Ask HN: How Can One Correctly Assess Their Own Ability?

2 points

17 years ago

I am sure that most of you have, by now, heard of "Unskilled and Unaware of It."[1] This paper, authored by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in 1999, describes how the least competent tend to overestimate their abilities while the most competent tend to underestimate. The eponymous "Dunning-Kruger effect"[2], referenced on HN from time to time, serves as an explanation for those unfortunate individuals in our field and in others who possess that toxic mixture of ineptitude and intellectual indolence (they lack the drive to improve, because they see nothing that requires improvement). While providing us with a compelling warning against hubris, it does not seem to provide any further clarity concerning self-assessment; according to Dunning-Kruger, you likely succumb to illusory superiority or illusory inferiority, but either way your perception of yourself is likely to be illusory. One of the authors, Dunning, described how the study shook his confidence: "I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad at, and I didn't know it."[3]

One might conclude from Dunning-Kruger that since accurate self-assessment appears difficult, you ought to just err on the side of caution and try to underestimate your abilities. After all, what harm can come from that? Unfortunately, this advice seems to contradict insight gleaned from other cognitive bias studies. Take the Pygmalion Effect[4]. Teachers were told that certain students chosen (unbeknownst to the teachers) at random had high IQs and would turn out to be high achievers. The result: those students ended up becoming the high-IQ high achievers that their teachers had been led to believe they were. It would seem from this that one should do the opposite of what Dunning-Kruger intimates; you should overestimate your abilities, assume you are among the elite, and with enough time and effort your reality will come to match your perception of yourself.

I feel somewhat torn between not wanting to end up as one of those arrogant incompetents but also not wanting deprive myself of whatever benefits positive thinking might bestow. After all, can you really be successful without some confidence? How do you manage self-perception, confidence and humbleness?

1. http://gagne.homedns.org/~tgagne/contrib/unskilled.html

2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_effect

3. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2000/01/18/MN73840.DTL

4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

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