And that is exactly the problem.
Imagine someone who understands almost nothing about a given subject.
Doesn't know the basic rules.
Doesn't understand the terms.
Doesn't see the obvious mistakes.
But has an opinion.
And not just an opinion.
Absolute certainty.
“I know how things stand.”
“There's no other way it could be.”
“All these specialists don't understand a thing.”
“I see it very clearly.”
Sound familiar?
You probably thought of someone right away.
And this is exactly where one of the most interesting ideas in psychology begins.
The less you know...
In 1999, the psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning set out to test something that, at first glance, looked perfectly simple:
Can people judge how well they are doing?
They gave the participants tasks in grammar, logic, and humor recognition.
Then they asked:
“How well do you think you did?”
And this is where it gets interesting.
The people with the weakest results were also among those who overestimated themselves the most.
In one of the experiments, the actual score of the weakest group placed them among roughly the bottom 12% of participants.
They, however, believed they were around the 62nd percentile.
In other words:
They hadn't just done badly.
They hadn't even understood how badly they had done.
And that is the essence of the Dunning–Kruger effect.
The scariest part is that there is no way to know
Imagine you don't understand programming.
You open some code.
You look at it.
“This is complete nonsense. I could have written this in five minutes.”
The problem is that you don't know what you aren't seeing.
You don't see the architecture.
You don't see the hidden dependencies.
You don't see the security problems.
You don't see why some decisions were made this way.
To you the code just looks complicated and badly written.
You don't have the knowledge with which to evaluate your own evaluation.
And that is a devilishly good trap.
At first everything looks easy
When you start learning something, you pick up a few basics.
And suddenly:
“Ahh, I've got it.”
Your confidence grows much faster than your knowledge.
This is the moment when you can be most dangerous.
Because you already know enough to have an opinion.
But you don't yet know enough to understand how wrong that opinion can be.
Then you keep learning.
And you start to see how much you don't know.
Confidence drops.
Doubts appear.
You start asking.
You read.
You check.
You understand that things are far more complicated.
And if you keep going long enough, confidence gradually returns.
But this time there is an important difference:
Now you have a reason to be confident.
And here comes the funniest part
When someone is very confident and obviously doesn't understand the subject, we immediately notice Dunning–Kruger.
“This guy is a complete idiot.”
“He doesn't understand a thing, and he's sounding off.”
“How can he be so sure?”
But there's a small problem.
We are probably doing the same thing.
Not in everything.
In something.
Every person has areas where they know little.
And somewhere in there our own “mountain of stupidity” may be sitting.
We just haven't reached the moment when we can see it yet.
The most dangerous person in the room
It isn't the one who says:
“I don't know.”
At least he can ask.
It isn't the one who says:
“I'm not sure.”
At least he leaves room for being wrong.
More dangerous is the person who says:
“I am absolutely certain.”
...when there is no reason to be.
He has no reason to check.
No reason to listen.
No reason to change his mind.
And the worst part:
He may never realize that he is wrong.
And you?
Next time someone says something unbelievably stupid, don't rush to think:
“This person is an idiot.”
Maybe he is.
But for a moment ask yourself another question:
“In which area am I the same?”
Because there are things we know.
There are things we know we don't know.
And there are things we don't even know we don't know.
That third category is the most interesting.
And the most dangerous.
Because if you don't know that you don't know...
there is no reason to start learning.
And this is where it gets truly unpleasant.
While you were reading this article, you were probably thinking of someone.
A colleague.
A friend.
Someone on the internet.
A person who speaks with astonishing confidence about things they obviously don't understand.
You probably smiled.
You may even have said to yourself:
“Exactly! That's Dunning–Kruger.”
Except there is a much harder question:
What if that person is you?
Not in general.
Not in everything.
Only in one area where you don't yet know enough to understand how little you know.
And if you are completely convinced that this couldn't possibly be the case...
that may be exactly the most interesting part.
This text was generated with artificial intelligence, based on various materials on the subject.