Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

I wish I could upvote it many times.

Failure is not normal and it is speaks badly of you no matter what's the reason. Most people including me are not perfect and it will happen but that doesn't mean failure is alright, that means that we're an problem.

The only thing one has any right in their life to ever blame are themselves.

Imposter syndrome imposter syndrome, a/k/a IS².

The Dunning-Kruger effect is something you have to be very careful with. It's come out of social science, so, you have to keep up a high level of skepticism.

The first problem is the "effect" can be discovered in purely random data, because it's basically just a statistical artefact. There's a description of what went wrong here [1] and a paper from 2017 here [2] ("Our data show that peoples' self-assessments of competence, in general, reflect a genuine competence that they can demonstrate. That finding contradicts the current consensus about the nature of self-assessment"). In other words it doesn't replicate when the data is handled correctly. By itself that problem means DK should not really be cited for anything.

But even if you ignore that:

• The original study does the usual pop psychology thing of extrapolating from a tiny self-selecting sample of American college students to all of humanity.

• It has a stupid design in which the students are asked to rate how funny jokes are, with some local comedians being the "experts", and this is presented as a measure of social skills i.e. simple disagreement on what's funny is sufficient to get you dinged as incompetent-but-doesn't-know-it in DK's research.

• It also has a problem with circular logic where they found that one of their hand-picked joke experts disagreed with the others on what's funny, meaning that comedian would have been considered one of those idiots who thinks they're an expert, but they were picked by Dunning & Kruger specifically because they were an expert. This shows that the nature of many tasks is subjective and certainly the one they'd chosen is subjective, but instead of fixing their definition of expertise they just tossed the guy out of the expert pool.

(the study does have two other tasks, but there's not enough detail in the descriptions to know if they had similar problems)

Dunning wrote an attempted rebuttal in 2022 [3], but it is unable to directly attack the statistical claims and instead argues that because there have been replications, the effect is real. But this doesn't make sense because if you replicate an invalid methodology you'll get the same results; this doesn't make them correct. He also argues for it by presenting examples of "skills" that are simply brain teasers/well known gotchas, rather than actual skills one might practice.

[1] https://fortune.com/2023/05/08/what-is-dunning-kruger-effect...

[2] https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/

[3] https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dunning-kruger-effect-an...

I agree with your comment, and feel that in a software engineering context, the quote

> To find the sweet spot between impostor syndrome and overconfidence, you first need to understand that you can make mistakes without it reflecting on your competence.

is incomplete without describing the environment and people you are around when you make these mistakes. The teams I have worked with until now have all been extremely kind in dealing with other engineers making mistakes and focused on how we could reduce such mistakes as part of a team. It helped me build a mental checklist on dealing with such a situation and when/how to take the risk and when to bring in additional help. I never really noticed the impact of this until I worked with a colleague who seemed to have trouble releasing their work to production and always kept delaying things out.

A musician fails to perform a piece hundreds or thousands of times while learning it. A programmer fails to apply a concept many times until they fully understand it. To imply that failure is not normal and not alright is to imply that everybody should be able to perfectly do anything in their life without any prior practice.

Clearly, the word "failure" in this context is insufficient, because we all would agree that some failures are unreasonable and some are an absolutely normal and necessary part of personal growth.