Dunning-Kruger, Take Two, or The Failure Mode of Clever

[chris_gerrib]

So, a few days ago, the great John Scalzi had another post on the Dunning-Kruger Syndrome. For those just joining, the Dunning-Kruger syndrome is where incompetent people don't realize that they are incompetent, even as they do things incompetently. I'm not sure what prompted Scalzi's musings, but this post followed closely on the heels of a cryptic statement that "the failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'."

At any rate, Scalzi's post led me to the discovery of the idea that no one knows what they are doing. Steve Schwartz, the author of that link, postulates three types of knowledge:
1) Stuff you know
2) Stuff you know you don't know
3) Stuff you don't know you don't know (Rumsfeld's "unknown unknowns.")

It's a long and interesting post, but one of the ideas is that spending your life in category #3 is dangerous. One will go blissfully along doing stuff, unaware of the potential danger, until, sooner or later, wham! So the goal is to get as much stuff into categories 1 and 2.

Thus endeth today's lesson...

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I'd add a collorary to 3 which covers certain people we know. Stuff you don't know you don't know but think and act like you are an expert at level 1.

That's a slightly different and even more dangerous category than 3. :)

I'd say it's like a decent enough welder moving onto Stainless Steel and/or Aluminium welding and not knowing that what you're about to do is dangerous.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

False expertise is addressed in the longer article.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Then I'd better read it :)

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Good article, enjoyed it.

I came across an example of the first thing he mentioned when we sold our first start up. It came as something of an epiphany that everybody else was making it up at the same time.