“But the key lesson of the Dunning-Kruger framework is that it applies to us all, sooner or later. Each of us at some point reaches the limits of our expertise and knowledge. Those limits make our misjudgments that lie beyond those boundaries undetectable for us.”
Is the feeling that you are competent always actually an indication of incompetence?
The Dunning-Kruger effect reflects a blind spot each one of us may have. How can deal with this effectively? Are there indirect ways of gaining more insight into the areas in which we grossly overestimate ourselves? Is it perhaps so that the level of our confidence on any topic is merely an indicator of our own ignorance? This is a scary hypothesis because, if true, it would mean that we could never have any confidence in our own conclusions. But I think the hypothesis is not true.
On what do you base your feeling of competence?
Thus, it does not appear to be true that people with low competence are self-assured whereas people of high competence are uncertain. The main point is that with people of low competence their self-confidence is unjustified. The hypothesis that confidence is always an indication of ignorance is not true. The central question is: do we have a good reason to be confident about our own competence?We can draw several lessons from these conclusions. First, we cannot trust our own confidence about our competence to be reliable. It can be justified or unjustified. Second, we need different basis to determine the adequacy of our own level of confidence. As I wrote in this article, a good way to check your own knowledge about a topic is to explain in detail, preferably on paper, what you know about the topic. This can be a good way to discover that you may know less about the details of the topic than your thought. Third, we can, to some extent, focus on maintain a beginner's mindset, even when we know relatively much about a topic. While we can be quite confident about some topics within our area of expertise, at the same time, we can keep on paying attention to the topic about which have questions, and are confused or uncertain. Just about any area of expertise is quite complex and often evolving. There are always grounds to keep questioning your own expertise and to keep learning and investigating.
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