Incompetent, overconfident & unaware

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. — William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

If the late novelist Kurt Vonnegut had been a social psychologist — and thank goodness he wasn’t, because the graphs alone would have finished him off — he might have been pleased to learn that two real psychologists, David A. Dunning and Justin Kruger, discovered something in 1999 that explains a great deal about the human condition.

They published it in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which is not usually where you go looking for cosmic jokes, but there it was. I stumbled across the article on a cloudy day recently mostly devoted to rereading old Vonnegut essays, which never get old.

The psychologists’ finding was simple: people who are bad at things are often very sure they are good at them.

Not just a little sure.

Spectacularly sure. “Very stable genius, greatest president ever” Donald Trump sure. Pete Hegseth masculinist identity politics sure. Stephen Miller might makes right and woe to the conquered sure.

They are so sure, in fact, that their certainty prevents them from noticing that they are bad at the thing. Their incompetence hides itself from them like a burglar who also happens to be the homeowner.

So it goes.

“Dunning and Kruger,” science writer Jim Holt relates in an essay in his terrific 2018 book When Einstein Walked with Gödel:

…  administered three sorts of tests to their subjects: logic, English grammar, and humour (where ratings of jokes were judged against those of a panel of professional comedians). In all three, the subjects who did worst were the most likely to “grossly overestimate” how well they had performed. Those who scored in the twelfth percentile in the logic test, for example, imagined that their overall skill in logic was at the sixty-eighth percentile.

This discovery might have remained a harmless curiosity — like discovering that pigeons can recognize paintings by Monet — except that humans have built a civilization that requires a frightening number of complicated decisions. Decisions about bombing Iran, about taking control of the central banking system, about the wisdom of filling the atmosphere with the leftovers of burning ancient dinosaurs.

A species that struggles to operate a television remote without consulting a 10-year-old is now in charge of planetary climate systems.

Poo-tee-weet?

You might imagine that the people making these decisions would be the most careful and thoughtful among us. You might imagine them speaking cautiously, weighing evidence and occasionally admitting that something is confusing.

But then, you might also be a siren on Titan.

Inevitably, the loudest voices belong to people who are absolutely certain about everything. Wars are simple. Economies are simple. Climate is simple. History is simple. All problems are simple if you do not understand them.

This sort of confidence travels well. It fits neatly into speeches, headlines and Truth Social posts. It is tidy. It reassures people that the universe is manageable and that the fellow at the podium definitely knows where the steering wheel is.

Whether the steering wheel is attached to anything is another question.

Vonnegut preached humility. This was his belated response, after walking off the stage at the U.S. Library of Congress half a century ago, when a man in the audience asked “about his right, as a leader of America’s young people, to make those people so cynical and pessimistic”: The beliefs I have to defend are so soft and complicated, actually, and, when vivisected, turn into bowls of undifferentiated mush. I am a pacifist, I am an anarchist, I am a planetary citizen, and so on.

Similarly, scientists and historians and other professional worriers — people who have spent decades studying these messy systems — tend to have beliefs complicated by nuance, knowledge and recognition of what they don’t know. They say things like “the evidence suggests” or “the situation is complicated.”

Nobody ever started a war with the phrase “the evidence suggests.”

A society that valued intellectual humility — people saying “I don’t know enough about this yet” — would look very different. It would listen more carefully to people who study complex systems. It would reward caution instead of bravado. It might even treat uncertainty as a sign of seriousness rather than weakness.

This would require a cultural shift so dramatic that it may be slightly less likely than teaching the average IKEA assembler to pause halfway through the bookshelf and think, “You know what, maybe I should check the instructions.”

Still, the instructions do exist.

They’re written by scientists, historians, economists, journalists (real journalists) and other people who have devoted their lives to understanding how things work. And humility, in other words, is not just a moral virtue. It’s a cognitive upgrade.

The problem, as Dunning-Kruger effect shows, is that the people who most need to read the instructions and the qualifiers are often the ones most certain they already know what they say. Besides, such knowledge might cramp their rapacity and venality.

The tragic little trick uncovered by Dunning and Kruger is that the people most likely to misunderstand the world are also the least likely to suspect they misunderstand it. The skills required to recognize wisdom are often the same skills required to possess it.

Channelling Matthew Arnold, I made the same observation once before in a blog piece on Colorado politician, businesswoman, gun rights activist and Beetlejuice enthusiast Lauren Boebert:

The crucial element necessary to success in politics and pretty much all human endeavours, as the poets have told us, is neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. And certainly not intelligence or character. Rather, nothing succeeds like a self-delusional confidence in one’s non-existent talents and a bottomless sense of entitlement.

Bertrand Russell put it more succinctly in his 1933 essay The Triumph of Stupidity: “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Which leaves the rest of us in a curious position: passengers on a very large and fragile spaceship, listening carefully while the most confident people on board explain that they are certain they know which buttons do what.

Maybe some of them do.

Some of them absolutely do not.

And it’s the latter group bursting with ex cathedra confidence. The overconfidence of the incompetent. “Who knows?” Holt reflects at the end of his essay. “The most overconfident judgment in history might turn out to be cogito, ergo sum.”