
Can you be too incompetent to understand just how incompetent you are? - robg
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/?hp
======
10ren
It's also acknowledging that our thinking is partly shaped by our terms. If
you think in terms of Java, you might not see an elegant functional solution.
If you think in Haskell, you might not see an elegant imperative solution.

The known unknowns are like a door you haven't opened. The unknown unknown is
_not even realizing there's a door_. It's a thrill to discover such doors.

It makes me hopeful to think that just a couple of steps off the beaten track,
there are miracles that the mainstream has not dreamed of (nor me). _There are
more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy._ Such is the motivation of a would-be
scientist/inventor/entrepreneur.

One may laugh at such incompetent people as in the article... but how do we
know _we_ aren't incompetent? One way is objective tests: If we can pass a
maths test, we likely know some maths. If our programs behaves as we predict,
we likely know some coding. Another way is to consult with a community of
people reputed to be competent, and ask them if we are. Universities do this -
notwithstanding the study in the article - hopefully at least at the
postgraduate level. I may be stupid, but at least I'm _state-of-the-art-
stupid._ Of course, there are famous examples of radical scientists, scorned
by the scientific establishment, who turned out to be right... (though perhaps
famous more due to their appeal than their frequency.)

~~~
thunk
> _It's also acknowledging that our thinking is partly shaped by our terms._

Good point, but sounds like Sapir-Whorf:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

~~~
nitrogen
There's an article today on Ars Technica/Nobel Intent related to this concept
that considers the influence of language on spatial reasoning:
[http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/language-in-
spac...](http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/06/language-in-space-
language-and-orientation-skills-correlate.ars)

I'd always wondered if maybe thinking in Japanese or German allows Japanese or
German people to come up with better solutions to some computing or
engineering problems. Thanks for sharing that link.

------
frederickcook
I worked at an open-pit copper mine in New Mexico one summer, part of which
included a pretty intense 3-day safety course. One of the best take-aways was
their definition of four levels of competence:

Unconscious Incompetence: you don't know what you don't know Conscious
Incompetence: you begin to learn what you don't know Conscious Competence: you
learn your task, but need to concentrate on it Unconscious Competence: you can
perform your task without that level of concentration

The obvious most dangerous one is unconscious incompetence, but the other
dangerous one is conscious competence. As you learn your task, you may become
overconfident at this point, which may lead to lose of concentration on the
task if you know your task better than you do.

Applies not only to working with heavy machinery at a mine, but server
administration, coding, etc.

Reference: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_stages_of_competence>

~~~
superkarn
Reminds me of this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121775>

------
lotharbot
Just a few weeks ago, my five-month-old son suddenly discovered that he had
hands. He's been staring at them, intentionally grasping objects, waving and
gesturing quite a bit since them. Thought of another way, just a month ago,
any solution to any problem that required the use of hands was an "unknown
unknown" to my son.

It's been amazing to watch my son as he discovers things most of us take for
granted, as he changes "unknown unknowns" into "known unknowns" or even
"known".

~~~
jswinghammer
Wait until he figures out he can use those hands to put things into his mouth.
I think that's a major hobby for kids until they're much older.

Good luck with your son! Congrats!

------
stcredzero
I see this in the Irish trad and Old-Time scenes all the time. A lot of
sessions have the one sweet guy or gal who everybody likes, but who is so bad,
it's an empirically measurable fact. There's one Houston drummer whose
technique for holding her stick is so bad, her 2nd beat each measure falls at
random every time. You could take a recording in Audacity, put in the tic
marks, and it would be glaringly obvious. I've encountered many musicians with
no rhythmic sense and others with no sense of pitch to speak of. I've also
encountered musicians who are very competent in one genre, but have not enough
clue to know they're clueless in Irish trad. This weekend, I was playing with
a wonderfully competent old time player who had no clue the emphasized beats
in Irish trad fall on the _downbeat_ and not on _every upbeat_. Doing the
latter obliterates the occasional deviation that can add playful (purposeful)
changes to the rhythm. It's like showing a Picasso blue period painting under
a blue floodlight.

The lesson here: One can be very good in one area, but still very clueless in
another, even a closely related one!

~~~
jerf
"It's like showing a Picasso blue period painting under a blue floodlight."

I hate to noisy up the posts, but sometimes you gotta call things out in a
positive way, just to change things up: I salute you for that metaphor.

~~~
smutticus
As a general grammar and linguistic nazi I feel compelled to point out that
the above trope is actually a simile. No offense intended.

------
Mc_Big_G
_It is a wise man who knows that he knows nothing._ \- Not sure who really
said it.

What I find interesting, and somewhat disheartening, is that the people who
are incompetent and constantly brag about themselves, actually tend to be more
successful because people admire confidence.

~~~
yesimahuman
Why I think everyone should go to and have the opportunity to go to college:
you learn that you _don't_ know so many things. It's really enlightening.

~~~
pradocchia
I think this illustrates the sorry state of education. I learned about unknown
unknowns in high school from Socrates. I hope my son learns them even sooner.
There's an opportunity cost in false confidence. Better to get that out of the
way at a young age, and learn to feign confidence when necessary.

~~~
yesimahuman
But that isn't everything. At a university you start to see that subjects that
might have appeared to be shallow at first glance are really quite vast and
complex. It's hard to say with confidence you are an expert on any of those
subjects after seeing a little ways down their respective rabbit holes (which
you rarely get the opportunity to do in high school).

~~~
callahad
Which is exactly why I love this stanza from Pope's Essay on Criticism[0]:

A little Learning is a dang'rous Thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring:

There shallow Draughts intoxicate the Brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Fir'd at first Sight with what the Muse imparts,

In fearless Youth we tempt the Heights of Arts,

While from the bounded Level of our Mind,

Short Views we take, nor see the lengths behind,

But more advanc'd, behold with strange Surprize

New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise!

So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try,

Mount o'er the Vales, and seem to tread the Sky;

Th' Eternal Snows appear already past,

And the first Clouds and Mountains seem the last:

But those attain'd, we tremble to survey

The growing Labours of the lengthen'd Way,

Th' increasing Prospect tires our wandering Eyes,

Hills peep o'er Hills, and Alps on Alps arise!

[0]: <http://poetry.eserver.org/essay-on-criticism.html>

~~~
billswift
A counter-quote:

"A little learning is _not_ a dangerous thing to one who does not mistake it
for a great deal." -- William A White

------
DanielBMarkham
_Dunning wondered whether it was possible to measure one’s self-assessed level
of competence against something a little more objective — say, actual
competence._

A much more interesting question, one for my next blog entry, is the opposite:
in a complex world of millions of different specialties about which much is
known at great depth, might it be impossible for anybody to know when one is
exceeding one's competence? Might this, instead of being a humorous story
about bank-robbers or a story about "others", be a story about the entire
population of the planet?

The easy question is: given a specific field, how do we help people self-rate?
But it's not a very practical question, because in the real world it's never
just one vertical field to rate inside of. The tougher question is the
matrixed-skills one. The brain surgeon who speaks about car maintenance as an
expert although he is completely wrong, the psychologist that waxes on about
social ills as an expert although he is completely off-base, the college
professor in mathematics that forays into economics with nothing more than a
lunch pail and a bologna sandwich. This is the really the more interesting
(and important) scenario. (The hacker that ventures into cognitive psychology.
Yes, I get the irony.)

Note that I picked skills that were far apart from each other: brain surgery
and automotive repair, for instance. These are the easy cases. The crazy hard
ones are where the skillsets are very close to each other. Not sure that
outsiders could spot that happening.

~~~
billswift
There are actually two different questions about competence:

Competence compared to some objective standard, basically "Can I do that?",
which I think often can be answered realistically (at least where "that" is
specific enough).

Competence compared to others, or how do my abilities rank compared to others,
which may not really be answerable, except very generally and vaguely.

The big problem comes in trying to generalize from specific competencies to
"general competence".

------
yummyfajitas
The Dunning-Kruger effect is an overcomplicated explanation for a much simpler
phenomenon: no one can effectively estimate their own competence. Highly
competent people are also a poor judge of their own competence.

[http://sitemaker.umich.edu/kburson/files/bursonlarrickklayma...](http://sitemaker.umich.edu/kburson/files/bursonlarrickklayman.pdf)

~~~
sprout
It's perhaps even more trivial than that: no one can effectively estimate
competence.

~~~
yummyfajitas
That's what the paper suggests, I should have been more clear in my statement.
Neither incompetent, highly competent, nor people in between can effectively
judge competence.

------
oz
Proverb traditionally attributed to the Chinese:

 _He who knows and knows he knows,

He is a wise man; seek him.

He who knows and knows not he knows,

He is asleep; wake him.

He who knows not and knows he knows not,

He is a child; teach him.

He who knows not and knows not he knows not,

He is a fool; shun him._

------
zach
In the Bible, Proverbs incessantly mocks those who lack wisdom, who are simply
called fools. Like an illustration that fools instinctively repeat their
mistakes like a dog comes back to lick up his own vomit. Nice.

Then comes this thought: "Do you see a man who is wise in his own eyes? There
is more hope for a fool than for him."

~~~
oz
In some of the cases, the word translated 'fool' is the Hebrew word _nabal_
which should better be translated as 'perverse.' Thus the verses which says,
"The fool hath said in his heart there is no God, They are corrupt, they have
done abominable works, there is none that doeth good." (Psalm 14:1; Psalm
53:1)

------
kurtosis
"Unknown unknown solutions haunt the mediocre without their knowledge."

Discovering new solutions and ideas often involves a lot of naivety - Making
progress often requires a willingness to approach a problem with a truly fresh
perspective, free of the prejudices and blindness that come from having too
much depth in a field.

While I can't always find the discipline for this - I like to try and attempt
a problem on my own, even when I strongly suspect that there is an existing
solution better than anything I could invent. I am surely less competent than
someone who knows the existing solution and applies it without hesitation, but
the more competent expert is less likely to improve his methods unless he is
willing to move beyond established methods where he risks screwing up.

Intelligence _can_ emerge from stupidity.

This is actually a heuristic for solving the reinforcement learning problem:
there is a known tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. If the vast
bulk of the solution space is crap and you know this then you are less likely
to explore and find a better solution.

see: <http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/%7Esutton/book/the-book.html>

------
pwhelan
Quite frankly, we can't judge our own competence very well without the wisdom
of age and careful observation & contemplation. Even then, we can only judge
our competence relative to others.

This is assuming we have a working, widely accepted definition for competence
which we tend to gloss over and use only in specific contexts.

I also strongly disagree with "it is a a wise man who knows he knows nothing".
A wise man knows what he doesn't know, but he certainly knows some things. He
knows where to apply his own judgment and where to apply the thinking of
others.

~~~
foulmouthboy
You're taking it too literally.

------
1053r
One somewhat useful heuristic I've found for judging my own competence: If I
think someone is wrong but I can't say why, I'm probably the incompetent one
(they may be also). But if I think someone is wrong and I can give clear
directions as to what they are doing wrong and how to fix it, I probably have
a better understanding of the subject domain than they do.

It doesn't always work, and but it's especially handy when you turn it around
and get someone else to tell you exactly why what you are doing is wrong.

~~~
pradocchia
This is a very, very dangerous heuristic. Competence does not imply the
ability to articulate said competence. Many (most? all?) competences are in
the doing, not the saying. Articulation is its own competence, and there's a
bridge from one to the other, but only a bridge.

It is so dangerous because you are more likely to write someone off (yourself
or others) if the articulation requirement isn't met. When it's others that
you write off, you compound whatever latent Dunning-Kruger effect you may be
experiencing. When it's yourself, you then open yourself to distortion caused
by the Dunning-Kruger effect in others. eg, "he seems to know what he's
talking about" etc.

------
csmeder
I would argue everybody does it (besides maybe Buddha :)

This book covers many of the fallacies people fall for
[http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400077427/randohouse...](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400077427/randohouseinc-20)
Stumbling on Happiness

"Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible
futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why?
As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine
what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just
as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does
imagination play tricks when we try to look forward."

------
Aegean
This can happen in the opposite extreme in the software engineering world.
Only few best hackers see things through, and the remaining %99 argue with
them missing the point that is very subtle.

------
bravura
The list of tags for this article is simply amazing: ANOSOGNOSICS DILEMMA,
BANK ROBBERIES, DECISION-MAKING, DONALD RUMSFELD, DUNNING-KRUGER EFFECT,
INCOMPETENCE, KNOWLEDGE, LACK OF KNOWLEDGE

------
Tichy
Read your greeks...

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing>

This actually had impressed me already at an early age (despite not really
having read Socrates/Plato directly). I can only hope that it protected me
against the DK effect at least a little bit.

Also note that Socrates ended up being poisoned by his enemies.

I also subscribe to the "all code sucks" variant of the theorem.

~~~
stcredzero
Abbreviating Dunnking-Krueger as DK -- not sure if the publisher of the DK
educational books want that to become widespread!

~~~
bitwize
I read it as "Donkey Kong effect" at first. Do the incompetent tackle problems
by lobbing barrels at them like an angry gorilla?

~~~
stcredzero
If barrels = the conventional tools that worked before, then that's not a bad
way to start, so long as you stop after hitting your cranium on some brick
walls and go and do something else. The answer often comes to me over
breakfast the next day.

------
johnl
You can say that about smart people too. It is just hard to jump outside the
framework of your own education and experiences and come to a conclusion that
conflicts with everything you see as being right. He should have validated his
hypothesis by backing into his conclusion using several independent methods
and not relying on just one.

------
thirsteh
This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect>

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which "people reach erroneous
conclusions and make unfortunate choices but their incompetence robs them of
the metacognitive ability to realize it." The unskilled therefore suffer from
illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher
than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities,
suffering from illusory inferiority. This leads to the perverse situation in
which less competent people rate their own ability higher than more competent
people. It also explains why actual competence may weaken self-confidence:
because competent individuals falsely assume that others have an equivalent
understanding. "Thus, the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an
error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems
from an error about others."

“In the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of
doubt.”

— Bertrand Russell

~~~
unwind
Uh, more than half of the article is an interview with Dunning, so that's
quite clear from the article itself.

------
rameshnid
I have long believed, it's impossible to assess ones own intellect. What's
more interesting is the ability of a genius to locate and acknowledge another
genius even if he is from another field and even when it's not obvious to
others.

Geniuses exist in cliques.

------
julius_geezer
Listen to me sing, and you'll have no doubt.

