illusory expertise
illusory expertise
the Dunning-Kruger effect and its implications
Starting a habit of conscious reflection has been a bit of a revelation this year; it’s fascinating to peel back layer after layer and better understand how my strange mind works and why I do and feel the things that I do and feel.
Every time I reflect back on myself from months, weeks, or even days ago, I often find myself thinking “wow, that dude was clueless.” The strange thing is that if I’m being honest, there haven’t been very many times during this past year that I have felt that feeling of cluelessness in the moment.
In the abstract, this isn’t a groundbreaking observation; obviously gaining perspective and end experience makes it easier to find gaps in your past understanding of the world. The part that I’m more interested in is the insane level of confidence and belief that I’ve always had in my current perspective and understanding of the world. This is despite the fact that future experience has always proven my current perspective and understanding to be shallow and naive. So how, at any point in my life, have I had any kind of confidence or belief in the way that I see the world while knowing that future experience will prove it to be full of shit?
There’s a fascinating phenomenon that I’ve recently come across called the Dunning-Kruger effect which describes the disconnect between confidence and reality that I’m struggling to come to grips with. At a high level, it posits that we have a natural tendency to overestimate our level of expertise or knowledge about any area, leading to a false and fraudulent sense of confidence in our perspective and abilities. This overestimation largely comes from lack of experience or perspective; an inaccurate mapping of the territory that you think you know. In other words, it’s an effect that ‘scientifically’ describes the concept hinted at by the following phrase: “You don’t know what you don’t know.”
This article discusses the above idea more deeply and also explores some other ideas surrounding expertise, confidence, and dogmatism that the Dunning-Kruger effect has inspired in me, namely:
The glorification of individual narratives and takes
Explicit vs. tacit knowledge and the limits of rules and mental models
The Dunning-Kruger effect
I described what the Dunning-Kruger effect is at a high level above, but it can be more easily understood with the following chart:
This cycle describes the evolution of our confidence surrounding our own competence in any area, from gardening to meditation to sports to analytics. This is how each phase in the cycle usually goes:
Peak of Mount-Stupid: “This is easy, everything is so common sense, how hard can it be?”
Valley of Despair: “What the fuck this is so much more complicated than I initially thought, why does nothing make sense?”
Slope of Enlightenment: “Okay I still don’t fully understand but everything is starting to make a little bit more sense now with experience.”
Plateau of Sustainability: “I finally got it, but wow, there’s way more than meets the eye.”
(For you fellow business school nerds, you’ll notice that this is basically the Gartner Hype Cycle, except for personal beliefs / confidence instead of technology. Crazy, isn’t it?)
The issue that the Dunning-Kruger effect points to is that our own confidence is a horrible proxy for determining our own competence; we have a really hard time knowing whether we’re on Mount Stupid or the Plateau of Sustainability. For example, riddle me this:
One of the first studies that found illusory superiority was carried out in the United States by the College Board in 1976.[6] A survey was attached to the SAT exams (taken by one million students annually), asking the students to rate themselves relative to the median of the sample (rather than the average peer) on a number of vague positive characteristics. In ratings of leadership, 70% of the students put themselves above the median. In ability to get on well with others, 85% put themselves above the median; 25% rated themselves in the top 1%.
Fascinating. Humans are so strange.
Regardless, I think our inability to accurately and honestly place ourselves on the above curve has a few interesting consequences.
Glorification of individual narratives and takes
I’ll start by explaining a few loosely connected observations I’ve made recently and then explain how they’re related to the Dunning-Krueger effect:
Culture of takes - I’ve noticed that people are generally very liberal in sharing their takes and judgements on the world, and that generally people are more interested in sharing these takes than they are in discussing the thought process behind them that they’re employing.
Preference of talking over listening - In social settings, I’ve noticed that people generally are more interested in sharing their own stories and personal opinions than they are in listening and understanding others. For example, whenever the topic of politics comes up, people usually just share their own personal views and then enter into debate instead of listening and understanding the reasons why others hold the views they do.
Encouragement of ‘validation’ of feelings and emotions - Generally, there seems to be a cultural standard that encourages people to validate one another’s feelings and emotions. This consequently results in people searching for validation for their own feelings and emotions whenever they’re facing something difficult.
Again, none of these are very interesting observations; it’s pretty standard operating procedures for humans to love talking about themselves and sharing their thoughts. But the Dunning-Kruger effect adds an interesting wrinkle to this: hubris and overconfidence. Not only are people liberal in sharing what’s on their mind, but they vastly overestimate their own competence regarding everything everything they perceive to be true. And I think when you mix this hubris and overconfidence with our human tendency to constantly talk about ourselves and our perspectives, it results in dogmatism, close-mindedness, and attachment to static narratives.
Especially in regards to the above observations, I think this can have dangerous consequences:
It’s one thing to have a lot of takes, but quite another to actually fully believe that you have novel unique insights that you must share with the world and act upon. In tandem with the internet and social media, I think this hubris is a contributing factor to the rampant polarization and extremism that we see nowadays. The internet makes it super easy to find people who share the same ideas as you, and when you put a bunch of people in a room that have crazy wack ideas mixed in with the belief that they’re smarter than everyone else…yikes.
I think hubris and false confidence might be the biggest contributing factor to the general lack of empathy and listening skills that I feel like everyone has observed. Why would you want to listen to someone else or understand their point of view if you believe that you’re smarter or that you have some unique competence or insight? We’re all more interested in proving that we’re right than trying to build solutions together, which I feel is pushing us all further apart and behind the general sense of isolation and disconnect that pervades our modern world.
I’m not so sure that it’s healthy to seek or give validation for one another’s feelings. In one light, feeding into your own narrative only cements your spot on the Peak of Mount Stupid; you might simply lack the experience to understand your situation in a different and perhaps more nuanced and mature perspective. Perhaps it’s healthier to abandon the pursuit of validation and instead release your attachment to your own narrative and way of interpreting the situations you’re facing; often times it’s that very narrative that’s behind whatever pain or suffering we’re experiencing.
Explicit vs. tacit knowledge
This part is less about observations that relate to the Dunning-Kruger effect, but more about a mechanism that might add some color as to why it happens with such startling frequency.
You can divide knowledge, or competence, into two categories:
Explicit knowledge - This is knowledge that is codified, or written. Laws of physics, mental models, investing rules, personal conduct policies, etc. are all things that I think can generally be categorized as explicit knowledge.
Tacit knowledge - This is knowledge that’s based on intuition and rooted in experience, practice, and values; it’s the kind that’s harder to explain. For example, cooking is a practice that is rife with tacit knowledge; knowing exactly how long to simmer a curry or cook a piece of meat isn’t something that can be learned within a textbook but rather can only be perfected with time, practice, and experience.
I think this binary of knowledge types might have an interesting interaction with the Dunning-Kruger effect. Perhaps gaining ‘explicit’ knowledge - mental models, rules to live by, etc. - gives you the illusion of expertise. Perhaps this is why self-improvement and productivity gurus are obsessed with mental models, life mottos, rules to live by, etc. - it makes them think they know exactly what they’re doing. Perhaps this is why people are obsessed with life hacks - they contain a promise that mastering small morsels of explicit knowledge will make you some kind of guru and ensure personal and financial success.
Except this knowledge lacks any kind of depth. True mastery and wisdom only emerges when you learn where these hard and set rules, these bits of explicit knowledge, falls short; when you learn when these rules apply and when they don’t. And that wisdom is something that’s only contained within tacit knowledge. There’s no shortcuts to get there.
There were a lot of wandering thoughts covered above, but I think they can be distilled into two general takeaways that I’m trying to stay mindful of:
Always remind yourself that you know nothing - Based on all the dynamics listed above, it’s pretty evident that most of whatever I think I know about the world is probably misguided and rooted in hubris. I want to constantly remind myself of this fact to encourage myself to remain open-minded and to hedge against any kind of dogmatism that would prevent me from actually expanding my worldview.
Be hesitant to generalize observations into hard and set rules - I fear that constantly living life according to hard and set rules will push me away from having the kinds of experiences that will actually build a base of tacit knowledge from which I can actually develop some kind of wisdom. I want to flip this backwards; follow my intuition, learn from others, and then reflect on these experiences to understand where commonly held rules and axioms fall short and in what situations they may not apply.
In general, all this is also pushing me to be a lot more mindful of the external influences that I surround myself with. I’m growing more and more disillusioned with anyone who proclaims they know what they’re talking about or tells me they know how to make me think or live better. Unfortunately, that applies to most of the ‘productivity’ or ‘self-improvement’ content that floats around nowadays in the form of podcasts, Twitter threads, memoirs, and more. I absolutely ate that stuff up at the start of this year.
Now I think I’m looking for something different. While earlier I was searching for content or ideas that would tell me what I needed to do to feel better about myself, now I’m searching for people who embody the curiosity, humility, and eagerness to learn and explore that I’m trying to build; people who are more interested in building a better thinking process as opposed to parroting all the ‘right’ ideas and proving their competence; people who seek to ask questions rather than have all the answers.
Obviously this is a lot harder to find. But that’s not going to stop me from trying.