Polidicks: Unconscious Incompetence

There is a point when we reach a level of knowledge in a topic that we think we know more than we do. It happens throughout our lives. As toddlers we get confident in standing until we are coaxed into taking steps and we fall and are shocked at our failure to overcome gravity. As we age we learn, decades after we think we have mastered balance, that one stone under our sensible shoes can send us tumbling back down.

I am entrenched in middle age and remember the folly of adolescence, when we believed we understood the world, only to learn repeatedly that we didn’t know much at all. I still too often realize that I don’t actually understand the world around me because it is infinitely complex, but also because I am foolishly overconfident.

The term “Dunning-Kruger effect” refers to this lack of awareness about some domain or another. We all fall prey to it. There are millions of people who made millions of dollars buying cryptographic tokens in the late aughts who now believe that they have some skill at identifying good investments in the wider economy. If I had bought ten bitcoin when I first heard of bitcoin (which I could have afforded at the time), I would now have nearly a $1m worth of bitcoin.^[1] It wouldn’t have meant that I had incredible foresight to know a wise investment. It would have meant that I got lucky.

The Dunning-Kruger effect often gets identified as lack of intelligence, but absolutely no one is immune. We are each intelligent in our own way and ignorant in many ways.

A phrase that drives me crazy is “common sense” as something that someone “should have known.” There is absolutely nothing that any of us should have known. We had to learn it all. We avoid touching a hot stove not because we have common sense, we avoid touching it because we have hurt ourselves touching it. We shouldn’t shame curiosity, and curiosity has killed more people than cats. Maybe cats have common sense.

When we talk about common sense, we are usually talking about the things we learned through institutional wisdom and our ability to follow others in our group. We read cues to mirror their actions.

The phrase “he makes it look easy” works because if you don’t know how to (play ping pong/recite a poem/juggle six bowling pins/etc.) watching someone really adept makes it seem easier than it is. This is prevalent in youth. Many of us got good at something when we were young because we thought it should be difficult because we were young and lacked confidence in the world, when actually it would be difficult for anyone at any age.^[2] The difference between a good college athlete, a low performing professional, and a hall-of-famer is small but incredibly important. You can only understand the difference when you really know the domain.

It is easy to confuse unassailable proof with the false evidence when we assess our skill. We fall for it if it confirms our biases. It would be understandable if someone who has won an award that said that they were the “best” at something subjective might believe that they were the best at it.

I won a “best” award at work in 2011 or so, and it is definitely on my resume, but I don’t actually believe I was the best at the time, even in the limited domain of the award. The award meant that someone thought I had done a good job at something and they convinced a group of people that it deserved recognition. Pity the fool who wins a “best actor” award one year and thinks that they were the best actor that year. They should celebrate their recognition while knowing that there is no objective thing as a “best actor.”

I have spent the last decade confident that humans would continue to build on our institutional knowledge and that the next generations would benefit from learning the lessons of our ancestors.

We don’t shit where we eat, not because it is common sense. We don’t shit where we eat because decades of study of bacteria and illness led us to learn not get our shit near our food. We don’t have common sense about shit, we have instinct. It smells bad, so we instinctively avoid it. When it doesn’t smell bad, we are tempted to roll around in it. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that baby shit isn’t horrendously smelly and that caretakers have to actively keep babies from covering themselves in their own shit. Stupid babies.

I have never broken a bone larger than a digit. Does this mean I am exceptionally aware of the ability of my body to achieve physical things and that I never broke a bone while riding a bike or skateboard, or while playing football or diving into pools and rivers? That would be a reasonable assumption that is purely correlation, not causation. The reasons I’ve never broken a bone are that I am afraid of breaking a bone and I’ve been lucky. I stopped doing the things that skateboarders do to break bones when I started really getting hurt while skateboarding. Scars and sprains and road rash were enough to prevent me going higher and faster.

All the people that are alive today, or rich today, or hugely successful at what they do, should have the humility to know that they were, at least in part, lucky. All of us are, at one point, too ignorant to know that we shouldn’t be doing the thing we were doing.

I have spent the last decade confident that humans would continue to improve the world we live in. We’ve always had hiccups and corrections, external and self-inflicted, but the quality of life worldwide is undeniably better today than it was a hundred years ago.^[3]

I’m starting to worry that we’ve reached the overconfidence stage as a species. We seem to be getting to the point that we think we got here through an incredible skill at being smarter than other living creatures and that our “intelligence” has led us to create the solutions that will keep us living longer and better than our predecessors. I hope that the indicators of this unconscious incompetence(we don’t need to follow some scientific evidence/we can solve current problems through future technology/“things will get better if we just get back to how it was before”^[4]) are just another blip in the overall upward trajectory of the quality of life.

In America we are struggling with drug-, alcohol-, and food-related deaths, gun violence, health regressions (vaccine hesitancy, drifting mental health support), incarceration growth, and levels of income inequality similar to those which have preceded the downfall of many government systems.

I hope that these fears are predominantly American fears. I actually hope that the rest of the world is learning lessons from our failures at this point. My concern is that we humans have learned these lessons before. We learned them from England and France, from the Romans and Mongols, from the Aztecs, Incas, Egyptians, Persians, Vikings…from all the dead empires that have flamed out or burned themselves to the ground. It seems likely that America has just as much chance of burning itself down as being burned if we don’t figure out how to broker peace in the modern world.

The cure for Dunning-Kruger is humility and teamwork. We can’t see ourselves well, we humans. We are designed, after millennia of surviving threats from the natural world, to see threats around us, which makes other people seem a threat when other threats have been vanquished (food, shelter, safety). The most successful people, groups, communities, and countries over the longest terms have recognized that the strength of those around them is not a threat to their own security, but a boon for it. We Americans got to where we are because we reduced divisions and focused on prosperity for the widest number of people. We literally wrote a Declaration and then a Constitution about including many (yet not all) people in the country and had decades in improvements in freedom and civil rights and prosperity all at the same time post WWII^[5]

The good news and bad news is that I won’t be alive to see how it all works out. To see if America can become Spain or Japan, a former empire who contracted back to a healthy, if flawed country that is doing the best it can for its people in a modern global world, or if it becomes largely forgotten as a fallen empire, its land divided up for newer (better?) countries. As crazy as the world seems, it seems unlikely to happen in some catastrophic way (as I feared as a child during the world of the Cold War and Chernobyl), and if it does, I’m as unlikely to survive as most of America huddled into our population centers.

I am mostly an optimist, so I think these problems will be solved, but I’m also roughly familiar with human history and think that we will solve them only after much bloodshed and catastrophic death. The Black Plague didn’t kill nearly 50% of humans in Europe because they didn’t have enough common sense, it killed them because we didn’t yet have institutional knowledge to help people survive disease in crowded population centers. Is it optimistic to think that humans will survive on earth while thinking it’s possible that there will be fewer of us in two hundred years than there are today? Sort of.

Is it foolish to think that I have any answers at all? Is it likely that I am just one more data point in the group of overconfident humans in the realm of Conscious Incompetence? It is not just likely, it is a guarantee that I am foolish, yet I hope it’s my pessimism that’s wrong, not my optimism.