I was just having a conversation with someone who is convinced that the Dunning-Kruger effect does not accurately describe how things work in the real world. He went back and pointed out the original paper, written by David Dunning and Justin Kruger, which showed that while poor performers on tests did overestimate their own performance, it wasn’t the standard graph that we see all the time.

That is true, although David Dunning later published another study which got a lot closer to the common graph. So is the classical graph really accurate? Let’s talk about it.

I think one thing that we need to recognize is that the test methodology used by Dunning and Kruger is very different than how a lot of people try to utilize it. They gave people tests and asked the participants how they thought they did before the tests were scored. People who performed poorly on the tests tended to have higher confidence that they performed better than people who had performed well. The confidence curve rose for each quartile of the performance curve. That’s  great if you’re giving tests, probably not so much for anything else. Also, it’s very difficult to control for variables in a purely subjective assessment of performance.

The problem is, people lie, often unconsciously. Other theorists have found that people may have little incentive to tell the truth in reporting their subjective views, especially when those scores might become known to others. Therefore, they will say they did better than they actually thought that they did, just to save face.

I think it comes down to the actual character of the individuals in accurate self-reporting. Now I can only go by my own subjective experiences, but I know that when I was in school, back in the stone ages, if I went into a test knowing that I wasn’t prepared, then internally, I’d be honest with myself. I wasn’t going to do well. If I went in knowing my stuff, I’d be far more confident in the end results. Of course, I wasn’t sharing that with anyone else, but I recognized a correlation, back in the day. If I came out feeling like I aced the test, usually, I did. If I came out feeling bad about it, there was almost always a reason. It wasn’t perfect, of course, sometimes I thought I screwed up and I got high marks, but usually, I was pretty honest with myself.

Unfortunately, especially today, at least in my own subjective experience, I think that there are a lot of people who truly believe they know more than they actually do. Just looking at some of the things I’ve posted in recent weeks or months, it seems very clear to me that people aren’t very interested in the actual truth, so long as their feelings get coddled. They say something clearly and demonstrably wrong, yet even if they are proven wrong with verifiable evidence, they double down on their initial statements because being right isn’t important to them.

That’s what I find the most sad. These people are dumb and proud of it. It’s where fee-fees get in the way of objective truth. It’s one reason why I never go into any discussion without being able to back myself up. If I can’t prove it, I don’t say it, at least that’s what I try to do. I’m not perfect, but I don’t just say things out of the blue, just because I wish it was true. There is always an external rational justification and if not, I say so up front.

It’s a real shame that so many people out there demonstrably do otherwise. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, people will cling to bad ideas, false claims and irrational positions, just because that’s what makes them emotionally comforted. Lies don’t matter because they get a dopamine shot in the noggin from believing them. Yet you will see people saying “that’s just how people are!” I’m not. Lots of people aren’t. Lots of people are, of course, but it’s not something baked into the human genes by necessity. There comes a time when people need to take a giant step back and evaluate their methodology and when it’s found lacking, as a lot of people’s is, they need to change it. Being stupid is a choice for virtually everyone.

We don’t move forward until people understand and act on that simple fact. It’s why we’re generally screwed.