dunning-kruger

I mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect a few posts ago in the context of my ongoing professional self-worth issue but it's something I keep coming back to when thinking about myself and other people. I first heard about it on Lyle McDonald's forum (not the regular one, the other one), probably when someone was hating on some really idiotic stuff that Gary Taubes or Loren Cordain or someone like that had written.

The idea is that incompetent people are likely to make poor decisions or draw incorrect conclusions, but their own incompetence deprives them of the ability to be aware that they've reached the wrong conclusion or made the wrong decision. Therefore, they are likely to overestimate their own ability and knowledge. The flip side is that competent people are likely to make good decisions or draw correct conclusions, but their competence leads them to believe (falsely) that all others are equally or more competent. To quote Wikipedia quoting Dunning and Kruger, "The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

Now, this is obviously an appealing concept to me in the context of my professional life, for obvious reasons. It's nice to think that my constant second-guessing and lack of self-confidence arise not from actual incompetence but rather from the belief that everyone around me knows better and that I am constantly at risk of exposing myself. In reality, when I think about it, my actual competence is probably about average -- by definition, most people are average and I don't see any reason why I should think I'm otherwise in this context. Dunning and Kruger studied discrete skills, in logic, grammar and humor, so maybe the effect doesn't apply neatly to more complex things like professional performance. But it's funny to think that maybe I'm actually competent in the areas where I think I'm weak and actually incompetent in the areas where I think I'm strong. Except verbal standardized testing. That I know I'm pretty good at.

I wonder, too, what relationship there is between self-evaluation of competence at a particular skill or skills and overall "self-confidence" as perceived by others. Take this guy Salim, who I talked about last week. In the short time I spent with him, I found him to be clearly convinced of the value of his work and of himself, a dominant personality often oblivious to social context (what I trying to say is that when he had a question, he would barge into the room and just start talking, regardless of whether the people in the room were already in the midst of something else), and very sociable and comfortable in groups and in small talk. How does he think of himself? What is his self-perception like? I've got no idea but I would love to know.

Apparently Dunning-Kruger isn't as applicable to Europeans or East Asians -- true to Dunning and Kruger's environment, the effect was tested on undergraduate psychology students at Cornell. But I'm a lot like those students, presumably, so it's still relevant to me. Part of the beauty of being in my 20's and having gotten a BA: a lot academic research actually applies to me because I'm the population they test. Hell, I participated in a lot of psych and econ research at Michigan. Makes things interesting from an omphaloskeptic point of view.

Oh, and I found out what the Ghorband unrest means for me: nothing. All that stuff was going on in a different part of the province. Whew!