To learn, one must realize there is much they do not know.

Epictetus once wrote: “You can’t learn if you think you already know,”

This may be one of the biggest roadblocks to learning, above many social or individual hurdles: to think you already know.

Learning becomes rather unnecessary if we unconsciously believe ourselves to be omniscient.
Of course, none of us would articulate this.
That’s what makes it an unconscious belief.

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”
– William Shakespeare

If we are under the impression there is nothing we don’t know, we can successfully rid ourselves of any curiosity or potential to truly progress forward in both knowledge and action.

Ignorance typically does not lead us to realizing our ignorance.
Ignorance typically leads to greater confidence.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with a low ability at a task tend to overestimate their ability.

Why does this happen?

Ignorance gets confused with expertise.
Confidence gets confused with certainty.
Coherency gets confused with correctness.

Ignorance gets confused with expertise.

Ignorance can make you feel like an expert,
while knowledge can make you feel like a novice.

Having an inadequate understanding of a topic keeps us in the fog, potentially blinding us to its complexity and nuance. A murky understanding can deceive us into experiencing a sense of clarity.

At the core of this confusion is meta-cognition.
Our thinking about our thinking.
Our inability to recognize our own inability.

In Unskilled and Unaware of It, David Dunning and Justin Kruger put it this way: “Those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

We all have areas where we overestimate our ability.
The problem? Our lack of ability keeps us from seeing just that: our lack of ability.

In We Are All Confident Idiots, Dunning continues: “In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.”

To mistake ignorance for expertise is a trap we can avoid if we strive to both acknowledge and integrate this understanding into our lives.

Confidence gets confused with certainty.

Uncertainty can be gut-wrenching and unpleasant, making the desire for a type of unshakable certitude more of a need.

In Being Wrong, Kathryn Schulz writes, “Uncertainty leaves us stranded in a universe that is too big, too open, too ill-defined.”

The anxiety of uncertainty exacerbates our need to both be right and be utterly convinced of our rightness.

But our own confidence reveals little of our level of expertise, not to mention whether we are right or not.

Why? Because great confidence doesn’t automatically result in great accuracy.

We prefer quick, confident answers over rambling, nuanced explanations,
even if those rambling, nuanced explanations are closer to the truth.

This is difficult in a culture where confidence is valued far above contemplation. As I wrote in One Who is Curious is Bound to Change, thinking beyond our first condition response can be a detour.

Coherency gets confused with correctness.

We all need a coherent story to live from.

We need some meta-narrative to make sense of our lives, explaining
why good things happen,
why bad things happen,
all while giving us a reason to remain hopeful.

Coherent stories can equip us to live a good life.

Developing a sense of coherency helps us to feel competent and autonomous, two of our three psychological needs. It allows us to feel a sense of control over our environment and to realize our actions affect our world.

When this coherency is called into question, our very feelings of competence and autonomy are, too.

When life presents itself as simple, straightforward, and easily understandable, we likely have created a coherent story.
This is the exact purpose of a coherent story: to bring clarity where there is complexity.

There is nothing wrong with living within a coherent story.
How could we survive and thrive otherwise?

Yet, we must realize a coherent story is not always a/the objectively correct one.
Even the most helpful or coherent stories we tell ourselves may not be true.

What’s coherent is not always correct,
and what’s correct is not always coherent.

What does the Dunning-Kruger effect feel like?

“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
– Charles Darwin

Here is the Dunning-Kruger effect in visual form.

This graph is useful in beginning to see the Dunning-Kruger effect in ourselves and in others.

1) Peak of Mt. Stupid: At the very beginning of understanding something, we feel excessive levels of confidence.

2) Valley of Despair: As we spend more time with the subject, we begin to realize it is far more complex than we previously imagined. This can be crushing.

3) Slope of Enlightenment: Learning isn’t out of reach, but it isn’t as effortless as we desire. Growth takes significant time and energy.

4) Plateau of Sustainability: After devoting far more time and energy than we first imagined, we may reach a place of slow, continual growth with an appropriate level of confidence. This does not mean we have achieved complete mastery.

The Dunning-Kruger effect feels like learning.

The highs of learning can be mistaken as expertise,
while forward progress can feel like you are going backwards.

Why do we struggle with it?

As we outlined earlier, we struggle with the Dunning-Kruger effect for three reasons:

Ignorance gets confused with expertise.
Confidence gets confused with certainty.
Coherency gets confused with correctness.

Yet, there is more at play.
Here are several additional reasons why we encounter the Dunning-Kruger effect in our lives:

1) We overestimate our own competence in a field.

2) We believe expertise in one field easily translates to another.

3) We unconsciously seek to protect our self-esteem and ego.

4) We struggle to see our lack of expertise.

5) We struggle to see others’ expertise.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is multi-layered in both its causes and effects.

What are examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect?

The Dunning-Kruger effect could likely be seen in any domain. Before mentioning a few current examples, here are three studies Dunning and Kruger shared in Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.

1) Humor
– Participants were asked to rate the humor of a joke on a 1-11 scale
– Researchers compared participants ranking with a panel of experts (Professional comedians)
– The bottom quartile put themselves at the 58th percentile; they tested at the 12th

2) Logic
– Participants took a logic test featuring 20 questions from the LSAT prep guide
– Participants estimated their logical reasoning ability and overall test performance compared to others, as well as how many questions out of 20 they answered correctly
– Those in the bottom quartile showed the greatest “miscalibration”, as they overestimated their performance by nearly 50%

3) Grammar
– Participants took a grammar test
– Participants rated their ability to recognize correct grammar and estimated their test performance compared to others
– Then, the top quartile and the bottom quartile reassessed their work after viewing the tests of five other participants
– Those in the bottom quartile were less able to identify the competence level of peers and self than those in the top quartile

Then, of course, there the painfully obvious examples of
Covid-19,
Politics at-large,
and everything in-between.

Seeking medical advice from… non-medical experts?
Getting news from… memes?
Interesting.

This is the Dunning-Kruger effect lived out: those with less knowledge can believe themselves to be an authoritative source on a subject.

This is not just the Right,
nor is it just the Left.
It’s everyone.
It’s you.
It’s me.

“The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club.”
– David Dunning

Living and Learning through the Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect is not meant to be used to dismiss others when you disagree with them, nor is it meant to demean others for being different.

If we are not careful, the Dunning-Kruger effect can become yet another weapon in our ego-defense arsenal, leading us to grow deeper in our conviction of our superiority and their inferiority.

While I don’t think it’s necessary or helpful to use it against others, I have found it helpful when used on myself.

Here are a few lessons I am currently sorting through.

Allow yourself to be a beginner again.

Enabling yourself to honestly state, “I don’t know,” may be the most freeing first step we can take.

We must admit we have yet to reach the peak of understanding and expertise.

This means we can let ourselves truly be a beginner.

Beginners ask questions.
Beginners are excited.
Beginners are curious, because, as Steve Jobs put it, “(they are) less sure about everything.”

Reconsider what it means to learn.

What if instead of searching for more information to confirm our beliefs, we did the opposite?

We could question what we know.
Pay attention to voices outside our circle.
Realize learning is a much slower, more laborious process than we like to imagine.

We can approach learning as a way to grow in curiosity, instead of another opportunity to confirm our current understanding.

Stop comparing yourself to others.

We opened with a quote from Epictetus.
It’s only right we end with a quote from him, too.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid with regard to external things. Don’t wish to be thought to know anything.”

There will always likely be those who know more than you, as well as those who know less than you.
Who cares?

It is a waste of precious time and energy to exhaust yourself by playing comparison games, regardless of who “wins”.

When you begin, maybe for the first time, to be awe-struck by just how infinitely intricate everything is;
When you allow yourself to bask in all you don’t know;
When you let yourself see the depths of your own ignorance;

you could not be in a better place to learn,
love the process,
and hopefully avoid Mt. Stupid and the Valley of Despair altogether.

---

Learning is impossible without awareness and humility.

Awareness of all we don’t know or have wrong.
Humility to accept this.

But we would be foolish to stop at realizing our lack of knowledge.
We do not need to camp out in the Valley of Despair for life.

The Personalized Learning Plan can help you emerge out of the Valley of Despair through:

1. Brainstorming Topics
2. Selecting Topics
3. Setting Learning Goals
4. Gathering Resources
5. Creating a Schedule
6. Learning + Reflection Guides

Mastery is not as out of reach as it may appear.

Click HERE to learn more!