senior person asks for the impossible, an incompetent junior person confidently strides up and promises results. Because they are both incompetent, they can happily fail, but convince themselves that they have actually succeeded. If you have ever worked in a big company, then you probably don't have to imagine.

In other words, because of Dunning-Kruger life is unlikely to be a meritocracy. There are clear advantages to being competent, but one should not overlook the network effect of a group of confident, but incompetent people. Understanding that *you must deal with these people to ensure success* is key. In my career, I have found that borrowing some confidence from an "incompetent" co-worker, while lending some of my "competence" has been very successful. In fact, it is so useful to me that I have redefined my definition of competence. In truth, I was never very successful until I learned to look at things from other perspectives. No matter how right you are, if you can't act on it, it doesn't make much difference. And even if you are very wrong, acting often wins the day.

It's a bitter pill to swallow for someone whose ego is bound up in their competence. But life is not fair.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[gweihir]

It is strong enough that it is a reasonable single-case estimator. However you need to get the implication direction right: The statement is that "stupid people are confident", not that confident people are stupid. Confident people are a mix of the competent and the utterly incompetent, with the former a smaller minority.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[grcumb]

Heh... poker much?

Poker?!? I hardly even know 'er!

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[nukenerd]

Those of us who are driven primarily by a quest for knowledge and understanding, by contrast, usually behave confidently when we're confident, and when we aren't, we take the time to learn enough to become confident.

I was agreeing with you (you seemed to be describing my Brother-in-Law) until then. I am confident that I am capable about things in my own field(s) but I gather that I do not show it. People have to know me well (like the guys I work with) before they realise that. I also have a strong drive to increase my knowledge.

But thinking you can "take the time to learn" about areas in which we do not have the confidence/knowledge is a delusion. The totality of knowledge is vast*. I know nothing about music, and as a teen I decided it could stay that way (having seen how music can eat up some people's lives). You will never see me express an opinion about music.

* Confident new graduate : "I would estimate that I know 10% of all knowledge."
Wise old man : "OK, tell me what 10% of the World's population did yesterday."

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[nukenerd]

What a co-incidence - you are describing where I work! Who are you?

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[dinfinity]

Interestingly, this will favour the less competent people, because they will be more confident.

This, and most of your post has nothing to do with the Dunning-Kruger-effect. The effect does not state that the incompetent are more confident than the competent, just that they are more confident than they should be.

Your conjecture is based on the notion that competence and introversion go together in certain fields: "Incompetent, but confident people rise to the top while competent, but cautious people stay at the bottom." (notice the sudden addition of 'cautious' as somehow being inherent to competent people)

Although there is merit in it, again: it has nothing to do with the Dunning-Kruger-effect.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[Gestahl]

* Confident new graduate : "I would estimate that I know 10% of all knowledge." Wise old man : "OK, tell me what 10% of the World's population did yesterday." Smartass: "They survived one more day."

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[i kan reed]

Agency is arbitrary in meaning anyways. I don't have any trouble swallowing that pill.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[dgatwood]

But thinking you can "take the time to learn" about areas in which we do not have the confidence/knowledge is a delusion. The totality of knowledge is vast*. I know nothing about music, and as a teen I decided it could stay that way (having seen how music can eat up some people's lives). You will never see me express an opinion about music.

By contrast, I spent a significant chunk of my life in musical ensembles, and now routinely make snarky comments on Facebook about judging musical works based on the average number of measures per serious error made by the composer (or for sacred choral music, vice-versa, horrifyingly), interspersed with comments about XML parsers, obscure bits of the EPUB specification, and USB device quirks. But I digress.

I think we're actually pretty much in agreement here. I'm not saying that I think I could feasibly have enough knowledge to have an answer for everything, but rather that if I feel the need to have an opinion on something, I'll learn enough to not come out looking like a complete idiot. And I'll be reasonably confident that I'm right because I learned enough to form an opinion based on actual facts, with references to back those opinions up. I might still be proven wrong if I overlooked some subtlety, but I'll be right way more often than not. Much like you, if I don't know enough to state something with... let's say 90% confidence or better, I generally won't say anything at all, or at best, will express it in a way that makes it clear that I'm not confident about it, and that I'd like folks to discuss it openly.

Of course, this occasionally leads me down a rabbit hole, where I'm curious enough to form an opinion about something, and end up burning hours doing research, digging into statistics, etc., only to conclude that it really wasn't as interesting as it initially seemed, but that's the price of critical thinking, I suppose.

Re:Summary doesn't support headline

[NoOneInParticular]

Yes, I have a kid. Mortally afraid to jump off a platform a quarter her height. No, overconfidence is not innate.

Well that explains...

[meerling]

Politicians...

Re:Well that explains...

[BringsApples]

Politicians actually don't have any of their own confidence, they take yours. That's the whole schtick to politics these days: Gain The People's Confidence. They each know how full of shit they are, and more importantly, they know how full of shit you are.

Re:Well that explains...

[fustakrakich]

Wrong, sir. Politicians are perfectly competent at what they were hired to do. The people who finance them are very pleased. And it shows in the reelection rates. They are not idiots by a long shot, not the winners anyway. Now, the voters, there you might have a point.

Re:Well that explains...

[radarskiy]

...and Slashdot commenters talking about politicians.

Re:Well that explains...

[Beck_Neard]

It explains everyone. Society rewards confidence, even if that confidence is wrong. It does not reward ability at all, at least not directly.

If you know something and are confident in it, people listen.
If you don't know something but are confident in it, people listen.
If you know something but aren't confident in it, people won't listen.
If you don't know something and aren't confident in it, people won't listen.

The only exception to this is when you have been wrong so many times that people gradually stop taking your confidence at face value. But you can still rile up support again through a few sound-bites and appeals to the lowest common denominator. After all, we all know that the ability to come up with a witty one-liner on the spot demonstrates intelligence and wit.

People are dumb (myself included).

Well, sure.

[fahrbot-bot]

"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."

The truthiness of that seems pretty solid.

Seems consistent

[Dega704]

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand Russell

Re:Seems consistent

[Anonymous Coward]

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.
-Plato

Re:Seems consistent

[grcumb]

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something. -Plato

But ACs still haven't learned to just fucking google clever aphorisms before they post them.

HINT: Plato didn't speak English, so the likelihood of him coming up with a cute turn of phrase like that in Classical Greek, and then having it translate to something so erudite in English is... small.

Re:Seems consistent

[UnderCoverPenguin]

HINT: Plato didn't speak English, so the likelihood of him coming up with a cute turn of phrase like that in Classical Greek, and then having it translate to something so erudite in English is... small.

Translated literally, I agree that something said/written by the Plato of ancient Greek fame would not be so erudite in English.

I once could read ancient Latin, which was heavily influenced by ancient Greek. To anyone who had not learned to read ancient Latin, a literal translation of stories (and other documents) written in the Latin of that era would be difficult to read. An easily readable "translation" is often actually a kind of collaboration between the original author and the translator (even when the original author is not involved in the translation, as would be the case when said author is dead).

So, if the ancient Plato actually said/wrote a phrase like that, the often quoted English version would have gotten its English erudicity from the translator.

Re:Seems consistent

[grcumb]

If I'm not mistaking, that quote is from part-time philologist Jim (Massy) Plato who is still busy philosophizing while fishing the Alaskan gulf for dungeoness crab when he's not seriously pondering life's shortcomings from underneath his barstool.

Touché...

... And the image of a dungeoness crab will remain with me till my dying day.

Dungeness crab, on the other hand, tend to disappear from my table in moments.

Re:Seems consistent

[NewYork]

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

And knowing is half the battle.

[cadience]

Makes sense. The more you know, the more you know you that you don't know.

Re:And knowing is half the battle.

[riverat1]

Exactly, when I was 18-20 I thought I knew everything. Then I started learning how much I didn't know.

Re:And knowing is half the battle.

[LessThanObvious]

"The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, as lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras."

Now that's funny.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

And that's what's wrong today

[Opportunist]

People who know their stuff also know just how little they really know, and they tend to be cautious with their answers. People who don't, but know just enough to THINK they know a lot lack that inhibition. And they won't hesitate to use this to assert they know a lot. This in turn will be seen as determination and having a vision by management and now take a wild guess who will be in charge of making all the important decisions.

And sometimes I can't help but wonder if knowing too much is actually keeping people from climbing the corporate ladder. It seems, the less you know, the higher your chance that you'll end up at the C-Level.

Re:And that's what's wrong today

[Kjella]

And sometimes I can't help but wonder if knowing too much is actually keeping people from climbing the corporate ladder. It seems, the less you know, the higher your chance that you'll end up at the C-Level.

Well yes, it's the people who found out they could delegate the job to others. Perhaps more importantly, it's the people who wanted to delegate the job to others. If you want to give them credit, maybe they're the ones who realized they weren't the best man for those nitty-gritty details and didn't want to take a deep dive into it. Engineers want to pick it apart and find out how it works, managers want to stack them and build a tower. I clearly prefer being a technical expert, if I'm "leading" someone it's because I'm teaching them and training them. I don't want to be the cat herder of people who know more than me, I'd get way too interested in doing their job instead of mine.

Re:And that's what's wrong today

[AthanasiusKircher]

And sometimes I can't help but wonder if knowing too much is actually keeping people from climbing the corporate ladder. It seems, the less you know, the higher your chance that you'll end up at the C-Level.

I'm pretty sure I remember reading a study some years back about average IQ vs. salary. (Given the thread I'm discussing this in, I'm hesitant to say I'm sure of anything.) Anyhow, the conclusion was that people who made the big money in business tend not to be the smartest -- they tend to be somewhat above average, but not more than a standard deviation or two. Those results make some intuitive sense, given not only the parent's argument about ignorance, but also the fact that the people who possess rare intelligence often also end up with weird and eclectic interests, which means they often may be driven by some more esoteric obsession than the simple accumulation of wealth.

But perhaps I'm just rationalizing, as TFA says.

Anyhow, I would also agree with the parent to some extent because I think our current corporate culture specifically REQUIRES a certain level of ignorance to produce the results that many businesses want. There are very few corporations satisfied to be relatively "stable" from year-to-year. Growth, expansion, innovation, etc. are the normal desired features, even in businesses where basic methods don't change very fast.

The most rational choice -- and probably the one adopted by intelligent, informed people -- would be one that probably approximates the average growth rate of the economy as a whole. For example, it's like the "invest in index funds" strategy -- from a rational, informed perspective, it's probably the course most likely to keep your investments stable.

But lots of people are convinced that they have a strategy that will beat the market. Similarly, lots of people in mid-level management think they have a plan for a business that will involve risky choices to get ahead of competition, to expand at a great rate, etc.

Obviously there will be a few people who actually ARE smart enough to figure out a strategy that's likely to beat the average. But there are probably 10 times as many people who THINK they can beat the average, but they're deluded.

The problem is that if you gather enough such people together, a few of them are bound to have a string of "hits" just by chance. And those people tend to get promoted in our current corporate culture, because they apparently produce "results" which are far ahead of what the rational, informed, safer course would be... even if their "hits" were just a string of luck.

And once you reach a certain level of management and size of business, even really bad decisions won't sink your career. For one thing, you increasingly rely on delegating those decisions to underlings who will take the fall unless a true disaster happens where they call for the head of the CEO. Instead of promoting the risky decisions yourself, you are in change of promoting the people who will do it, and some will get lucky... just like you did. And if you have a string of luck, you become a "great CEO." If you fail miserably (as is just as likely with chance), you take your golden parachute and retire.

Basically, this is bound to be a case in a system where we promote people based on the idea that they will be overly aggressive and make strong decisions outside the norm, expecting results outside the norm. We're essentially demanding a level of exceptionalism that will tend to favor promotion on the basis of chance success (since few people have the skills to actually succeed that way due to skill). The demand for those sort of people will always exceed their supply -- which means lots of people will just get promoted for having a string of positive results outside the norm... even if it's the blind luck of someone who's too ignorant to choose a more rational and safer course.

Re:And that's what's wrong today

[31eq]

I'm distracted from the whole argument by this idea that two standard deviations above the mean isn't that great. In fact, it puts you well within the top 4% of the population (assuming a gaussian distribution). Is that how smart they are or how smart they think they are?

Re:And that's what's wrong today

[Opportunist]

For me it's every time I have to sit in a meeting.

Actually it makes a certain amount of sense

[the_skywise]

Incompetence generally isn't fatal in today's society.

So long as you can back it up with deflection ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM") which is a basic two year old skill ("I didna take da cookie!") you're not going to lose your position until you reach the level of GROSS incompetence and maybe not even then.

The real problem is when you have skilled people who make mistakes, KNOW they make mistakes and qualify their answers because they know they may not be right. They're overridden by these same people that never accept failure but still give the wrong answers.

Re:Actually it makes a certain amount of sense

[ic3m4n1]

That way skilled people making mistakes are even more susceptible to being ignored because they may feel responsible knowing their mistakes and try to take blame themselves. Further allowing incompetents to get away from responsibility of their actions.

Interesting group theory.

Re:You will not succeed,

[sexconker]

If you do not try, and do not prepare for failure.

Because in preparing for failure, you conceive of how the plan could fail, and from that, accurately gauge the project cost.

Wrong.
Plenty of "successful" people have never planned or tried - they were born into success and were never allowed to fail with consequence.

This is merely proof of the old adage:

[DontBlameCanada]

"He knows just enough to be dangerous."

Most sw/dev managers I know fall in this category.

Re:This is merely proof of the old adage:

[R3d M3rcury]

I was thinking of: "All things are easy to those who don't have to do them."

Not a new idea

[Translation Error]

"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" - Charles Darwin

Re:Not a new idea

[StripedCow]

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."
        -- Bertrand Russell

Isn't it a relection of desired outcome?

[evanh]

The projected confidence is a learned behaviour I suspect. One learns to effect change through convincing others to do their bidding.

So, its a misunderstanding that most idiots are even looking to give a "correct" answer but rather are caring more about personal status and influence.

Give Credit Where Credit is Due

[njnnja]

Slashdotter geekoid has been on top of this for as long as I have left .sigs on

Re:Give Credit Where Credit is Due

[Anonymous Coward]

"I know that I know nothing" - Socrates
(if you really want to give credit - though it seems a bit dated to qualify as "news"...)

Re:Give Credit Where Credit is Due

[digsbo]

Nah. He's been referring to Kruger-Dunning. Different thing entirely.

I'm I smart? I guess I'll never know.

[DumbSwede]

When I was a child I use to fret to myself if I was stupid would I be smart enough to know I was stupid. At the age of 56 this thought still comes back to me, but now as when my mental decline starts will I realize it?

One can get into a loop thinking about these things, as the converse is that people that worry they don’t measure up, typically more than measure up. So if I think I’m below average does that make me about average, then the second I think I might be above average, boom I might be below average again :-)

Actually I do think I’m above average in many area’s as evidenced by various testing measures, but I probably over estimate my knowledge in non-technical areas, just as the study suggests. That said I typically stand back aghast at today’s Republican conservatives – I may be wrong, but in general they seem mean and – yes I’ll say it – bigoted. Of course that could just be Dunning-Kruger blinding me to the brilliance of the current Republican vision.

Re:I'm I smart? I guess I'll never know.

[dgatwood]

Of course that could just be Dunning-Kruger blinding me to the brilliance of the current Republican vision.

Quite the opposite. The Dunning-Kruger effect exhibited by those candidates blinds people to their general ignorance and lack of knowledge of even relatively recent history, economics, technology, or really much of anything as far as I can tell. They campaign on a few wedge issues that they know they'll never actually make progress on (e.g. abortion), while showing utter incompetence at everything they touch.

Mind you, the Democrats aren't all that great, either. Given free reign, they tend to spend more and more money on social programs without critically evaluating whether those programs work, raise taxes to pay for it, and end up just making a mess of things.

Economically, what we need is a group of people who are true fiscal conservatives. That means people who are careful about spending money and who constantly reevaluate programs to ensure that the money is being used effectively (which the Democrats fail at). That also means people who know not to spend huge amounts of money on credit, hoping that economic expansion will "fix" their crippling debt (which the Republicans fail at). That means not pumping money into their cronies' businesses (which both parties fail at, just with different cronies). That means setting up tax systems that don't favor the wealthy with lower tax rates under a false belief that this will create jobs (which the Republicans fail at), and that don't overly burden small businesses that create jobs (which the Democrats fail at). And it also means creating an environment that favors competition while disrupting monopolies (which the Republicans badly fail at, and the Democrats also often fail at).

From there, we need people who defend liberty and civil rights, and who stand up for those who are powerless. Both Democrats and Republicans suck at that, just in different ways. Both parties attack the fourth amendment. Republicans and some Democrats (e.g. Hillary Clinton) attack the free speech aspects of the first. Republicans vigorously defend freedom of religion, but only for Christian religions. Democrats attack the second amendment. And neither party respects the remaining amendments very much, with the exception of the third (which nobody cares much about).

Re:I'm I smart? I guess I'll never know.

[phantomfive]

That said I typically stand back aghast at today’s Republican conservatives – I may be wrong, but in general they seem mean and – yes I’ll say it – bigoted. Of course that could just be Dunning-Kruger blinding me to the brilliance of the current Republican vision.

The question you should ask is whether you think the Democratic vision is amazing. Finding problems with one party is hardly original.

Re:I'm I smart? I guess I'll never know.

[31415926535897]

That said I typically stand back aghast at today’s Republican conservatives – I may be wrong, but in general they seem mean and – yes I’ll say it – bigoted. Of course that could just be Dunning-Kruger blinding me to the brilliance of the current Republican vision.

I agree with you, but I also think the following is true too: :%s/Republican\|conservative/\={'Republican':'Democrat','conservative':'liberal'}[submatch(0)]/g;

Re:I'm I smart? I guess I'll never know.

[rasmusbr]

According to TFA these studies actually show that the top performers, say the top 2%, on a given task accurately rate themselves as top performers. The surprising thing is that the bottom 2% also rate themselves as top performers.

One possible explanation is that the very worst performers on a given task are people who are actively stupid in a way. These people have strongly held false beliefs about how things work, which actively mislead them. They are also confident enough that they don't acquire feedback and therefore it never dawns on them how wrong they are.

When you think about it, it is actually possible to do worse than chance of a multiple choice test if you have strongly held false beliefs. Someone who merely guesses will tend to get 1/m questions right where m is the number of alternatives. Someone who has a false sense of knowledge could easily get zero questions right.

Darrell Issa is a perfect example

[cat_jesus]

In Hearing, GOP Chairman Issa Misnames African Country, Repeatedly Mispronounces ‘Ebola’

Issa also thinks he knows more about ebola than doctors at the CDC

Idiocracy is happening.

Re:Darrell Issa is a perfect example

[jeffmflanagan]

I'm pretty sure Issa knows he's a sleazy clown who is voted into office by people who are as bad as he is.

Re:Darrell Issa is a perfect example

[thomst]

cat_jesus noted:

In Hearing, GOP Chairman Issa Misnames African Country, Repeatedly Mispronounces ‘Ebola’ Issa also thinks he knows more about ebola than doctors at the CDC.

Darryl Issa is an intelligent guy. He's also a well-educated guy.

Unfortunately, he's also a grandstanding, profoundly partisan hack who doesn't give a damn about facts, because he represents a redder-than-red district, so he only cares about getting more face time on Faux News ...

Not so smart after all.

[DumbSwede]

Should be titled: Am I smart? I guess I'll never know.
Answer seems clear now :-)

You forgot half the effect...

[yorgo]

Each time I see someone mention the D-K effect, they focus only on the first manifestation: unskilled individuals tend to suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate.

But, there is an equal-but-opposite manifestation, as well: highly skilled individuals tend to rate their ability lower than is accurate.

Why is this one typically ignored?

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[riverat1]

The effects of thinking you have more ability than you have are usually considerably more spectacular underestimating your ability.

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[Pfhorrest]

Maybe because there are fewer highly skilled individuals than there are mediocre ones... although, now that I think about it, there are also fewer terrible unskilled individuals than there are mediocre ones, assuming a normal distribution.

That raises an interesting question. Confidence decreases with competence (so dumb people think they're smart and smart people think they're dumb), but where do the two curves intersect? At what level of competence do people statistically have accurate confidence? I'd venture a guess that that point is beyond the median competence level, in which case, the domain where confidence exceeds competence would be larger than the domain where competence exceeds confidence: we'd have a lot more overconfident idiots than we would underconfident geniuses. So of course the overconfident idiots would be the more notable consequence of the D-K effect, and the underconfident geniuses would be more-often neglected.

I would like to see some kind of study involving confidence in light of knowledge of the D-K effect and both subjective and objective third-party competency assessments.

When I was a kid, I initially thought I was of average intelligence, and just surrounded by idiots (who I assumed must all be below average, not understanding back then how averages work). But then over years of teachers and such telling me that I scored far above average on all objective competency tests, I adjusted my perception and realized that all of the "idiots" were in fact just average people, and I was the unusual one, above average. By college and throughout college, I had internalized that enough that I no longer thought of average people as "idiots" at all; they were just ordinary people with their ordinary intellectual difficulties that I was fortunate not to be burdened with. After college however, meeting with prolonged failure at endeavors outside academics, I began to perceive myself as in fact below average, and questioned the objectivity of the competency tests from my youth (or rather, questioned whether they tested actual competency rather than just some useless test-taking ability). But in the years since then, friends and colleagues and even employers continue to tell me in their subjective opinion how above average I am. And still I sometimes looks at others struggling to understand things that seem so simple and easy to me, not things I have more experience with but just things that seem like they would be obvious to any newcomer.

So now I have no idea what to think about my own competency. I have contradictory "gut feelings" both that others seem dumb for not seeing things that are so obvious, and that I must be dumb for failing at things that so many others are succeeding at. I then doubt both of those feelings due to knowledge of the D-K effect; maybe I feel smarter than others because I don't even know how dumb I am, and maybe I feel like I'm failing only because I see how much more room for success there is. On the whole, weighing those two against each other, my reflexive (self-referential) gut feeling is that I probably just think other people are dumb because I'm too dumb to even know what smart is, and that that's probably why I'm failing at things so many others are succeeding at. But then I remember all those objective competency tests claiming I'm far above average, and how everybody else's subjective assessment of me is that I am above average too, and I wonder again if maybe I only think I'm a failure because I'm aware of how much better I could be doing?

And when I look at objective measures of success, I see that I am doing about as well as average, and wonder, do all the conflicting factors cancel out and I'm really just average in the end? Except then, there are conflicting factors about whether I am doing as well as average too; everyone I personally know in meatspace thinks I'm doing phenomenally well, way better than average, but the normative standard I see in the media and hear people talk about on the internet seems almost u

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[gweihir]

Simple: It applies to far, far fewer people. There are not that many highly capable individuals around.

The other thing is that it is not as pronounced a problem. If, say, your brain surgeon is reasonably confident he can fix your problem and has a good reputation, that is good enough to trust him. If he is a total quack and is absolutely sure he can fix your problem, that tends to have unfortunate consequences.

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[Anonymous Coward]

Culturally we love to attack hubris. We put people on pedestals, be they celebrity or politician or otherwise, just so we can knock them off of it.

Highly competent people are boring. They do what they do and things get done just the same as the sun rises every day. That lack of interest is compounded by them being of lower confidence. It is perceived, and likely is to some extent, humble.

Oh how completely dull it is to see someone of skill that is also of quality character. Give us confident idiots and we all turn our attention to enjoy the show.

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[yorgo]

You know that feeling you get when you read a Dilbert cartoon and think it was specifically written about you (or your workplace)? That's the feeling I got reading your post.

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[Pfhorrest]

Glad to hear I'm not alone. :-)

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[TranquilVoid]

Firstly, it's an impressively mature outlook to think of yourself as fortunate for being intelligent rather than being angry at the majority for being 'idiots'.

Secondly, success within a species as social as humans depends on a lot more than individual intelligence (tests are typically very individual). A lot of success comes from relational ability and if you are below average in this then it can hamper the use of your intellectual abilities. Compounding this, low relational ability doesn't seem correlated with a low need for relationships. Another factor is that the majority will create structures than benefit average people and, if you are exceptionally intelligent or dumb, will not be able to make full use of them.

Re:You forgot half the effect...

[Pfhorrest]

Thank you for the compliment about maturity. Reflecting on it made me realize something: even before I started to think of myself as maybe below average due to my prolonged post-collegiate failures, I was noticing something that I admired in the people "less smart" than me, something that I just now realized, in retrospect, was the very skill I had to learn to begin to overcome those failures. I usually didn't really study for my classes, I just listened in lecture and sometimes did the reading, and somehow absorbed the material, which was easy for me. I didn't really understand what "studying" involved, how to even do it if I needed to do it. Either something made sense to me, and then it was easy and I was good at it, or it didn't make sense to me, and I didn't even know where to begin trying to make sense of it, it was intractably hard and I was terrible at it so I gave up and did something else that made more sense. But I saw fellow classmates to whom nothing we were studying made initial sense, but they somehow... did something, I wasn't sure what... and came out the other end of it having some competency at a thing that they didn't just "grok". I found that impressive because it looked really really hard and unpleasant and I was really glad that I didn't have to do it to succeed... in school.

After school, I eventually found myself at a place in life where every single option to move forward in life was something that didn't just make initial sense to me. Everything was something hard that I sucked at and I didn't even know where to begin trying. It took years but I eventually figured out how to tackle problems-I-don't-know-how-to-tackle. I'm still not sure how to put in words what exactly it is that I learned, and that's frustrating to realize. I'm still absolutely terrified to be put in a position where I'm responsible for doing something I don't already know how to do thoroughly, but somehow I'm now able to "fake it till I make it", to just start doing something, even if it might not be the right thing, and then rely on feedback from that process to refine what I do, until eventually I do know what I'm doing. But it still scares the shit out of me; I just feel like screaming "I don't know how to do this! Don't rely on me, I have no idea what I'm doing!" except I have to be someone people can rely on or else I'm useless to anyone, and as success in adult life hinges entirely upon being useful to other people, I have to keep my mouth shut and just figure it out anyway.

I wonder if that's related to the D-K effect at all; I am acutely aware of exactly what I don't know, and I know I wouldn't want to rely on someone with that dearth of knowledge to do this, so I feel like I shouldn't allow anyone else to rely on me, except I have to, both to survive and to ever have any opportunity to become more reliable. (As a side-effect, I'm also now realizing how many supposed experts I rely on, from construction people to auto mechanics to even doctors, are all just as unreliable at their jobs as I am at my job, and that's kind of frightening and at times infuriating, when the whole reason I'm paying someone to do something is because they're supposed to be better at it than me, but a not-even-amateur like me can still find faults in their work, faults which they acknowledge once pointed out, but wouldn't have spotted without me).

Anyway, good point about relational ability being important to success as well. I would say that I do actually have a low intrinsic need for relationships —I'm generally very happy being alone, and try to structure my life in a way that I'm not in anyone else's business and they're not in mine —but when I set my mind to it I do seem to have high relational ability. When I first went off to college, after doing independent study throughout high school and consequently not having much social contact at all, that in turn after being the unpopular weird nerd throughout elementary school, I decided that I was going to make a concerted effort to h

Oh oh

[Tablizer]

"Professor Dunning is quite confident in the results of the study." (Paraphrased...sorta)

Re:Oh oh

[gweihir]

Fail. Wrong implication direction.

But I *am* the best!

[Tablizer]

I know I can out-troll anybody. Watch this!...

The man that inspired this: McArthur Wheeler

[uolamer]

"The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, as lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras." - Wikipedia

In 1995 McArthur Wheeler actually tested this beforehand with a camera. One way or another his test proved he was invisible, at least to himself.... (lens cap maybe? bad film? somehow didn't get himself in frame when taking the picture?).. He robbed two banks in plain daylight. Later was showed the CCTV footage and still didn't understand how it captured his face..

I read about this a few months ago and just found this to be one of the funniest things. Imagine doing something so stupid a whole psychological theory was inspired.

Re:The man that inspired this: McArthur Wheeler

[Quirkz]

Maybe with lemon juice in his eyes he couldn't see anything, and assumed the picture itself was blurry, rather than his vision?

Re:The man that inspired this: McArthur Wheeler

[uolamer]

Find your own citation out of these 5,780 results

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=%22McArth...

And thus...

[roc97007]

...management was born.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

And we seem to enjoy watching it

[ArhcAngel]

High profile examples of this personified:
Homer Simpson
Peter Griffin
Sheldon Cooper
And society will follow a confident idiot off a cliff before they will follow an unsure genius anywhere.

I was just talking about this with my wife...

[weiserfireman]

She asked me, "how do you know you are a good computer technician"

Me, "because I know how little I really know. When I was a good amateur, I thought I knew a lot, and was confident, but now, I know so much more that I know what I don't know. That makes me a good technician."

She was confused, but I now I know there there is a scientific name for what I was trying to explain.

Re:I was just talking about this with my wife...

[Anonymous Coward]

My old boss is convinced that he is a top notch computer technician.

He told one customer that Apple changed from PowerPC to Intel because "the industry" got together and told Apple if they didn't change, then they were going to build a new internet just for Apple.

He told another that Apple and Linux were incredibly popular, but the numbers of users were falling because they were ending up in jail for jealously writing viruses to attack Windows.

Once, I had installed a high-end power hungry video card with the two input (parallel) power adapter as instructed by the manual. He saw it, and shouted at me, unplugged it, and explained that if I'd burned it out by doubling the voltage I'd be paying for it, and I was lucky that I didn't.

Then there was the time that he told our contractor electrical engineer that someone had wired the school up but... I forget what, I think he said the electrician had wired it up but inverted the phase of the power, and that caused a couple of power supplies to pop.

Whatever the case, the engineer later said to me that if the wiring had been done the way my boss claimed, the local substation would have been inserious trouble.

But my old boss is definitely a "genious," and has had more than 10 years experience as a computer technician. (I wouldn't trust him to insert RAM sticks.)

Re:I was just talking about this with my wife...

[gweihir]

Indeed. Knowing your limitations both allows you to act competently, and to know when you need to overcome some of that limitations. If you do not know, you just end up breaking it.

Re:I was just talking about this with my wife...

[gweihir]

Prime example you have there. And one fundamentally unable to learn, as he already "knows" everything. Unfortunately, the world has become far too safe a place for these morons to get themselves killed in a timely fashion.

Re:I was just talking about this with my wife...

[TeknoHog]

But my old boss is definitely a "genious," and has had more than 10 years experience as a computer technician. (I wouldn't trust him to insert RAM sticks.)

That's why they are called "ram" -- you don't insert the sticks, you ram sticks.

I remeber

[obarthelemy]

getting a lot of flack in high school for answering "I don't know" to a lot of stuff. And not just from teachers ^^

Intelligence is..

[Rinikusu]

Intelligence is knowing that everyone around you is full of shit.
Wisdom is knowing you are, too.

Re:Intelligence is..

[gweihir]

If you have wisdom, you can also start doing something about _your_ problem and overcome it. Sadly, most human beings never reach that point.

Re:Intelligence is..

[LQ]

Intelligence is knowing that everyone around you is full of shit. Wisdom is knowing you are, too.

The flip-side is imposter syndrome where you live in fear of being found out as an idiot. You wonder how long you can keep on winging it doing your well paid job when you know you're not really that good at it. So maybe if you feel that, you should be less hard on yourself. This, of course, does not apply to me as I'm actually brilliant.

I wish

[raymorris]

I wish that were so. My dad was very successful. I chose to not do what he did (work his ass off at school and work).
Unsurprisingly, I was not successful. Later, I chose to do what he did - I had a full time job, a part time job, and was in school "full time". Lo and behold, I became successful.

Re:I wish

[RuffMasterD]

Boosh Junior, is that you?

Well that explains it

[Anon-Admin]

Now I fully understand the CIO's decisions

Coin a new phrase

[Scottingham]

I'd like to coin a new phrase: The Kruger Hump.

This is the inflection point where you realize just how little you actually know. Up to that point is marked by the D-K effect.

I thought ...

[PPH]

... Dunning-Kruger was the name of the business school our CEO got his degree from.

I blame women

[ShanghaiBill]

that sounds a bit confident. maybe it's too confident. maybe you are succumbing to Dunning-Kruger yourself!

I have found that if I sound confident, other people will listen and follow, regardless of whether I know what I am talking about. I have also found that women tend to be attracted to confident, self-assured men, and are less concerned about whether the guy is actually right or wrong. So, if my theory is correct, men should display more self-confidence. Maybe the author already considered gender differences, but I didn't RTFA, I am just assuming that I am right.

Re:I blame women

[Neo-Rio-101]

...which is funny because in East Asian countries (specifically China, Japan), being and sounding overly confident comes off arrogant and boastful.... EVEN IF you ARE confident about certain things. You'll just sound pompous, to the point where you have to fake inadequacy to get people to take you seriously.

This would explain why nerdy and geeky men typically hook up with Asian women.
*ducks*

Re:I blame women

[Sardaukar86]

This would explain why nerdy and geeky men typically hook up with Asian women.

..and here was I foolishly thinking it was because the Asian women in question were hot.

Re:I blame women

[Neo-Rio-101]

... I mean that Asian girls prefer men who lack self-confidence. Maybe because they're easier targets to walk all over?
this isn't scientific, so I'll stop here.

Re:I blame women

[Sardaukar86]

If that's the case I'd love to meet some of these Asian girls you mention!

Seriously though, I was just being a bit flippant rather than making an actual criticism of your comment. :)

Re:I blame women

[nukenerd]

This would explain why nerdy and geeky men typically hook up with Asian women.

..and here was I foolishly thinking it was because the Asian women in question were hot.

Nerdy men get hot women? I think that this thread has taken a wrong turning somewhere.

Re:I blame women

[neurovish]

that sounds a bit confident. maybe it's too confident. maybe you are succumbing to Dunning-Kruger yourself!

I have found that if I sound confident, other people will listen and follow, regardless of whether I know what I am talking about. I have also found that women tend to be attracted to confident, self-assured men, and are less concerned about whether the guy is actually right or wrong. So, if my theory is correct, men should display more self-confidence. Maybe the author already considered gender differences, but I didn't RTFA, I am just assuming that I am right.

Taking what you say in a work context, I would agree. Whenever I go into a meeting, get asked a question, and respond with an accurate "it will most likely work", everybody freaks out and thinks I don't know what I'm doing. If I respond with "yeah, there's no way that can fail" while running through my head some edge cases that would cause it to fail, everybody leaves happy and congratulating themselves on a successful meeting. I eventually had it pointed out to me what I was doing, and now I see it clearly. For the most part, managers above mine have no clue what is going on, and only think it terms of "it will work" and "it won't work". They aren't going to go to the CIO and other senior directors and say "this is a good path, we are 92% certain it will work". In the end if I say it will work, and it really doesn't, then they have short memories anyways ... most of the time.

The most frustrating is when there's two options, one presented by somebody who has a history of not getting things right and generally doesn't know what he's doing, and one I present. The imbecile goes in with "this is the way to go, absolutely", and I go in with "this is the solution most likely to work. We'll know more after it runs for a few weeks and we have more history in this environment. They always go with the imbecile, and it always fails.

Re:I blame women

[neurovish]

... I mean that Asian girls prefer men who lack self-confidence. Maybe because they're easier targets to walk all over?
this isn't scientific, so I'll stop here.

mmmm, with high heels too

As John Cleese pointed out

[msobkow]

As John Cleese pointed out, you need a minimum level of intelligence to even realize that you are stupid.

Sadly, a huge percentage of the population is too stupid to realize that they're morons.

Re:As John Cleese pointed out

[gweihir]

Indeed. Matches my experience. And unfortunately, the confident ones tend get promoted or elected.

Re:As John Cleese pointed out

[silfen]

Sadly, a huge percentage of the population is too stupid to realize that they're morons.

More importantly, a huge percentage of intellectuals, politicians, government advisers, economists, regulators, and administrators are too stupid to realize that they're morons in almost everything other than a (usually irrelevant) narrow specialty.

Dunning Kreuger are not aware of their incompetenc

[snowsnoot]

Example: I know I'm not competent at drawing. I need only look at the page to know I struggle even making a stick figure drawing. Just sayin'.

Like when making a system that is idiot proof,

[k6mfw]

along comes better idiots?

Obligatory Socrates Quote

[catchblue22]

When I left him, I reasoned thus with myself: I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know.

From Socrates, The Apology (399 B.C. or so)

Everything old is new again.

See: Truthiness

[lq_x_pl]

apologies to the Daily Show

This happens because this behavior is rewarded...

[Anonymous Coward]

...in all but a few contexts. Sure, on standardized tests and in chess tournaments, confidently doing the wrong thing doesn't give you any advantage. But humans didn't evolve to do well on standardized tests and win chess tournaments. We're social animals, we evolved to impress one another to social advantage.

In politics, which is really just a giant test-bed for effective social messaging, there's a saying that for any complicated problem, there's an answer that's simple, straightforward, low-cost, and most importantly: wrong. Yet it goes without saying that this is still a winning message. Candidates who answer questions with: "Well, it's complicated, you need to factor in..." don't even make it through the primaries. Candidates who say "We can stop the spread of Ebola by applying this magic (and free!) federal policy lotion" win easily.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong...

Re:I can't help but observe

[gweihir]

Wrong implication direction. The statement is about stupid people, not about confident ones.

This does _not_ mean confident people are stupid!

[gweihir]

The statement is "stupid people are confident" as in stupid(p) => confident(p).
It is not "confident people are stupid" (i.e. confident(p) => stupid(p)). Confident people are a mix of a small group that actually has a clue and a large group that is stupid.

As this discussion thread so far nicely shows, quite a few of the people here get the implication wrong. They are in the "large group".

Re:This finding can be captured by the statements

[gweihir]

Also happens that most professors think they are above average....

As to drivers, here is one:
    Radio announcer: "A wrong-way driver is driving on route xyz..."
    Driver: "One? Hundreds!"

Re:SubjectsInCommentsAreStupid

[lesincompetent]

Morons modding me offtopic, go figure what the fuck is up with them.

Yes, yes we are.

[TigerPlish]

Adiane: "Are you humans that stupid?"

Yoko: "Unfortunately... yes, yes we are."

Attenborough: "Who cares! Fire!

Our fine species, in a nutshell.

He knows just enough to be dangerous.

[pz]

Seems to explain the effect where a little knowledge in a field appears to make one reckless and dangerous, whereas deeper knowledge makes one cautious.

I don't know what you are talking about.

[ememisya]

Personally I'm brilliant!

yet people keep voting for experts

[silfen]

People have understood this for a long time. This is what people refer to when they call our current president "the anointed one", someone whose incorrectly judges himself, and is judged by others, to be an expert on a lot of things he knows next to nothing about.

That is why many people want small government, because a large part of the so-called "experts" in government clearly don't know what they are doing; by that I mean that they fail to deliver what they promise. You have a better chance making decisions for yourself than having them imposed on you by a president, cabinet, or other meddling government expert with Dunning-Kruger effect.

Re:we are

[gweihir]

Obviously, the full comparison was that professors think they are above average professors. Anything else would be obvious nonsense.

less facts = more work

[Kevin Fishburne]

I'm one of those overconfident idiots who never knows what he's talking about (being an expert in nothing), but I suspect it has to do with the higher mental effort required to intelligently form and express an idea about what is inadequately understood than to simply regurgitate what one thinks they already know. I remember when I was a kid my shrink gave me an IQ test and asked me why there were seasons. I had no fucking idea, but started thinking about possible reasons. I knew the Earth's orbit was elliptical and guessed our distance from the Sun was responsible (incorrectly, of course). I suppose demonstrating that I was able to use what little I knew to form a reasonable hypothesis was good enough for the test, but the point is the very act of pushing myself forward based on inadequate information gave me confidence.

What worries me are the people who speak confidently as pure, thoughtless bullshit pours from their mouth (politicians, for example). At least give it a really hard think before you make a fool of yourself.

It's pretty easy to identify confident morons.

[Brannon]

They will usually find some way to blame everything on Barack Obama.

Re:This does _not_ mean confident people are stupi

[phantomfive]

You got it wrong too. There are stupid people who are not confident, so there is no implication. A lot of stupid people are confident. And a lot of smart people are not confident.

Woody Allen

[alphazulu0]

"Confidence is what you have before you understand the problem."
— Woody Allen

az0

Isn't it a reflection of desired outcome?

[evanh]

Doh! I'd misspelt the subject. :(

Faith

[SpaceCracker]

Overconfidence in unsubstantiated knowledge.
Hmmm, make me wonder: could the Dunning-Kruger effect explain this whole religion thing?

Group psychology =/= individual competence

[Peter (Professor) Fo]

A lot of knowledgeable, experienced and clever people have 'been there, done that' when it comes to committees etc. As their interest may not be in leadership but delivering tech or just getting things done without a lot of opinionated discussion from people who exhibit the D-K effect, they take a back seat and find excuses to avoid management meetings and responsibility. Many management methods are designed to leech the brains from the better qualified so why would I want to join in with what is essentially a bunch of amateurs diluting my competence, wasting my time, arguing and deciding to be idiots regardless of my clear advice.

Jim Jeffries

[Detonia]

...already pointed this out

How sure is he of this?

[rs79]

Or has Dunning been Krugered?

Missing Caveat

[meustrus]

We Are All Confident Idiots...In America.

Re:This does _not_ mean confident people are stupi

[gweihir]

This is a "statistical implication", not a logical one, i.e. it just has a high likelihood for a random sample to be true. Really, your statement is complete BS as it ignores the context of the discussion.

Re:This does _not_ mean confident people are stupi

[phantomfive]

Are you trying to demonstrate the topic of the article personally, or does it really bother you that much when someone implies you might be stupid (since apparently you do have confidence)?

Re:This does _not_ mean confident people are stupi

[gweihir]

Now you have gone completely off the rails. This does not merit an answer.

In other words

[axl917]

every Fox News anchor.

Re:This does _not_ mean confident people are stupi

[phantomfive]

And yet you answered anyway.

In any case, even by "statistical implication" you are wrong.....if "confident people are a mix of a small group that actually has a clue and a large group that is stupid" (those are your words) then indeed confident(p) => stupid(p) more often than not. Surely you understand that.

Furthermore, another way you are also wrong is that the D-K effect indeed does say that skilled people tend to be less confident. That's "statistical implication" for you.

I think you mean 'uppity'.

[Brannon]

It's okay, we can all hear your dog whistle words.

Well this explains everything...

[gtworld2001]

Finally, an explanation for Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld as well as why the U.S. had eight years of hell. Then again, it also explains the hopeless mess that Obama has made worse than it was when he inherited it. Oh, mark Rob and Doug Ford deciphered as well.

George W Bush.

[DarthVain]

Sounds a lot like George W Bush. I think much of his support came from his confidence.

Stupid people are confident in their answers. Politicians also come usually with some simplistic ideology that they firmly believe in which is also pretty dubious.

Smart people question. Smart people are critical thinkers. Just regurgitating "facts" as gospel is a no no. Smart people know that most things are more complicated than they might seem. Everything has a story behind it, debate, perspective, and bias.

Two quick examples which recently proved to me more than ever that this is the case:
1) (This one I may have even learned on Slashdot) When I was in school I was taught that things fall due to gravity at 9.8m/s. If someone asked me the question, that would have been my response. However, they use this value to make it easy to do simple calculations. As it turns out, that 9.8m/s is an estimate. What it actually is, really depends on where the heck you are on the Earth, as it can vary from place to place. Sure I might have known that had I taken some more advanced courses on the subject, but all I had known was what I was taught, and they certainly didn't tell the younger audience the whole story as they likely didn't want to complicate the issue.

2) (This one I learned at a Trivia night at a pub) Simple question: What is the planet with the furthest orbit from the Sun. Again easy, I was taught in school that the furthest planet was Pluto (and this isn't even getting into a definition of what is a Planet and what is not). However that answer would be wrong. The planet with the furthest orbit is Jupiter. Even when I got the question, I started to question what I knew. A date was mentioned. I also knew independently that Pluto has a weird orbit. I could surmise that perhaps at given times, Pluto isn't the furthest planet. It isn't. It will be again in about 100 or whatever years or so, but currently Jupiter is further away. However again, likely the teacher, doesn't want to confuse the issue (facts), with details, like different orbits, and how it changes over time.

So there are two simple "facts" about hard science, that has more to the story that you might be aware of. Smart people know that they don't know everything, and that there will likely always be someone that knows some topic better than you do.

However in terms of politicians and running a country, factually explaining in detail the nuances of every question and what the possible answers are, and why you chose what to believe and your reasoned response, might be lost on the gray masses. Many like the comfort that confidence (even if false), that says; this is the issue, and I have the solution! Go back to enjoying your infotainment...

Re:George W Bush.

[Tunefix]

In example 2: Shure you aren't thinking about Neptune and not Jupiter?

Re:George W Bush.

[DarthVain]

Could be, I would have to look it up! :)

As George Carlin pointed out

[DarthVain]

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”

Obligatory Princess Bride Quote

[Zynder]

Socrates speaks like the Sicilian from Princess Bride. You knew I'd respond this way so I can clearly not choose the reply you expect! But then you'd know I'd know that so I must choose the reply you expect!

And that's what's wrong today

[palion]

How many times have I wished to be stupid.

The Silver Lining

[BobSteinVisiBone]

It's fashionable to cite the Dunning-Kruger effect as evidence of human dark natures: overconfidence, insecurity, or the foolish tendency of the masses to overvalue bravado. But what of the advantages?

If the optimal knowledge and skill to make a decision is not the same as maximal knowledge and skill, then there's a backside to the advantage curve. More than diminishing returns, competence beyond a certain point may hinder and hobble decision making. Mental resources are finite. There may be such a thing as knowing too much.

Maybe there's a mental organ that tries to guess when we've learned enough and it's time to act. In fine-tuning any sensibility, it's the misfiring that gains undue attention. Certainly the headlines of any age are rich with examples of right action flummoxed by call for more study. To the extent that a company or a family or a nation needs a leader at all, is the best party always the smartest duck in the room? To the extent not, the sliver of human nature that recognizes this could be branded Dunning-Kruger and yet may have deep worth.

The most effective team may have the first-rate thinkers second in command.

Well...

[doom]

This certainly explains web designer syndrome, doesn't it?