Steve Novella did this piece about Dunning-Kruger last month. Is it wrong that I find some of it extremely funny?
Like this, quoting Dunning…
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.
I see someone bouncing along like one of the creatures in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, puffed out by the hot air of something that feels to them like knowledge. And so I laugh.
Also Dunning:
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.
We do pick up a lot of clutter as we proceed. I recognize my own clutter pretty regularly – I’ll start to think I know something about the law and then remember it’s just something I saw on some tv show about cops or prosecutors or both. Our brains are Velcro to all the passing junk that floats by.
Novella this time:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is not just a curiosity of psychology, it touches on a critical aspect of the default mode of human thought, and a major flaw in our thinking. It also applies to everyone – we are all at various places on that curve with respect to different areas of knowledge. You may be an expert in some things, and competent in others, but will also be toward the bottom of the curve in some areas of knowledge.
Admit it – probably up to this point in this article you were imagining yourself in the upper half of that curve, and inwardly smirking at the poor rubes in the bottom half. But we are all in the bottom half some of the time. The Dunning-Kruger effect does not just apply to other people – it applies to everyone.
This is one reason I think the distinction between what we know and what we’ve been told is important. If we’ve only been told, the chances are good that we’re in the bottom half on that subject.
I wonder whether this phenomena might be largely based on the meaning ascribed to various forms of knowledge. Thus the need to think of oneself as knowledgeable, because admitted ignorance would be humiliating or cause a sense of powerlessness.
For example, the fact that people have much less knowledge of their own bodies and minds than they would like is scary, so it’s common to mistrust doctors as well as mental health professionals and neuroscientists who study matters related to cognition and behavior.
So it’s common to hear things like “who cares what my cholesterol reading is, I feel great,” or “there has to be more to consciousness than brain activity.” Then there is the creationist “expert” who has to “know” more than biologists at the risk of feeling like “just an animal.”
But in areas where it’s rare to base one’s sense of identity on knowledge of the subject at hand, people seem more open to admitting ignorance and accepting or even wanting the input of those who are more knowledgeable. I’m rather glad if a cab driver knows more about the layout of the city than I do, for example. That’s what I’m paying for!
“If we’ve only been told, the chances are good that we’re in the bottom half on that subject.”
this single statement should make us realize
every single “authority” is simply faking it
as an ordinary man i have learned to never press an “absolute” belief of any kind
and on a practical level
i love when i am proven wrong
because then i can be shown what’s right
and things become so much easier
“this single statement should make us realize
every single “authority” is simply faking it”
Uh… I think it should make us realize almost exactly the opposite. There are knowledgeable people, at least about many things, and it’s critical that we try and recognize when we are not those people. If every single “authority” is simply faking it, then you could never be proven wrong, nor be shown what’s right.
I’m an expert in my field.
And the more I learn, the more, it seems, there is to learn. So I don’t even think I agree with that we are only the ‘the bottom’ half the time….
Then again, compared to a layman, I am way off in the top (random small percent), so I guess it depends also on the company one keeps.
But we should also realise the limitations of the knowledgeable people themselves. It’s all well and good for me to acknowledge, say, James Hansen’s decades of top level expertise on climate science, even on his less lengthy involvement in raising truffles (yes, really). It’s another thing entirely for me to say that I accept anything he says on Egyptian archaeology or social relations within gorilla families or orthodontics because he’s such a knowledgeable, clever chap generally.
I realise that that’s about the “halo effect” rather than Dunning Kruger, but it’s very easy to let respect and acceptance of authority in one area wash over into uncritical acceptance of unrelated notions. The unbelievable follies of some Nobel Prize winners when they step outside their narrow fields of expertise are not just a few stories about unusual people. It’s a warning to us all.