Dunning Kruger Effect

I most often hear the Dunning Kruger effect as the misquoted aphorism "Psychologist say that people think they are much smarter than they really are - they don't know what they don't know." This is not a decent statement of the phenomena and is strictly incorrect.

What Dunning and Kruger did discover is that individual scores of IQ or WORDSUM in a population form a distribution across the population studied and that self-assessment off IQ was over exaggerated by the individuals with 'below average' or bottom two quartiles of the distribution. On the other hand, individuals with 'above average' or upper two quartiles of the population underestimate their measured IQ. The phenomena described by Dunning and Kruger can be assessed for any group.

The second finding that is much less well known is that each quartile knows with uncanny precision that the quartile below them is less smart and the quartile above them is more smart. The least intelligent can see that almost everyone is smarter. The most intelligent individuals can determine that most everyone is less smart. Although this is a specific case of innumeracy combined with stupidity, that is a surface reading.

My conjecture after working with the public is that no worse population exists than the 2nd quartile. Every bad thing on earth finds fruit in the 2nd quartile. I will illustrate with an example. I sell data circuits to medium and large businesses. In network terms I am designing and selling Wide Area Networks (WANs) to people with multiple Local Area Networks (LANs). There are two main things on the LAN - data from the interwebs and voice (over Internet Protocol or VoIP). Here is what happened.

An IT vendor named Barry (almost his real name) sold his services to a three city WAN I was providing. For each LAN there was a computer network and a high end telephone system. Barry was installing both at each of the three sites. On the hour following the completion of the circuit - exactly one hour after I had completed my job - Barry called to explain a host of changes he needed to make to my WAN for his LAN to operate properly. Where were these questions before and during the turn up of the circuit? They were trapped in Barry's 2nd quartile skull.

An Unrelated Tabernacle

It turns out that Barry works for his mother who had sold his services to my customer because they all went to the Holiness Tabernacle of Lord Jesus with Signs Following. Everyone we interacted with from this congregation was in the Bottom Quartile except Barry who was in the 2nd Quartile. Barry is the smartest man in the church. Barry is a stupid man in the land of the awesomely stupid. Not only does he not know what he does not know - he has constant feedback from the Bottom Quartile that his self assessment of greater super powers is the least good thing imaginable.

Long story short, Barry called me up everyday for three weeks to attempt yet another explaination of his grand plan. It was intricate and fascinating. I have installed over one hundred circuits and Barry was in a new section - an unexplored territory - of teh stupid. He was asking for configurations that only existed in his fevered mind. No one did it like Barry and Barry did things like no one else. What this means in evolutionary terms is that Barry was jumping into the gaping mouth of a shark he was trying to jump.

Was I short with Barry? Yes I was. I had several conference calls with Barry and the service provider's technical experts. None of us could determine how all of this wasted activity would culminate in the interval between the start of this fool's errand and the last phone call Larry would make before he gave up and admitted defeat. All of us could smell his fear and clearly see his flame-out but we could not hurry him along. Barry had to fuck up at his own leisurely pace. At some point last week Barry stopped calling and threw in the towel.

Then Mama Grizzly took over and wrote a poison pen letter to my boss decrying my malfeasance (I was mean to Barry) because I asked so many questions and did not force smart and competant people to blow up Barry's customer. We were unconvincingly charged with ruining his abject and shabby 'plan' which had unfolded like demon origami before the assembled panel of judges. We had kicked Barry off the island and he knew it. At some point in the process Barry met several of us in the upper quadrant and he found out how his guesses about what to do were not right - his guesses were not even wrong. Barry was fooled by randomness. His own randomness.

Now the Tea Party connection. The mass movement of the stupid and the left behind has pushed Grandma and her red, white and blue Halloween costume onto the TV sets of the proletariat. Like The National Enquirer and the Weekly World News of the old media, these lumps of clay were now glued to the Confirmation Bias Engine. They only news they watch is  Fox News. The only books they 'read' are authored by Glenn Beck, Bill O. and Sister Sarah. The whole of the message bombarding them daily, hourly and by the minute:

"You, dear viewer, are not in the bottom two quartiles of intelligence. Your WORDSUM score is decent. You are not eat up with teh stupid. Fear the hoity-toity and demand notice as the most exceptionalism dimwits. From someone who is smarter than you. God and Jefferson Davis are a good place to start. Oh, and misread The Holy Federalist Papers and the Blessed Constitution."

But that is how mass movements start. The revolution has started and the stupid are the cannon fodder. Same old same old. Except now with added internet - the grave yard of teh stupid.