Dunning Kruger Effect Quotes

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The problem is that the people with the most ridiculous ideas are always the people who are most certain of them." (The Decider, July 21, 2007)
Bill Maher
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
Bertrand Russell
Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre
Robert Hughes
those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Many fail to grasp what they have seen, and cannot judge what they have learned, although they tell themselves they know.
Heraclitus (Fragments)
Like all vain men, he had moments of unreasonable confidence.
Warren Eyster (The Goblins of Eros)
The Dunning Kruger Effect: Dumb people like Trump don't know how dumb they are. They don't even know how much stuff they don't know. They don't know that other people know the stuff they don't know that they don't know. Dumb people like Trump believe they know everything there is to know.
Oliver Markus Malloy (American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America)
Bax had learned there weren’t many things a dumb guy liked more than to have someone tell him how smart he was.
dbschlosser
There is, and there always has been, an unusually high and consistent correlation between the stupidity of a given person and that person’s propensity to be impressed by the measurement of I.Q.
Christopher Hitchens (The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect: Dumb people like Trump think they're super smart, because they are so spectacularly stupid, they don't even know how much stuff they don't know. They are so dumb, they don't even know that other people know a lot more about a topic than they do.
Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert)
Don’t let the Dunning-Kruger effect cast its shadow over you. If you want to be great at something, you have to practice, and then you have to sample the work of people who have been doing it for their whole lives. Compare and contrast and eat some humble
David McRaney (You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself)
The Dunning-Kruger effect was proposed by David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999. They found that, if people have limited knowledge on a topic, they tend to be extremely confident in what they’re saying and grossly overestimate their competence to discuss it. Conversely, as people gain more knowledge, they become more shy about expressing it. If we apply this theory to social media conversations, the people who know the least will be commenting the most because they’re over-confident. The Dunning-Kruger effect, combined with empathy destruction, could create an environment where those with the least knowledge are the most vocal, yet are unable to comprehend opposing points of view. At the same time, those with the most knowledge are likely to stay silent. Hence we end up with a cesspool of over-confident ignoramuses yelling at each other. Social media in a nutshell, ladies and gentlemen.
Dagogo Altraide (New Thinking: From Einstein to Artificial Intelligence, the Science and Technology that Transformed Our World)
(In case you were unaware, “woke” is a term used by urban teens to describe a mental state in which one believes they are cognizant of how the world really works but instead wouldn’t have a clue if it slapped them in the face. Saying that someone is “woke” is a hip way of saying that they suffer from late-stage Dunning-Kruger effect.)
Jim Goad (Whiteness: The Original Sin)
Uno de los aspectos más dolorosos de nuestros tiempos es que los estúpidos están muy seguros de sí mismos mientras los inteligentes están llenos de dudas
Bertrand Russell
Why are stupid people so confident and why are smart people so shy? The effect of Dunning-Kruger.
Anna G. (The Biased Mind: Why do we make mistakes, and why do we repeat them)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is basically being too stupid to know how stupid you are. That
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: Adventures of an American in Britain)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are.
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is essentially being too stupid to appreciate how stupid you are. That sounds like a pretty good description of the world to me. So
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
If you suspect that you suck, you will probably suck. This is called the self-fulfilling prophecy. If you suspect you are great, you will probably suck. This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. There’s an obvious deduction to be made here, but you probably missed it.
Zach Weinersmith (Science: Abridged Beyond the Point of Usefulness)
Reason and logic are a force for unity. People can rally around the objective, absolute Truth. All of these are undermined by the Dunning-Kruger effect, by the rise of irrationalism. Today, the world is full of subjectivists and relativists who actively sneer at the Truth and proclaim that everyone has their own truth. When you start believing your own truth, your own propaganda, your own bullshit, you become a narcissist. You think you are a god, and that no one is allowed to contradict you. After all, who are they to challenge your truth?
Joe Dixon (Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President)
The Moronarchy is upon us. Welcome to the Dumbocalypse. The Dumbageddon Conspiracy has finally paid off. Freedumb and Dumbocracy have reached their logical conclusion. How did we get here? We can thank the Dunning-Kruger effect, the most powerful and disturbing force in the world today ... the force of human stupidity, the greatest destroyer and wrecker there has ever been. Come and explore the bizarre world of idiots, of the Confederacy of Dunces, of the Dunciad.
Joe Dixon (Dumbocalypse Now: The First Dunning-Kruger President)
The thing about bozos is that bozos don’t know that they’re bozos. Bozos think they’re the shit, which makes them really annoying but also incredibly entertaining, depending on your point of view. Shrinks call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after two researchers from Cornell University whose studies found that incompetent people fail to recognize their own lack of skill, grossly overestimate their abilities, and are unable to recognize talent in other people who actually are competent.
Dan Lyons (Disrupted: Ludicrous Misadventures in the Tech Start-up Bubble)
Imagine you are very good at a particular game. Pick anything—chess, Street Fighter, poker—doesn’t matter. You play this game with friends all the time, and you always win. You get so good at it, you start to think you could win a tournament. You get online and find where the next regional tournament is; you pay the entrance fee and get your ass handed to you in the first round. It turns out, you are not so smart. All this time, you thought you were among the best of the best, but you were really just an amateur. This is the DunningKruger effect, and it’s a basic element of human nature
Anonymous
The internet accelerates everything. And what it is most accelerating is human stupidity. It is destroying attention spans. It is making it impossible for people to study and think. It is reducing everything to infantile videos, memes and soundbites. It promotes trolling on a global scale. It spreads the Dunning-Kruger effect everywhere, and it makes people believe that their crazy, ignorant, half-baked opinions – based on total prejudice and refusal to think about a new subject for anything more than a second – should be broadcast across the globe. The internet is intensifying and magnifying mediocrity and hatred of everything that is difficult and excellent.
Ranty McRanterson (Regatta De Mort: The Mad God)
You cannot have big thoughts if you are constantly doing small things (e.g. always checking your smartphones for the latest micro-updates on your social media of trivia and pointlessness). Using a smartphone makes you dumb. It shortens your attention span and shrinks your intelligence. They should be renamed dumbphones. They don't expand your consciousness, they contract it and make it tiny. Most smartphone users are out of their tiny little minds. Predatory capitalism and its consumer gadgets have been enormously damaging to the intellectual progress of the human race. They have been remarkably successful at dumbing down humanity and promoting the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Thomas Stark (The Book of Thought: Mind Matters (The Truth Series 6))
You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)
Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
When you are unskilled yet unaware, you often experience what is now known in psychology as the Dunning-Kruger effect, a psychological phenomenon that arises sometimes in your life because you are generally very bad at self-assessment. If you have ever been confronted with the fact that you were in over your head, or that you had no idea what you were doing, or that you thought you were more skilled at something than you actually were – then you may have experienced this effect. It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it,
Anonymous
Dunning-Kruger effect: the tendency for some people to substantially overestimate their abilities. The less competent people are, the more they overestimate their abilities—which makes a strange kind of sense.
Anonymous
It’s a rule in life that the more certain we appear about something, the less we know about it. It has a name – the Dunning–Kruger effect – and it is at work every time someone tells you with absolute certainty how things are in the world. The sign of the true expert is his modest awareness of how much more there is to know; how complex and nuanced the subject at hand insists on remaining.
Derren Brown (Happy Derren Brown, How Emotions Are Made The Secret Life of the Brain, No Alzheimer's Smarter Brain Keto Solution 3 Books Collection Set)
Then along came social media, the worst thing of all, the Cretin Unbound. Any moron could shout down Prometheus. The confederacy of dunces could descend like a pack and mock Apollo and Pythagoras. Now I’m putting an end to this circus. The clowns have performed long enough. The joke’s not funny anymore.
Mark Romel (The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery)
People are not interchangeable. They come from a variety of backgrounds and with a varied set of personalities, strengths, and goals. To be the best manager, you must manage to the person, accounting for each individual’s unique set of characteristics and current challenges. Craft unique roles that amplify each individual’s strengths and motivations. Avoid the Peter principle by promoting people only to roles in which they can succeed. Properly delineate roles and responsibilities using the model of DRI (directly responsible individual). People need coaching to reach their full potential, especially at new roles. Deliberate practice is the most effective way to help people scale new learning curves. Use the consequence-conviction matrix to look for learning opportunities, and use radical candor within one-on-ones to deliver constructive feedback. When trying new things, watch out for common psychological failure modes like impostor syndrome and the Dunning-Kruger effect. Actively define group culture and consistently engage in winning hearts and minds toward your desired culture and associated vision. If you can set people up for success in the right roles and well-defined culture, then you can create the environment for 10x teams to emerge.
Gabriel Weinberg (Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models)
Do you know about the Dunning-Kruger effect?” “Never heard of it,” said Will. “Scientific fact,” said Elise. “Part one: Idiots and incompetents grossly overestimate their intelligence and abilities. In fact, they’re so stupid they’re unable to see what complete morons they really are. So they end up with a false sense of superiority, which in turn creates a false sense of confidence, which perpetuates the cycle that constantly reinforces their fake superiority. Part two: Genuinely smart and skillful people chronically underestimate their own abilities and end up suffering from equally false feelings of self-doubt and inferiority.
Mark Frost (The Paladin Prophecy (The Paladin Prophecy, #1))
Dunning-Kruger effect,
Gabriel Weinberg (Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models)
Human stupidity is the world’s biggest problem. It always has been. The Dunning-Kruger effect is now the world’s most urgent issue – because all of the morons think they’re smart, and they oppose all of the genuinely smart people. The Dumbocracy is upon us. The Dumbageddon Conspiracy is in full flow.
Joe Dixon (The Insanity Wars: Why People Are Crazier Than Ever)
impostor thoughts can motivate us to work smarter. When we don’t believe we’re going to win, we have nothing to lose by rethinking our strategy. Remember that total beginners don’t fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Feeling like an impostor puts us in a beginner’s mindset, leading us to question assumptions that others have taken for granted.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
The Dunning-Kruger effect was codified by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of Cornell University. The effect is this: a deliberate and thoughtful bias in judgment that is illogical. The person creates their own reality based on their perceptions and assumptions. An essential part of the Dunning-Kruger effect is the person who has come to the illogical conclusion simply cannot see their own incompetence or ineptitude. They are unable to realize that they are wrong.
Kris Wilder (The Big Bloody Book of Violence: The Smart Person's Guide for Surviving Dangerous Times: What Every Person Must Know About Self-Defense)
David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They had just published a “modest report” on skill and confidence that would soon become famous. They found that in many situations, those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
They found that in many situations, those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence. In the original Dunning-Kruger studies, people who scored the lowest on tests of logical reasoning, grammar, and sense of humor had the most inflated opinions of their skills.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Have you ever come across people that you know are less competent yet they confidently claim to be otherwise? This is in fact another cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect. We tend to deny our failures more than we realize. We fail to acknowledge the gap that exists between our actual performance and how we perceived our performance.
Charles Holm (The 25 Cognitive Biases: Uncovering The Myth Of Rational Thinking)
It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know the more likely you are to perceive yourself as an expert.
Fiona Neill (The Betrayals)
thepsychchic chips clips ii If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135 W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142 Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147 Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159 You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162 Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190 The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191 An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208 Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217 John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224 Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237 [on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go. One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.” Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257 Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251 JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252
Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Uncertainty primes us to ask questions and absorb new ideas. It protects us against the Dunning-Kruger effect. “Impostor syndrome always keeps me on my toes and growing because I never think I know it all,
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
They found that in many situations, those who can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Beware of getting stranded at the summit of Mount Stupid. Don’t confuse confidence with competence. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a good reminder that the better you think you are, the greater the risk that you’re overestimating yourself—and the greater the odds that you’ll stop improving.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Don’t do yourself down,” said Clementine, wishing Malcolm would get some of the confidence that people with absolutely no talents or knowledge tended to have. The Dunning-Kruger effect was such an interesting bias.
Henry Adams (Titus the Germ's Journey through Purgatory)
Graves is a classic example of the Dunning–Kruger effect in action; if he doesn’t know something, he thinks it’s not important. At least he’s diligent in his stupidity.
Robert Pobi (City of Windows (Lucas Page, #1))
This family dynamic might explain why I am so offended by individuals who exhibit the Dunning-Kruger effect, that is, a self-assuredness and supreme confidence despite one’s idiocy (David Dunning was my professor at Cornell University).
Gad Saad (The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense)
Second, impostor thoughts can motivate us to work smarter. When we don’t believe we’re going to win, we have nothing to lose by rethinking our strategy. Remember that total beginners don’t fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Feeling like an impostor puts us in a beginner’s mindset, leading us to question assumptions that others have taken for granted.
Adam M. Grant (Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know)
Ah, the old description-experience gap. Phil may not know the term, but he understands the concept—exactly what he’s been trying to tell me this whole time about poker terms. You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.)
Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb.
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people come to believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are.
Tina Brown (The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor--the Truth and the Turmoil)
Conspiracy theories encourage the masses to believe in lurid nonsense and to denounce intellectuals, who are supposedly all in on the conspiracy and hard at work to deceive and enslave the people. But mediocrities, so we are to believe, can see through all intellectual bullshit … they know experts are idiots. Here we have the Dunning-Kruger effect in full flow, shining like the dumbest star in the sky, the one that hovered above that grubby stable in Bethlehem.
David Sinclair (Locusts, Hollywood, and the Valley of Ashes: Individualism Versus Collectivism)
(There’s even a term to describe the cognitive bias where people who aren’t actually very skilled have a tendency to think they’re better than they are: the Dunning-Kruger effect.)
Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
I am the world's foremost authority on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
W.C. Brown
The Dunning-Kruger Effect arises from a paradox: those lacking skills are doubly disadvantaged — they perform poorly and are unable to recognize their incompetence.
Simon Tröster (Boldly Biased: How We Fool Ourselves)