Wikipedia has the following definition for the Dunning Kruger Effect paraphrased from a scholarly article by the people who first described it:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
A good friend of mine sent me a quote about this and pointed to a great article in the New York Times that describes it all. We have done some consulting work together with a group of people who are floundering in their effort to solve a hard engineering problem. The main engineer who works on the problem seems to suffer from this phenomena so we feel helpless and do not hold out a lot of hope that the problem will be solved.
This all got me to thinking that I have lived on both sides of that divide–unrecognized incompetence and underrated competence. It is horrifying and, frankly, embarrassing when I think on past projects. In the case of our current project, it was not really the unrecognized incompetence that motivated us to leave the project, it was the arrogance with which it was coupled.
That needs to be a lesson to me. I need to really work on suppressing my inner Ted Baxter.
Betty Blonde #304 – 09/16/2009
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