Yeats, I think, summed it up on a general level: The best lack all conviction, while the worst. Are full of passionate intensity.
4 Likes
There’s actually a third category – incompetent people who know that they are incompetent who think they are suffering from the Imposter Syndrome rather than being initially accurate. A sort of meta Dunning-Kruger.
3 Likes
Because they are surrounded by incompetent people whose life depends on their incompetence not being found out. The ones the video talks about.
Not a video but hopefully helpful
1 Like
I wouldn’t call it an inherent bias. I think it’s based on a fact of reality, that you don’t know what you don’t know.
I think you can see how the skill of doing something and the skill of knowing if you are good at doing it are related most easily in games. Like if two chess grand masters play a few turns and professional commentators believe one has established an advantage and you showed the board to me, I think I’d be better than 50/50 at guessing who has the advantage because I have at least played many games of chess, but I doubt I’d be much better than 50/50. Some boards would be easier than others.
Do the same with Go and I have no reason to think I’d be better than a coin flip at all.
In either case, it’s clear that the skill of evaluating a board state is very similar to the skill of actually playing the game.
But D-K is entirely about what you do after those facts are formed. You could a) feel confident that you know who is winning based on some simplistic assessment; b) feel that you had better not speculate; c) feel that if you don’t know it’s not worth knowing and say you don’t care; d) you could say you have no idea but be curious to learn who has the advantage and how experts know that.
(list not meant to be exhaustive)
I don’t think there’s an inherent bias that sends us to any of those. Maybe you go (a) because you like to assert dominance; or (b) because you are afraid of looking like a fool in public; or (c) because you feel you are already being made to look like a fool; or (d) because you are curious. I think all of those traits are found to various levels in people and none of them are more inherent.
So I think D-K in basically entirely cultural because it only kicks in at the “What to do about it” stage. I think American (and Canadian, eh) culture tends to emphasize the value of being dominant and tends to diminish the problem of looking like a fool (via Thatcher’s “There is no such as society”). I also think that, at least in the contemporary right wing, there’s active discouragement of being curious.
2 Likes
Have you read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking Fast and Slow”? He breaks down internal bias into its components with lengthy experiments proving each. I think you’d like it. It shows how internal biases, physically built into the human, translate into stuff like what you’re talking about.
3 Likes
When I was more junior in my industry I felt tremendous pressure to be able to answer any question that was put to me. I thought being good at my job meant being an expert on everything and I tried my best to act as if that was the case. I don’t think I was BAD at my job, but that mentality probably led to confusion and slowdowns as I struggled to deal with problems that I really didn’t know how to deal with and probably weren’t even my job to deal with.
As I advance in the industry and spend more time working with people at or near the top of the pile, I’ve learned that the really great people, the ones everyone likes to work with, who are admired and respected and seen as trusted advisers and dispensers of valuable wisdom, have no qualms whatsoever about admitting they don’t know something. They will immediately say “Oh, I don’t know about that, you should talk to so-and-so”.
Being an expert means knowing what you don’t know.
2 Likes
D&B have been proudly been saying it’s probably their call.
humabella> discouraging creativity.
Something like ‘If you know better, take over the business, fix everything at once, destroy the old books, lease me a better set, and hand out a net profit to set in at nothing I had to do before?’ Rather than, ‘Show me the new art done well?’
1 Like
And which camp were you in?
Of course, it also requires self-serving bias to assume that it matters whether or not you are competent, confident, or otherwise whatever you and others feel about each other. IMO a curious society is faced outward, trying to comprehend the world at large. Whereas a timid society are scared of the world, and resort to playing status games amongst themselves instead.
1 Like
I very much hope that I was one of the Imposter syndromes. I may actually have been an imposter, but I don’t think so. After I burned out I definitely became something of an imposter.
This topic was automatically closed after 39 hours. New replies are no longer allowed.
