Hacker News

Maybe it's just me, but I have never understood the Dunning Krueger effect to mean "dumb people think they're smart and smart people think they're dumb". That was always misrepresented, as far as I was concerned.

The study itself seemed to imply that it was more about experience with a subject, rather than an intelligence factor. That, the more you learn about a subject, the more realistic your assessment of your own understanding becomes...and eventually you get to a point where you know enough to know you don't know everything.

I have seen that effect many times in my life, being someone who works in a highly skilled trade, as well as someone who practices martial arts. In both areas, there is a common turn of phrase to describe this effect..."They know just enough to be dangerous".

In martial arts, every student gets to a point where their confidence in their skills, outpaces their actual aptitude. This is because during practice, they can feel themselves becoming more proficient, as the movements become smoother and easier to perform. This leads to an assumption that they are "ready for anything". An assumption that usually disappears when they are put in a situation where their skills are actually challenged. They quickly realize the difference between "practice" and "practical".

But, at much higher levels of proficiency, you get to a point where you underestimate your own success rate, simply because you know how much can potentially go wrong, and are often surprised when your skills prove sufficient to overcome those possibilities.

The same effect can be seen in highly skilled trades. So many students come out of school with a head full of theoretical knowledge, but not much practical experience, with "ideas" that they swear will revolutionize the industry, and set them apart from their peers. They will often criticize the older, more experienced workers around them for being too "old-school" in their approach to the work, and are convinced that their own "new-school" knowledge will be vastly superior, in practice. This is seldom true.

Real life experience is often a trial-and-error process that takes great-seeming ideas, and whittles them down to just the ones that actually work. The overall effect being that the less experience you have, the more you think you can do...but, the more experience you have, the more you know you can't. Very often, this results in more experienced tradesmen being more conservative in what they are willing to risk, even when success is still possible...versus younger, less experienced tradesmen taking unnecessary risks because they haven't learned the dangers, first-hand.