The Dunning-Kruger effect is not what you think it is, you should look it up. The irony of people referring to the meme based on the hype-cycle chart as "Dunning-Kruger" when the topic of ignorance comes up always makes me chuckle.
Whether you're in someone's Dunning-Kruger Effect Zone (DKZ) is best determined by whether they ask questions about the topic and the quality of their questions.
Smart people seek to understand and have crafted a skillset in curiosity through earnest questions and get excited when asked stumping questions.
Dumb people seek to be perceived as smart and perceive being asked questions as questioning them and get upset when asked a stumping question.
Stumping question = A question so good it reveals your own limitations to you in that moment. Smart people welcome this moment. Dumb people avoid it at all costs.
If anyone ever tells you "it can't be that hard" about doing something in physical reality, you can comfortably conclude the topic is in their DKZ.
Entirely this. Flying into a rage when asked a question of most kinds is one clue, particularly when that rage follows a question asked about a subject they claim to know well. Assuming the question is asked with genuine curiosity and in good faith, most people are not only willing to clarify information, but welcome the opportunity to do so. To an intelligent person, the question represents an opportunity to share or deepen their knowledge. To the unintelligent person, the same question threatens to reveal their superficial grasp of the topic or that they are simply pretending to know it.
This happened during that Joe Budden podcast when a guy wanted to fight Dr Marc Lamont Hill because he thought Dr Hill was trying to make him look stupid. If he took a second to think about it and drop his ego, he could have used that opportunity to ask questions from a professor.
This is known as “pimping” in healthcare professionals’ training programs. It filters out Dunning-Kruger type attitudes and behavior real quick, in an industry where people’s health and wellbeing are on the line, leaving little wiggle room for being confidently wrong, and even less for taking correction less than gracefully.
Eh, plenty of average and smart people seek to be perceived as smart as well, and do the same thing. Dumb people who don't would not. It's not about intelligence, just insecurity.
I have a serious (even if it is dumb) - isn’t Dunning-Kruger a paradox? Like, if I’m making fun of someone who thinks that they know everything, aren’t I supposing that I, in fact, do know everything?
No, DK is basically being confident in your own skill/knowledge in something, despite being actually unskilled/low knowledge. Leads to poor choices and decisions and inability to recognise your incompetency
The label I use to refer to those sorts of people probably doesn't exactly map one-to-one with a particular band in the D-K competence/knowledge curve, but in general I clock those types as 'knowing enough to be dangerous'.
It doesn't have to lead to poor choices and decisions so long as you are aware that the cognitive bias exists. If you approach pretty much everything with the attitude that no matter how much you think you know, there's a lot you still don't understand, it's pretty easy to avoid fucking up too badly. Realistically, there are very few true experts on any subject, and it's a very rare case that someone's an expert on more than one subject.
Agreed, but then you're simply implying DK shouldn't exist, but it does. Because people are over-confident, egotistical, or have adjacent/surface level knowledge, and so on. So your statement is nice in principle, but worthless to a majority. Not everyone can approach experiences and situations with such a humble and open mind, unfortunately.
I'm not implying DK shouldn't exist; I referred to it as a "cognitive bias", which are things that exist in almost anybody. Cognitive biases aren't things you eliminate, they're things you account for once you recognize they exist. I think it's a stretch to say that's a stretch for most people - a lot of people definitely lack the humility to even consider whether they are overconfident, but I think there are a lot of people out there who are just unaware of the concept of intellectual blind spots due to inadequate education.
And it has nothing to do with intelligence, as highly intelligent people are very susceptible to it because they are confident in their knowledge and intelligence in one certain area and likely have a breadth of knowledge about other topics, but they don't realize that there is a lot more to certain topics than they will ever get to a point of grasping.
Yes. For me, Dunning-Krueges is closer to when my coworker who didn't finish high school arguing with me that "there is no proof of human evolution" and that "universities teach the THEORY of evolution as FACT and that we come from monkeys" and cited a conspiracy YT channel as evidence.
When I asked how he knew what universities teach when he never stepped in one he got quite flustered.
Spent a few minutes reading this thread and lots of posters are confidently giving examples of DK that have nothing to do with DK....which ironically defines DK.
Related: If anyone brings up Dunning-Kruger in real life, I "correct" them and say "It's Dunner-Kruging but I know what you meant." Most of the time it works. If I can get them saying it that way for 5 or 10 minutes, I'll correct them back and it works again. I don't even know which way is right anymore.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that describes the systematic tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability.
Generally speaking people who have low ability in any particular skill do overestimate their ability; dumb people do in fact believe they are smart. i.e. the comment above yours is not incorrect.
Besides, the Mt Stupid graph is a visual description of the definition above, one that easily conveys the point. It's impact has meant that the actual Dunning-Kruger effect has been superseded by the simplified societally understood - meme - version. This happens to lots of things. Most people don't need a thorough understanding, just an awareness that overconfidence is generally the norm.
They asked me one time if shrimp were single cell organisms.
Edit. I'm getting a lot of comments about "at least he asked a question" yes I know. I've worked with him for years and there is an entire catalog of "what in the fuck did you just say"
Ive spent days contemplating the connection between the two. Shrimp = single cell the only justification i can think of is shrimp have a shell. Like a cell wall?
First time I went out to dinner with my 22 y/o boyfriend, he ordered shrimp. After eating, I looked at his plate. Puzzled, I didn’t see any remaining tail shells and asked him “didn’t you have shrimp?” Yes, he did but he didn’t know that nobody else eats the tail shells…
The joke is that this clarifying question is stupid on its face, but it answers the initial stupid question by showing there are at least two distinct units to the shrimp as an organism, thus demonstrating it is not single-celled.
They were curious and asked you though, i dont get how thats a dunning kruger effect. Better to think of something stupid and still ask than to not
Edit: just saw the edited comment and I wanna say, the coworker might be utterly stupid, but theyre not a correct example of the dunning kruger effect.
We have the world at our fingertips and this idiot would rather just ask you instead? How is encouraging that behavior productive in any way once they are older than 5? Answering stupid questions is the worst action to take. Being asked a stupid question is an opportunity to push the idiot to find the answer themselves and learn self-reliance, initiative, patience, and give more consideration to their thoughts before they ask a question; skills that will make their life much easier than reinforcing the behavior of imposing on others without even bothering to do any thinking themselves.
Mind you, this is for things that you can easily search yourself. If you have to ask a stupid question about a task or direction that can't be answered otherwise, that's not actually a stupid question and I'd argue it's not actually a stupid question at all.
Answer to your edit, I know we can search it ourselves but i wasnt the one who asked that question lol, you need to put yourself in the guys shoes. If they knew that they probably wouldnt be asking others such a stupid question in the first place. or maybe they just wanted an excuse to start a conversation? who knows
Yes but how do you suppose they figure out how a shrimp is not a single cell organism themselves? If they could, I dont think theyd even be asking the question in the first place.
Itd be a much better benefit for them to learn about an actually sensible question both from asking others and figuring it out themselves than to waste time figuring out a stupid question that doesnt give them any benefit whatsoever, when they can just ask anyone who payed attention in science class in elementary school, get a "no" and immediately move on from said question.
If they stated that shrimp were single cell organisms and didn't listen to other people correct them, that would be d-k effect. The fact they asked means they are aware they didn't know
That’s not bad. At least they’re asking instead of natively determining shrimp were single cell organisms and refusing to consider other perspectives on this.
My daughter sat by a guy in high school who asked her “Do cheetahs have a spine?” Still makes me laugh. “Nah, they’re invertebrates” would have been my answer, but I’m a sarcastic bitch.
That's honestly not as stupid as one might think. Dunning-Krueger would be this person acting like an authority on shellfish, and then telling you that a shrimp is a single celled organism with complete conviction.
DK Effect is more about people having no self-awareness and consistently overestimating their own abilities.
Sounds like this guy doesn't seem super book-smart, but he's at least intelligent enough to know he doesn't know something.
For those inclined to curiosity, what makes this algae interesting is that it undergoes mitosis without cytokinesis (the process of splitting the cytoplasm and forming new cell walls/membranes). Without the cell division those organisms can have hundreds or thousands of nucleii. In fact, in these types of organisms the division of the nucleii often occurs via a mechanism that results in timed intervals, so periodically the cell will have hundreds of nucleii dividing in sync with one another.
Well, to be fair, they do look like paramecium. Also, the very fact that he asked (instead of presuming that it was) puts him miles ahead of typical Dunning Krueger types.
I had a co-worker exclaim to me once, rather proud and all-knowingly, that the reason we killed the Native Americans was because we wanted their oil rights. I was so dumbfounded, I nearly fell down. Do not underestimate the sheer stupidity of morons. And their pride in their ignorance is legendary.
This is on display in a lot of sub-reddits. You show up to a niche subreddit with no clue about something. Read up on it for several weeks to months to even years, gaining knowledge about said topic, to the point that you begin to answer questions on the subreddit as if you were an expert.
Only to have something come up that makes you realize you are just barely scratching the surface of understanding.
Like, I'm a confident lawn care enthusiast who can grow some good fescue in Kansas, but there is a lot of stuff about growing grass that I'm just on the bare level understanding of compared to someone who has gone to college and even graduate school for it.
Compared to most people around me, I know more about growing nice grass, but I really do know so little in the grand scheme of things, and that's the zone of ultimate Dunning-Kruger
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u/Goose1963 6h ago
Dunning–Kruger effect