Mount Stupid

Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya submits an essay on the much-discussed and widely applicable Dunning-Kruger effect, focusing on its relevance to the theme of evolutionary thinking that is the theme of this podcast.  David Dunning and his protege Justing Kruger published the results of a study they conducted in 1999 at Cornell University titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It".

Transcript

Mount Stupid

 Good day to you, and welcome to Fascinating!  I am your host Rik, from Planet Vulcan.  My ongoing mission on Planet Earth:  to plant seeds of a way of thinking, a way that is based on an understanding of evolutionary processes, with the ultimate aim of helping to sustain and increase the momentum of Earth’s long arc towards prosperous and happy societies, founded on ideals of liberty and justice.

 Contributing editor Slainte na Zdorovya has submitted the following essay about the Dunning-Kruger effect.  She believes that this insightful study explains a lot of the fascinating stuff that is happening on your planet.

 Slainte writes:

 In 1999 social psychologist David Dunning and his protégé Justin Kruger collaborated on a study which measured how the participants in the study, who were students at Cornell University, assessed their own performance at certain tasks and then compared their self-assessments with the results of more or less objective measures of actual performance.

 They published a paper based on their study titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.

 The participants in the study were asked specifically how they rated their own competence in examples of grammar, logical reasoning ability and recognition of humor.

 There are of course objective measures of competence in grammar and logical reasoning.  Humor recognition is inescapably subjective, so the self-assessments in this area were compared to the assessments of a panel of professional comedians.

 The results in all three areas were consistent, and showed that the participants who scored in the lowest quartile, which placed them far below average, assessed their own performances as above average; and the participants who scored in the highest quartile assessed their own performances as being slightly less than they actually were.

 The proposed explanatory takeaway was that the participants who performed least competently not only lacked competence, but also lacked the competence needed to judge their own incompetence.  And the results which revealed this overconfidence did not simply reflect a general human bias towards overconfidence – on the contrary, the bias was strongly correlated with the participants’ lack of skill.

 But were these results robust?  Could the results be replicated?  Could the results stand up to attempts to falsify, as must be the case with any scientific investigation?  

 Since 1999, the Dunning-Kruger effect has been widely studied and replicated across other domains, including:

 Driving ability, where almost everybody believes they are better than average.

 Medicine, where participants evaluated the accuracy of their diagnoses; 

 Finance, where participants evaluated the quality of their investment decisions; 

 Education, where students evaluated their own attainments in mastery of their subject;

 Politics, where participants evaluated their knowledge of current events and public policy. 

 The tendency of the least skilled towards overconfidence has also been observed across cultures, though with some variation in magnitude, probably due to variations in cultural norms.  For example, in East Asian cultures a tendency towards modesty in self-assessment muted, but generally did not eliminate, the overconfidence.

 And what about rigorous hypothesis testing?

 Dunning and Kruger reasoned that if poor abilities at self-assessment were causally connected to, and not just correlated with, underlying incompetence, then training with the aim of improving underlying competence ought to lessen the amount of mismatch between actual performance and self-assessment.

 So they tested this idea by training the participants in underlying competence, then repeated the experiment, and found that accuracy of assessment also improved.  This result added weight to the interpretation that without competence you lack the ability to assess your own competence or lack thereof.

 In other words, the strong indication is that metacognition is indeed skill-dependent.

 These results echoed what Richard Feynman used to say about why rigorous application of the scientific method is crucial; that you have to take pains not to fool yourself, and that you are the easiest person to fool.

 Poorly formulated models of reality produce poor judgments of quality of the models themselves, and of the explanations and predictions generated by the poorly formulated models.

 The insights generated by Dunning and Kruger in this study are broadly applicable in the real world, including in areas that are of particular interest to the theme of this podcast.  Medievalist intelligent design thinking, especially in religion and politics, illustrates this applicability in quite unmistakable fashion.

 Look at the quality of the “arguments” presented by evolution deniers in both religion and politics.

 Religious creationists, for example, argue that evolution is a theory and not a fact, a statement which proves only that they do not have even a glimmer of understanding about what a theory is, and seem to believe that a theory is simply a proposed fact that has not yet been proven.

 The brilliant science and science fiction writer Isaac Asimov gave us a marvelous analogy to characterize the actual relationship between facts and theory.  Facts, he said, are like a pile of bricks; a theory is analogous to a building that is created from the bricks.

 Religionists also argue that observed complexity in nature is itself indisputable evidence of intelligent design, backing up their argument by saying that random chance cannot account for the existence of complex organisms.  They say things like “believing in evolution is like believing that you can throw a bunch of stuff off a cliff and the stuff will self-assemble into a 747 jet airliner”.

 But evolutionists of course do not argue that it is just random chance that is operating; rather it is a process of natural selection driven by hard realities of survival and replication that produces the complex organisms.

 And perhaps most telling of all is that religionists who argue that the natural world could not exist without having been intelligently created will not acknowledge that by the same token, neither could a creator exist without having had a creator of its own, and so on ad infinitum, and tell us that their proposed creator “just exists”.  

 You have to wonder why they can believe that a creator can “just exist” but cannot believe that nature can likewise “just exist”.

 And evolution-denying politicians, for example, argue that without a designer and a guiding hand, society would inevitably exist in a state of chaos.  They believe that only a “visible hand” could possibly create order, and openly scoff at the idea of the “invisible hand” and spontaneous emergent order.

 These politicians believe that they are capable of a thorough understanding of a socioeconomic system, which is in truth of such a level of complexity that no one can possibly understand it, and that based on this unrealistic assessment of the depth of their understanding they can design and direct real-world outcomes.

 Evolutionary thinkers, by contrast, acknowledge that there is a vast amount of information distributed throughout the socioeconomic system, which cannot possibly be accessed in its entirety by planners.

 Our socioeconomic system, or sociome, is organized by the energy that flows through it, and depends for its successful functioning on evolved feedback loops and autonomous error correction, with production and distribution coordinated by prices that are determined by supply and demand.  The price system is the only way we know of that successfully discovers the distributed information.

 Those who believe they can plan an entire economic system and impose their plan from the top down, as well as those who believe in the efficacy of deus ex machina style intervention, not only are unaware of the amount of complexity they are proposing to take on, they clearly do not possess the developed cognitive skills that would be necessary to assess the validity of their own thinking.  This is especially true when it comes to an understanding of the crucial importance of the price system, which is the mechanism that results in efficient allocation of resources if it is allowed to operate.

 The members of the Chinese Communist Party, for example, still believe that they are capable of planning and directing the performance of China’s entire economic system, and propose to do so by micromanaging the behavior of every individual citizen in a totalitarian manner – that by controlling their people they can control reality.

 Unsurprisingly to those with deep understanding of economics, with the recent reassertion of totalitarian control and the stifling of the market processes which had led to a period of strong growth following the reforms instituted by Deng Xiao Ping, the Chinese economy is increasingly wracked by huge dislocations, high unemployment rates, inefficiency and increasing stagnation.

 Those among us who would stop short of totalitarian control nevertheless believe that they are capable of piecemeal acts of coercion, for example by legislating prices and wages, and that by doing so they can control outcomes.  And when their plans inevitably fail and the consequences are not what they had envisioned, they excuse their failures by blaming it on the opposition or on human failings like “greed”.

 The defects in the thinking of both the wannabe planners and the wannabe interventionists are abundantly clear to those with true expertise, and who understand the evolutionary nature of the sociome; but these defects are invisible to the planners and the interveners because they do not understand enough even to be aware of how much they do not understand.

 In terms introduced by the popularized interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, the planners and interveners are clustering around the summit of Mount Stupid.

 What is Mount Stupid?

 If you plot a graph with the participants’ actual performance on the horizontal axis, and with self-assessment of performance on the vertical axis, Mount Stupid is the high point on the curve where actual competence is low and confidence is high.

 As actual performance improves beyond the range of low competence, the confidence of the participant typically descends rapidly and moves into what has been called The Valley of Despair; and as competence improves still more and the performer consequently gains not just competence but also in the ability to self-assess with greater accuracy, confidence also rises along what has been called The Slope of Enlightenment towards a Plateau of Sustainability.

 The question naturally arises as we observe behavior:  why do so many people remain around the summit of Mount Stupid and never seem to even attempt to gain the competence they would need to justify their level of confidence?

 It can only be because they are getting what they want by remaining incompetent, and have no reason for or interest in developing competence.  

 For religionists of a theistic persuasion, what they evidently want is a feeling of comfort based on membership in a community of fellow true believers, and the feeling of assurance that they will eventually be reborn into an eternal life in paradise.

 For followers of non-theistic quasi-religions such as Marxianity, what they evidently want is a feeling that their existence is important and significant as they righteously do battle against some imaginary evil enemies, even though from a cosmic perspective we are actually no more than dust in the wind.  We human beings occupy an insignificant dot in the universe for an insignificant span of time.

 And even from the more limited perspective of human existence on our planet, we are still insignificant beings in space and time, even as the delusional Ozymandias was in the sonnet penned by the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

 We are only truly significant to ourselves and our circle of family and friends, and this significance, along with a commitment to a productive life, is our proper focus.  

 And to the extent we yet cling to the summit of Mount Stupid, we not only fuck up the lives of our fellows on whom we inflict the costs of our folly, we sacrifice whatever value we personally could have enjoyed during our brief tenure on this planet if we had chosen instead to set out on a journey towards the Slope of Enlightenment.

 Thanks to Slainte for this essay.

 I invite you to have a listen to the next Fascinating! podcast and a look at the next video on our YouTube channel.  You can find access to all podcasts and videos on our web page, fascinatingpodcast.com.

 Please recommend Fascinating! to your friends if you find the lessons from nature in these essays personally valuable.

 Theme music:  Helium, with thanks to TrackTribe.

 Live long and prosper.

 Practice the art of winning without defeating anyone.

 Savor your experiences.

 Treasure your memories.

 Anticipate a happy and rewarding future.

 And respect nature’s wisdom.