Dunning-Kruger Disease and the Impostor Syndrome

Good news, impostor syndrome sufferers.

You may be free of Dunning-Kruger disease.

The Dunning-Kruger effect

Wikipedia says the Dunning–Kruger effect is:

a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is.

It continues:

It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.

In plain language: people who don’t know how much they don’t know, think they know a lot more than they know.

Dunning and Kruger also found that competent people often are unaware of how competent they are relative to others. That’s because they are aware of a lot that they don’t know, they are aware of how competent their peers are, and because they don’t hang around incompetent people.

As a result, they tend to think they’re average, at best.

Dunning described the Dunning–Kruger effect as “the anosognosia of everyday life,” which is the coolest thing I’ve read today.

Dunning-Kruger disease

Dunning-Kruger disease, a term that I just made up, is the pathological condition incompetents believe they are competent.

DKD is the acronym for Dunning-Kruger disease. I also just made that up.

People with DKD are dangerous and should be quarantined for their own good and the good of society.

Impostor Syndrome

Wikipedia says Impostor syndrome is

a psychological pattern in which one doubts one’s accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud.” Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck or interpret it as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be.

People with DKD never suffer from impostor syndrome.

Never.

If you have even a mild case of impostor syndrome, it means you’re not suffering from Dunning-Kreuger Disease.

That’s a good thing.

Having impostor syndrome doesn’t mean you are competent, but it raises the probability that you are.

DKD may help explain why you don’t feel as competent as the people around you.

You can be aware of what the competent people around you know—and you can’t be as aware of what they don’t know. You, on the other hand, know both what you know and what you don’t know.

And the people around you with DKD?

They are entirely certain of their competence. Unless you look into their actual accomplishments, you may be taken in.

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Practical implications of consciousness and knowledge

-In yesterday’s post I wrote:

That’s all very interesting, but I can already hear someone asking me, “Are there practical consequences?”

The answer is in the next blog post. Or will be.

And the answer is: “Yes.”

You mostly don’t need to know how things work

We use lots of products and tools and systems without knowing much about how they work.

Take cars.

Most of the time, all you need to know is how to get into one, how to start the engine, how to release the brake, how to speed it up and slow it down, and how to steer it. And the rules of the road.

You also need to know that when that little doohickey looks that way that you better find a gas station (or a charging station) so you can increase the supply of energy available to the car.

There are other things you need to know, too.

But there’s a lot you don’t need to know.

You don’t need to know, most of the time, how the energy that you stored in the car makes the car move.

You don’t need to know how car batteries work. For a gas-powered car, you mostly don’t need to understand how turning that switch or pressing that button, causes the engine to crank. How cranking the engine makes it catch. How pressing the accelerator makes the engine go faster.

Most of the time there are only two situations in which knowing things like this–and other, more detailed–car-related stuff has practical consequences:

• When your car is not operating correctly, and you want to fix it

• When your car is operating correctly, but you want to make it perform better

Here’s where I’m going to get to in a few hundred words:

Knowing the details of how your mind works mostly doesn’t matter. You just use it. But knowing the details matters in two similar situations:

• When your mind is not operating correctly, and you want to fix it

• When your mind is operating correctly, but you want to make it perform better

Alternatives to fixing and improving

Note the conditions attached to both those situations: “you want to fix it” and “you want to make it perform better.”

If your car isn’t operating correctly, you don’t have to fix it. Depending on how poorly it’s working, you have these choices:

• Live with the problem

• Find an alternative means of transportation

• Fix the problem

If your car is operating correctly, there’s no need to make it perform better. You have the same two alternatives.

If your mind is not operating correctly, your choices are:

• Live with the problem

• Fix the problem

• Find an alternative to the broken mental function

If there are no alternatives, you’re down to live with it or fix it.

Likewise for mental improvements

Knowing the details gives you options

I know lots of stuff about how cars work. Bobbi knows far less. When a car doesn’t work, I have options she doesn’t have.

I can try to apply my car-knowledge and find the source of the problem and fix it myself, or I can call on an expert.

Sometimes I know enough to know which of several experts is more likely to help. Occasionally I can use my knowledge to decide whether the expert I have picked knows how to fix the problem.

Bobbi has one choice: she calls the expert. Luckily she’s got an expert on call 24x7. Me.

If I want to improve my car, I know enough to do the research needed to find out how to improve it and what might work with my kind of car, and so on.

Or I can ask an expert.

Bobbi has one choice: she calls the expert. Again, it’s me.

Your mind is broken

A car that’s in good working order will probably continue to work well for years if you take it in for regular service and doing whatever the service person says needs doing. (This is one of the other things you need to know.)

At some point, the service person will tell you that you probably need a new car, and then you buy one.

Not so with your mind.

You probably know that your mind–like almost all minds–works better when you’ve slept, that it works very badly when you’re drunk or on drugs.

You may have learned that your particular mind: works best in the morning, or the middle of the day; that it does this kind of task best in quiet surroundings, this other kind best in a coffee shop, and this different type out in nature.

You might have learned some things about your mind that are quirky: like it shuts down completely when you see a clown.

You might have learned some things that help you acquire new information and new skills more effectively.

But most people don’t confront the sad truth: how many errors their minds make. They fail to operate correctly–in small ways–all the time, and in more significant ways, many times a day.

As I’m writing this, my mind conducts my thoughts to the fingers pressing my computer’s keys. Sometimes I press the wrong key. That’s a mental error. Sometimes I pick the wrong word — another, bigger error.

Because I’m paying attention right now, I’m noticing some of the errors that my mind is making. But most of the time, this kind of error goes unnoticed by most people most of the time. Noticing mental errors requires an intention that’s not usually present, and it often requires a skill that takes practice.

Most people have enough skill to notice big stupid errors with consequences too significant to ignore. But when the effects of an error are smaller, most people follow one of two simple, lazy strategies. One: they just move on. Two: they correct the error, but pay no attention to finding and correcting the underlying cause of the error.

In both cases, the mind that makes that kind of error will keep making that kind of mistake.

But what if you decided you wanted to repair your mind, so it didn’t make the same kinds of errors repeatedly? What if you decided that you wanted to improve your mind so that it could do the things that it does well, only more efficiently?

Just as with your car: to fix it when it’s broken or to make it better when it’s working, you have to know more about how your mind works.

Or, just as with your car: you need to call an expert.

Mind experts

Getting an expert to repair or improve your mind is similar to and different than getting one to repair or improve your car.

The similarities: you have to know enough to find an appropriate expert. You have to know enough to decide whether what the expert is recommending is likely to work–or likely to be worth trying.

The difference–and it is a big one: you can drop your car off at the expert’s shop and pick it up next Tuesday. You can’t do that with your mind.

You’re the only one who can do the work required to fix or improve your mind.

An expert can give you guidance–delivered through media or in real life. But you have to do the work.

And since you have to do the work, you have to have some idea of what you are doing.

Folk remedies and illusions

There are lots of folk remedies for fixing common mental problems.

You might be able to undertake some simple repairs yourself.

But many of those folk remedies are wrong because the mind works through a series of illusions, and most folk remedies don’t take that into account.

To remedy deeper mental problems or remedy or improve rapidly, you need to know how the mind actually works rather than how it seems to work.

You need to know the reality of mental processes, not just the illusions.

You need to be aware of the illusions and not be fooled by the illusions so you can make the repair.

The illusion of knowledge creation

Which takes us back to yesterday’s post.

Most of what our minds do is unconscious.

We have strategies for error correction, but we do them unconsciously.

What we do unconsciously is limited to what we do habitually. Our unconscious minds are lazy and won’t break out of unconscious patterns without conscious attention.

Without bringing consciousness to fixing a mental problem, very little will improve.

To fix a problem takes knowledge. The knowledge that’s needed is always already present, implicit in the mind, but it may require a lot of conscious work to bring that knowledge to consciousness.

There may be a way to become conscious of the knowledge that you need with less effort.

The previous post is a step in that direction.

It needs clarification. And will get it tomorrow.

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Consciousness and knowledge

The motivating idea: all knowledge already exists. It’s just not in a form that’s amenable to consciousness.

I have a list of 100 numbers. To make it easy, let’s make it the numbers from 1 to 100.

I also know a procedure for producing the sum of a list of numbers—an algorithm: write down the first number as the partial sum, add the next number to the partial sum, and continue adding until you’ve reached the last number.

Now I have the total: 5,050.

Is that new knowledge? In some sense, it’s not.

That knowledge was implicit in the mechanical application of the algorithm to the list.

Conscious creation

Consider this as a conscious activity.

I start being conscious of a list of numbers and of a procedure for adding them.

I am conscious that there is a number that is their sum, but I can’t be conscious of the actual number unless something happens.

That something else can be this: I can form an intention to add the numbers.

If I decided to act on that intention, I would become conscious of the first partial sum.

Then I will become conscious of each number, in turn, as I add it to the partial sum.

I repeat the process until the final sum appears, and then I am conscious of that number.

I could write a program that does the calculation.

In that case, I would need to be conscious of other things: the representation of the algorithm, the representation of the set of numbers, the procedure for running the program.

If I act on that intention by applying that knowledge, out pops the number that is the sum.

I can be conscious of that number without having been conscious of each of the individual numbers in the list.

Other ways of knowing and becoming conscious

Those are two ways of knowing the sum to be conscious of it,

Are there other ways?

As it happens, there are many.

One is the one that I used when writing this essay. The sum of the first and last numbers in the sequence—1 and 100 is 101. So is the sum of the second and next-to-last—2 and 99. And so on. There are 50 pairs of numbers, each adding to 101. So the sum of the numbers is equal to 101 * 50 or 5050.

To become conscious of 5050 that way, I did not have to be conscious of each number in the sequence. I did have to be conscious of that algorithm, that the paired totals were 101, that there were 50 such pairs, and then to do the math.

That’s a simpler way of knowing and becoming conscious of that number.

Are there other ways?

In fact, there are infinitely many ways, most of which are harder than adding up the numbers one-by-one, which in turn is more laborious than my algorithmic trick.

But are there even easier ways?

Of course, there are—once the necessary base knowledge is in place. A person sufficiently skilled at mental multiplication and knowing the short-cut algorithm could become conscious of the sum of a sequence of numbers as soon as they were told the bounds of the sequence.

Knowledge in this essay

Take this essay. I think it contains useful information that I intend to preserve as knowledge.

But where did that come from?

A physicalist would argue that everything required to produce this essay is already present in the physical systems that constitute my mind. By that, I mean: the physical structure of my brain, its current electrical and chemical state (both static and dynamic), along with any affordances outside my body, without which my mind would lose some of its operating capability. For example, things I have written on paper that I can access, and there’s stuff in the cloud I might refer to (based on what’s already in my brain.)

Whatever knowledge this essay contains must already have been present, but not in a form convenient to consciousness.

I was able to become conscious of the ideas that are in this essay by intending to write it and then sitting down and writing it.

And how did that happen?

Indeed, I sat down, and my fingers typed the words that became this essay. I reread the words and sometimes found them inadequate in some cases. Then my fingers typed other words that I express the idea more effectively.

Because I’ve written this, it’s more accessible to me. But the knowledge was there before I started writing.

Because I’ve posted it, it’s easier for you to become conscious of it. But their knowledge was there before I posted it.

You didn’t need me to write it.

The knowledge that led to this essay is not unique to me. It exists in countless other minds. My mind happens to be one that put the pieces together and produced this essay.

The knowledge in this essay existed elsewhere in the universe.

Instances of the necessary knowledge were incorporated into my systems.

Then the written form of that knowledge Shipyard.

All knowledge is everywhere

It must be true that every bit of knowledge that there will ever be expressed is already implicit in knowledge in other places in the universe.

And surprisingly, it must be true that every bit of knowledge is already present in every bit of the universe!

There’s only one wave function, after all, and that wave function is everywhere, and it must encode everything.

It’s just harder to pull specific bits of information out of some parts of the universe than others—sometimes almost impossibly harder.

But it’s always possible.

We humans are knowledge detectors and knowledge constructors. (And so are all other living things—with proclivities for detecting different kinds of knowledge. And so are other materials forms from which living things—themselves collections of information—emerge)

We experience the flood of information that surrounds us, and from it, we extract the knowledge that is most useful to us.

We assemble bits of knowledge we’ve collected, and we reorganize it and express it as “new knowledge.”

But it’s not new.

All new knowledge is implicit in already-existing knowledge.

Implicit knowledge

Suppose you have a list of 100 numbers, and you have an algorithm for adding numbers. Then knowledge of the sum of those numbers is implicit in the list and the algorithm. If you carried out the algorithm, the knowledge would become explicit and more available, but it’s not new.

Same with the universe.

All the knowledge that there ever was or ever will be was present in the instant after the Big Bang. It might have seemed chaotic, but it was not.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics tells us that entropy—which measures the disorder of the system—always rises. So it must be the case that the early universe—which might have seemed chaotic—was more orderly than it is today!

The net disorder of the universe has gone up steadily while local systems—like the planet Earth or you or me—represent islands of concentrated. The orderliness of the universe goes down even as the local orderliness of small regions goes up.

That’s entropy for you!

This essay is a case in point.

It’s a bit of order in a chaotic universe.

It contains information that I think is useful enough to preserve—thus meeting David Deutsch’s criteria for knowledge.

But where did that knowledge come from?

Like the sum of my list of numbers, it was there all the long.

The knowledge was within me, but I didn’t know that I knew it.

Like adding a hundred numbers to get the knowledge that was always there, I wrote this to find out what I knew.

And if you read it, you’ll know, too.

Practical consequences

That’s all very interesting, but I can already hear someone asking me, “Are there practical consequences?”

The answer is in the next blog post. Or will be.

The answer is “yes.”

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The hive-mind springs into action.

It’s February 13 (or was, when I started this), and I’m Not Dead Yet. Though with COVID-19, who knows how long that’s going to be.

Seriously, it’s not that serious. I just can’t resist shitty jokes.

And since I haven’t written a post in a couple of days, why not start with the inspiring story of the global response to COVID019?

Here’s what I think it means.

• The world is waking up.
• What’s waking it up
• The right kind of crisis
• Signs of the global mind at work
  .

The world is waking up

Years ago, I read a few books by and/or inspired by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit priest.

His idea was that the biosphere—the layer of life that covers an otherwise empty, barren rock—is turning into a noosphere.

The word noosphere, from the Greek noos, for mind, is the idea of evolving global consciousness.

It’s all headed toward an “Omega Point” (a maximum level of complexity and consciousness towards which he believed the universe was evolving).

We can see it happening. The collection of connected minds on the planet is the noosphere. New minds are joining, and the connections are getting faster and stronger, and amazing things are starting to happen.

Most of the minds in the noosphere are human, but some humans are gateways between the core collection of human minds and minds connected to their beloved cats, dogs, and other non-human animal minds.

Teilhard de Chardin lived before the internet, but he saw the noosphere growing as telephone and radio networks. Before that, print and writing vastly increated the connectivity-reach of individual human minds.

I’ve gotten to see the global mind start to wake up and direct itself to some of the serious problems that face us.

What’s waking it up

It’s the coronavirus,

Actually, it’s not the coronavirus. There are, and have been lots of them. SARS was one of the more famous coronaviruses, but it’s a big family with lots of cousins and uncles. The one that everyone is talking about is COVID-19, named for the year in which it was discovered 2019.

Here’s a rendering (not actual size):

This has been a wake-up call for the noosphere.

The right kind of crisis

Climate Change or Global Warming or AGW or whatever you want to call it may be a threat. It may even be a crisis.

But it’s the wrong kind of crisis.

COVID-19 is the right kind of crisis to help wake up the noosphere.

It’s not the first such crisis we’re going to see, and we’re going to need to get good at it.

Someone dies, and you can test their blood for the COVID-19 antibody. And if it’s there, you can pretty much know what killed them.

Where’s the test for determining that someone died due to climate change?

Hint: there isn’t one.

Hint: there can’t be one.

The result: reasonable people will waste lots of time debating the issue.

Reasonable people can debate hypotheses about the long-term consequences of our present emissions trajectory. Reasonable people can argue about what “our current trajectory” means. Reasonable people can talk about the best combination of adaptation, mitigation, and prevention.

COVID-19 is a whole other ball game.

COVID-19 is not climate change.

And it’s not even Ebola.

Remember Ebola?

Remember the Ebola scare of a couple of years ago?

Overall, eleven people were treated for Ebola in the United States during the 2014-2016 epidemic

That was over years. With this one, in a couple of months, we’ve already got fifteen.

Yeah, there were some cases outside Africa. One here, two there. But Ebola never really left its breeding grounds.

Here’s the map. Outside of Africa, the dots represent single infections, and this is five years after the initial outbreak.

Meanwhile, here’s what COVID-19 looks like,

There are few parts of the world as thoroughly connected to the rest of humanity as China.

Ebola was relatively slow-moving. There was time for debate and delay.

And of course for hysteria.

COVID-19 is different, and the global mind is saying, “We don’t have time to fuck around. We need to get on this!”

And get on it, we have.

Signs of the global mind at work

I’m fresh back from a visit to r/china_flu, a moderated subreddit that’s collecting and organizing the knowledge being generated all over the world r/china_flu is not the only hub for this kind of knowledge. There’s r/COVID19 more heavily moderated subreddit that aggregates and organizes more technical knowledge about COVID19—but is still open to discussion and analysis by less technical folks.

The Daily Discussion Post this one from February 13, is a starting point.

Here’s what today’s post looks like:

The WHO pages contain up to date and global information. Please refer to our Wiki for additiona information and a FAQ.

Well sourced map and data (John Hopkins)

Comment on our Feedback & Moderating Thread here!

Please click here for our official website

Join the user-moderated Discord server (we are not responsible for this)

Tracking coronavirus: Map, data and timeline - BNO News Live wire service

Our official YouTube channel will soon have interviews with multiple professionals and scientists subscribe to it to be notified when they are uploaded!

COVID19: WHO Director names virus, gives concerning opening statement | YouTube (05:29)

Join r/COVID19 for scientific, sourced discussion. Rules are enforced more strict there than here going forward.

Click here for the previous Daily General Post - Feb 12,
2020

That’s a gateway to a world of knowledge.

Click on some of the links, and you’ll see what people, all over the world, are doing to figure out what’s going on. People with useful skills can find what other like-minded folks are doing, and how to connect with them. People with the most vital, critical skills have dropped what they are doing and jumped in.

Here’s another encouraging sign, from here

SUCCESS UPDATE! Petition to take paywalls down during outbreak pushes publishers to release thousands more open-access articles for scientists

So, OK, not everything is perfect.

But cheer up. You’re not dead yet.

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A meditation on dullness

The Mind Illuminated, which I wrote about here, describes dullness as one of the phenomena a meditator needs to address.

Dullness: A lack of mental energy. There are differing degrees of dullness—from deep sleep or unconsciousness, through strong dullness such as drowsiness, to subtler forms of dullness such as feeling a bit “spaced out.” Dullness is a form of scattered attention. But unlike distractions, where attention “scatters” to other objects of awareness, dullness scatters attention from the breath to a void in which nothing is perceived at all.

My dullness

I hate the feeling of dullness.

As I started writing this morning, dullness began to rise in consciousness.

I hate dullness. Hate it.

Or I might have hated it if I had not been feeling so dull.

Instead, I disliked it in a vapid sort of way.

Severe pain is worse than dullness. Dullness can be a solution to otherwise unbearable pain.

But I’d rather experience mild pain for a long time to dullness for a short time.

Dullness is the slow death of consciousness.

Dullness and duality

To the dual mind, dullness is “bad.” Clarity or alertness, or whatever is opposite, is “good.”

To the non-dual mind, dullness is an experience. Clarity is an experience. Neither is good or bad. They just are.

To the dual mind, a person can either experience dullness or clarity.

To the non-dual mind, one can be dull and clear at the same time.

Dullness revealed

This morning I was writing about my aspirations.

I wrote that I aspired to know all that I could know. I wrote that I aspired to experience all that I could experience.

As I wrote, I became aware of my mind’s dullness.

As I continued to write, I became aware of the dullness growing.

Initially, I experienced what The Mind Illuminated might describe as “subtle dullness.”

Subtle dullness began to grow into what TMI might describe as “strong dullness.”

Making dullness disappear

As I became aware of the growing dullness, I thought: I’d like that dullness to disappear.

Then I thought: dullness is a part of existence.

I wrote that I aspire to experience whatever I can. So I’m willing to continue to experience dullness.

I was willing to experience dullness, I thought, but I was not willing to have that dullness keep me from writing.

I was willing to experience dullness, as long as it didn’t get in my way. The dullness could arise, as long as it was not obstructive.

I was willing to experience dullness—but only conditionally.

But what dullness is obstructive by its nature?

Non-dual dullness

Now we’re back to non-duality.

Can I be obstructed and not-obstructed at the same time? There’s a view of the world that says: no. It’s either, or.

That’s the answer from duality. But is that the final word? Can both be true?

Can I write with dullness as well as I could write without dullness?

Writing does not require dullness or clarity. It merely requires writing. Fingers tap, and words arise. Words connect, and sentences arise.

This writing is ample proof that dullness is no obstacle to writing.

It’s arising right now (or it did as I originally wrote it) alongside strong dullness. The writing arose with dullness just as it arose with clarity.

The words simply appeared.

These words arose:

I’m aware of the dullness, and aware that part of my mind is devoted to resisting it. The dullness has not prevented me from writing this.

It’s always sunny

One lesson I learned flying in airplanes for work: it’s never sunny or cloudy. It’s always sunny. Sometimes it’s sunny without clouds. Other times it’s sunny with clouds.

Cloudiness is a kind of illusion that keeps you from seeing that it’s sunny.

You just can’t see that it’s sunny because the clouds are in the way.

Getting rid of dullness

As the dullness arises, so arises an intention that I might articulate as “get rid of the dullness.”

So arises a belief that I might express as “I must stop what I am doing and get rid of the dullness.”

So arises the thought: “This is impossible. I’ve tried to get rid of dullness just by wanting to and failed.

Then arises the idea that I must stop what I am doing and sleep, or take a cold shower, or eat, or go for a walk or do something other than what I am doing because otherwise, the dullness will persist.

Why struggle to get rid of clouds when it’s sunny?

Dullness or not, when I intend the words to appear and allow them to appear, they appear.

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