Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Revisiting why incompetents think they’re awesome (2012)

arstechnica.com

68 pointsColinWright62 comments

[Disclaimer: This is just an opinion.]

I think a large part of this has to do with cultural attitude, and how projecting yourself as unnecessarily positive pays off in American culture. I bet most of the studies in that paper were done in the US, or at least in the West, and would have shown different results in a different culture.

In the US, saying something like "Oh yeah, I want to be pretty good at it, maybe a bit better than average." is considered a recipe for failure. Every parent seems to think that their kid is special, top of the class, Ivy League material with perfect scores everywhere.

As a result, you get a large number of peoplewho self-assess overly highly, amongst whom there are a few competent people. Also, with the tendency to not actually describe people at their appropriate level, there tends to be a sort of arms race with people evaluating themselves higher and higher. So an 'average' person becomes 'wonderful', and a 'good' person becomes 'stratospheric'.

I have to agree with you being an immigrant.If they have conducted the same study in different cultures,they would have found contradictory results.For example,the over emphasis given to the more experienced and older people may make senior staff over access their ability in a professional setting.

Where are you from? I've been to the Ukraine and those folks had a pretty high opinion of themselves.

Former cognitive neuroscientist here. Yes, what you're describing, the illusory superiority effect, was originally demonstrated in Westerners, but found not to replicate as well in Asian cultures.

What exactly are "Westerners" and what exactly are "Asian cultures" in the context of the research you speak of?

I think the generalization here is in individualistic vs collective, and a difference in style of communication.

This sums it up pretty well: http://bsix12.com/east-meets-west/

I would posit that part of the reason behind differences in illusory superiority are due to a difference in how you measure narcissism between cultures. You can't use the same test in a Western culture as you would an Eastern culture.

Collectivist cultures aren't immune to the narcissistic problem. They're just narcissistic in different ways. In fact, I would say they're more susceptible to it. Look at the whole Chinese "Tiger Mom" thing. Asian cultures place very high expectations on their people just as Western cultures do.

A western narcissist would say "I'm God's gift to mankind". An eastern narcissist would say "I'm God's gift to the collective/family/cooperative".

For example, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory is based on the DSM, an American diagnostic tool. One of the questions is: Do you "prefer to blend in with the crowd" or "prefer to be the center of attention". I would imagine a more Eastern narcissist would choose the former while a more Western narcissist would choose the latter. Also, "I am more assertive" vs "I wish I were more assertive". People from face-saving cultures probably wouldn't even know how to answer this, while a Western narcissist would probably choose the former.

Narcissism is the very definition of a first-world problem. As a personality style, it's far more prevalent in advanced societies. Once you get beyond mere survival, you start seeking self-actualization, which means people start trying to fulfill their own potential. This is a double-edged sword. On one hand, societies that are more narcissistic (like the US) allow individuals to do more things for society on their own. On the other hand, societies that are narcissistic expect people to do more.

> On the other hand, societies that are narcissistic expect people to do more.

And also have a very skewed perception of reality. It's pretty easy to have large swaths of population premising their entire world view on what is essentially self-serving mythology.

It's almost like the human psyche needs some amount of adversity to stay healthy. The cat that is too fat is also probably slightly insane, or at least unrealistic - it's only after you rub its nose into the dirt that it comes back to its senses.

(That came out more blunt than I intended, but the general idea is the same.)

> In the US, saying something like "Oh yeah, I want to be pretty good at it, maybe a bit better than average." is considered a recipe for failure.

To be fair, you used the wrong example. Saying something like that IS a recipe for failure - there are too many areas that somebody could decide to become good at; becomming just above average on your choosen area means you are about worthless.

And that's another problem with people's perception. Exceptionalism is the rule, people are diverse.

I guess it depends upon what you consider. For example, when I first take a dance class, my attitude is "let get the basics straight, maybe I can learn to do some basic moves and hold my own."

I have seen way too many people who expect to be Fred Astaire within 5 weeks, and then end up dancing horribly.

The Incompetent Co-Worker: I once worked with a guy who constantly made a giant mess out of everything he touched. I later found out his last name was a verb at all of the competitors around town for 'to mess something up', and over the course of my job shifted from working alongside him to simply putting out all of the fires he created as fast as he could start new ones. My productivity _appeared_ to go down, while he was always ready to take on a new project (before handing it off to me in a mess). The worst thing he did while I was there was delete all of our copies of an entire website we had been working on for months, only a week before launch. He would also edit documents live using in-browser editors (with no undo history) and when he made a mistake we would LOSE code and have to re-write sections. He was always viewed as the hero, yet nobody seemed to realize that all of the issues he (eventually sometimes) solved were self-created and preventable.

The incompetent IT guys: At my college we ran a number of PC labs and a number of Mac labs. The guys in IT clearly had training enough to _use_ macs, but they really didn't understand the concepts of network administration. We were a design program and one of the requirements was that we be able to install custom fonts for use in projects. One day people got to class the morning a massive project was due and nobody could open their project files to print them! I discovered that the _user_ font folder had simply been replaced with a shortcut to the _system_ font folder, and we didn't have the permission to restore it. So they had deleted every users custom fonts already, and now after I discovered and proved their error they had to restore it to the way it was. They looked like _heros_ for fixing the big problem on the worst day, but ultimately it was only their incompetence that created the problem in the first place. Their reasoning was that TTF fonts can sometimes carry viruses within them that infect Windows computers… (And we use OTF fonts on OS X)

In the case of the coworker it seems like you could have documented each of these specific cases and confronted the person about it. How do you talk your way out of losing data repeatedly?

Some people can talk their way out of almost anything. I've personally had my mind changed about something that was totally obvious; it's a pretty bizarre experience, looking back. Sometimes it takes hours or days for the reality distortion field to wear off.

I've had at least one coworker like this at previous jobs. They've tended to fool me repeatedly until I notice the pattern and revise my opinion of them. The confidence they display makes me think they're smarter / more informed / more thoughtful than I am, until enough evidence causes me to stop all positive weighting of their opinions. It's worse when you have imposter syndrome for the first several months of any new situation.

Who would you tell?

I've had exactly one boss who understood (some) of what I do.

Managing others, I've been completely snowed by people who's work is outside of my areas of expertise (tech writing, translation, graphic design, etc).

We had a "hero" on one of my teams that was strong conceptually but made poor implementation choices. Hacks with poor design that invariably didn't integrate well. High energy, always jumped right in - when others wanted to slow down and consider stuff, it looked bad by comparison. Deadlines became more stressful with more last minute bugs (that he would special-case "fix" - hero!!), and it was impossible to complain about him because our manager wasn't deep into the code.

Your story is in past tense, have you since quit this job or is the manager and hero gone?

You needed code reviews and design documents. If your group was too busy for this, then it needed this "hero" to keep pushing code out the door instead of dwelling on design choices.

Great story, like a lot of people, I can relate. There is another type of worker that I run into a lot. The type that actually screws things up on purpose. I call this the "Red Sock Effect". When I was growing up, my Mom and Dad got into a big fight over who would do my Dad's Laundry. Mom relented and agreed to do his shirts. Now keep in mind, back in those days, dudes could not be seen in a pink shirt. Mom "accidentally" tossed a red sock into the wash with Dad's white shirts so they came out pink. From then on, there were no more arguments, Dad took his shirts to the cleaners. At work, I run into the "red sockers" all the time. They feign incompetence and as a consequence, management takes work from them and gives it to those that are competent.

Isn't Dunning-Kruger simply stage one of the Four Stages of Competence? [1]

1. Unconscious incompetence - I think I'm awesome but I'm actually incompetent.

2. Conscious incompetence - I know I'm incompetent.

3. Conscious competence - I can do it but I have to concentrate really hard (probably with my tongue out[2]).

4. Unconscious competence - These aren't the droids you're looking for.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence

[2]: http://jackmathis.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/concentrati...

Title repeats an oft-repeated misrepresentation of what the Dunning-Kruger study actually demonstrated. See http://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-k...

Key sentence: "Unfortunately, Kruger and Dunning never actually provided any support for this type of just-world view; their studies categorically didn’t show that incompetent people are more confident or arrogant than competent people. What they did show is this: [image showing their data, followed by explanation of what regression towards mean is]"

I always thought the best conclusion to draw from Dunning-Kruger was the low value of self assessment.

Right, if you're not good at something, you're probably also not good at assessing how good you are.

I mean more generally, if you ask someone if they are good at something or if they say they are good at something you probably don't gain much actual information (even if all the participants are acting in good faith...).

Actually, the title doesn't make that claim either. It just mentions "incompetents think they're awesome," without claiming that they're more confident than competent people.

If you have to boil the paper down to a handful or words, this title isn't bad. It highlights the interesting bit, which will help people who've heard about Dunning-Kruger remember it. And if the reader is familiar with the misrepresentation of Dunning-Kruger, they'll learn something by reading the article.

(You did read the article, right? It specifically mentions this misconception. Key sentence: 'The findings of Dunning and Kruger are being reduced to "Stupid people are so stupid that they don't know they are stupid."' And since you read the article, the title did it's job.)

If someone said "my front left tire is flat", most people would assume that other tires are okay. That's not an error in reasoning, as some pedants would claim, it's just the way natural language works. So yes, the title is written to imply exactly what you say it doesn't claim.

It's the way natural language sometimes works. I would argue that the intended contrast of "incompetent people think they're awesome" is not against other people's self-opinions, as you're saying, but against a true, objective self-assesment. If I can find an interpretation where someone is correct, I'd rather take that.

I would highly suggest you read all of "Just Good Friends" written by Jeffrey Archer, available in "A Twist in the Tale" - http://books.google.com/books?id=m8uLx11IbtYC&printsec=front...

The theme of the particular story is irrelevant. It's much more about how your linguistic assumptions will ... well, read the story and see! I recommend this particular story because about half of the stories' endings in "A Twist in the Tale" didn't surprise me at all (but I am surprised at how many people I know who were surprised by their endings), but "Just Good Friends" totally got me!

If I had to boil the paper down to a handful of words it would be "people tend to err towards the average in their self-assessment."

If you had to title an article that you want people to read, what would you do then?

I'd start with an article whose honest, not beefed up title is enough to get people to read it.

> That said, spotting an expert outside of one’s field is a task one can become better at. And that’s important, given just how much information, good and bad, is not available to people. For example, is the expert associated with a university (a good sign) or some 'think tank' (a bad sign)?" Again, though, this takes experience and expertise. Groups like think tanks try to give themselves the trappings of expertise in a move specifically designed to fool us into trusting their statements.

This bothered me. I recall someone's response to a politician's rhetorical question as to why there were conservative think tanks but no liberal ones: "You already have them. They're called universities!"

The heuristic that tells you statements from someone affiliated to a university are more credible, and statements from someone affiliated to a think tank are less credible, will inevitably inform you that the US left is correct and the US right is wrong. It seems too crude to be useful in any area where think tanks operate.

You seem to think that an organized political group being pretty consistently wrong is a reductio ad adsurdum...?

I think they're both consistently wrong. I don't agree that affiliation with a university is a positive indicator if the subject is one that might be covered by a think tank.

But yes, I also think the viewpoint your comment suggests ("of course one side is always right and the other one isn't") lends a certain worthlessness to the person expressing it.

There are cases where the viewpoint "Of course one side is always right and the other isn't", has been entirely correct. For example, there was real controversy for decades over the idea that cigarettes caused cancer, that second-hand smoke caused cancer, and so on. One side was mostly good-faith research and the other side was almost entirely paid shills trying to muddy the water.

Climate change seems to be mostly the same situation.

The Soviet propaganda machine is another example - it presented an intellectually sophisticated "side" which was dictated by politics, not any genuine interest in reality.

I think we have to be careful, because propagandists know that most people want to be even-handed, and they take advantage of this to make fringe views seem credible. This makes "there are two sides, the truth must be somewhere in the middle" an entirely unreliable intellectual shortcut.

So if you want to argue that US right-wing think tanks are no worse, in terms of bias and distortion, than academia, I think you need to make that case in more detailed terms, and not just dismiss the very idea that one side could be more systematically biased than another.

"Do cigarettes cause cancer?" is both a single issue, and one with no middle ground you could occupy if you wanted to.

"Left vs Right" is not a single issue; claiming "Left is always correct" immediately commits you to one end of a very large number of dimensions.

And what bothers me about the idea "university-affiliated people are more credible; think-tank affiliated people are less credible" is that if you follow it, you will conclude that the left is correct, and the right is wrong... and it's not necessary to look at what the issue is, or what positions each side has taken, before coming to that conclusion.

There are tons of left wing think thanks, tho'. In fact people regularly complain to the BBC due to their habit of calling Reform say a "right wing think tank" but the Fabian Society just a "think tank" implying neutrality and objectivity.

Title could do with a [2012].

I've noticed a tendency for people who are average but think they're awesome to declare how rubbish they think they are in an odd appeal to Dunning-Kruger.

How do you know they think they are awesome? Maybe they are aware of their limitations and try to keep their ego at bay by reminding themselves about Dunning-Kruger's statement?

from the article, Dunning said:

"the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it’s been come to be called, is that one should pause to worry about one’s own certainty, not the certainty of others."

perhaps an average mind would poo poo themselves as a reaction to that uncertainty.

I like to think I am statedly and knowingly un-average, but not above average in very much at all. There are so many simple tasks that I know exactly how bad I am at (painting, framing work, basic db admin) that I'm happy to laugh at my own incompetence. Perhaps this is also rationalization of some kind of average-ness. Mediocrity can be scary.

Made me think of this: “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” ― Stephen Hawking

I find competency does not correlate well with level of confidence. Therefore, being confident does not mean incompetence. IMHO, confidence is a state of mind, and competence is a state of being. A lot of people get them mixed up. I know really competent people always think they are inadequate therefore don't even try to ask for the promotion they well deserve, then realize some incompetent guy bloated himself/herself into that position and quit afterwards. It's a shame really.

Good point.

Isn't the DK effect something that should be expected, given how the human mind works? To keep plowing ahead despite adversity, you need to have some trust in your abilities. It seems as if erring slightly in favor of over-estimating yourself might be beneficial for motivation - as long as the error remains small.

Assuming the un-promoted person is pretty good at judging people's expertise as well, as per the DK study. In your experience, do you think incompetents' promotions tend to increase or decrease the confidence of the competents'?

It depends on the person. Some after that worked hard not only on technical expertise but also on self-esteem. Some were indignant and convinced themselves they don't want that job anyway, all people on that level are incompetent managers.

Some people focus a lot more to be good at the job/skill, incompetent ones focus more on promoting him or herself. Result is quite obvious in short-run.

Being competent on a skill or certain job does not really correlate well with being competent on knowing thyself, either. I guess a lot of people are trying to find out what they really want, thus during that pursue become more competent. Incompetent people know very well they want, that promotion, and willing to cheat in order to get it.

People both competent in skills and self knowledge tend to become more confident. That's the kind of confidence both solid and humbling. Not some empty bubble can't carry any weight that can only exist in big company environment.

I think that my understanding of my chosen skillset / profession is good enough to know that I am not in, or anywhere near the top percentile for it.

I'm guessing intelligence isn't the prevailing factor here. It has more to do with awareness and self acceptance.

cited paper from Cornell:

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.64....

EDIT: accent title

I wonder how Dunning-Kruger effect impacts entrepreneurs/Startups. I contend that the founders need to exhibit certain amount of Dunning-Kruger at the initial stages. Otherwise how would one take on any large impossible goals venturing into unknown domains. But when they start exploring and getting into thick of things, they become less and less susceptible to this effect as they get feedback from the system and put in efforts to improve their skills.

> The paper gave voice to an observation that people make about their peers, but that they don’t know how to express

I think Alexander Pope expressed it well when he wrote "A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing."

That's interesting, but I actually am awesome.

I was thinking the same.

That's the nicest compliment I've seen on HN. Good on you!

I do appreciate your appreciation.

Do you have a citation for that? ;)

As a programmer my understanding of psychology is incompetent. Computers make sense to me, people rarely do.

I thought I was suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect, but it turns out that I am just a moron.

Something other than inappropriate feedback due to absence of any strong performers in the immediate environment to compare with, plus reality distortion/denial and unwilling to look farther around?

People who have managed to read two or three books in a whole life (well, one of them three times) are absolutely sure that reading is a total waste of time and should be even forbidden, while they are totally convinced that if they might be not the best person on earth (due to some external, uncontrollable misfortunes), but definitely right at the top of the whole humanity. Why, we have a full country of these.)

Haha! This article is doing a number on my impostor syndrome.

How can a person claim to suffer from impostor syndrome?

I know, rationally, that I'm competent. That does not prevent me from feeling like an impostor and having nagging self-doubts.

It's an interesting point - it may be possible to have 'impostor syndrome' syndrome, where you think you have imposter syndrome but you're actually an imposter. According to the study, if you were an imposter you'd have to be incompetent which means you'd be unable to judge that you were incompetent and you'd rationalize that you were competent.

Terrible cycle, but it's according to this article if you were an imposter you'd probably think you weren't. Uhm. This probably isn't helping. Good luck with your imposter syndrome!

That was wonderfully written. I hate you.

:-)

For a long time, my biggest fear was that I was secretly retarded. Every time anyone said I was smart, I thought they were just being nice, like how you'd put even your child's ugliest drawing on the fridge.

Of course, if I were, I probably couldn't comprehend the thought in the first place, so rationally, I know I'm not. A lot of it probably comes from reading things from/about people infinitely smarter/more motivated than I am, and feeling like I have no idea what I'm doing.

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