When We Commit Dunning-Kruger Suicide On Our Own Progress

Have you ever been in a heated debate and found yourself so passionately trying to prove the other person wrong that you’re not even certain that you’re right anymore?

This guy. Right here.

We’re all guilty of it in some manifestation, every one of us. We usually do this in the form of raising our voices, getting agitated, and pointing out what’s wrong with the other person’s stance, not what’s right about our own. It’s a fundamental survival mechanism hardwired into us, to believe that our line of thinking will benefit us and lead us to the right decisions, but if we’re not careful it can creep into important intellectual and physical parts of our life and create real degradation of personal progress.

The Dunning Kruger effect typically refers to those with a low level of subject matter who think their surface level understanding of a concept translates into a deep understanding. They don’t know what they don’t know, kind of thing. Those with the actual deep understanding are usually more reserved, because they know the debate is nuanced and take their time to speak out and voice their position. But the DK effect got me thinking about the greater concept of always thinking that we’re right, as a natural human tendency. After all, no greater example on display than our current individual political beliefs. We’re all 100% right, aren’t we?

The question I’ve posed to myself many times and that I would like to pose to you is, where are you guilty of the Dunning Kruger effect when it comes to the way that you fundamentally operate in the world? I really could care less about your politics or anything else, but what decisions do you make in your life, actions that you take, and sense of self do you carry with you that you know to be true and accurate? That you continuously double down on and refuse to have cross examined despite evidence from time to time that you might need to?

Most people are so eager to self validate their opinions, attitudes, and beliefs that they opt for a constant echo chamber of approval and over time, fall victim to a fictitious sense of superiority that inevitably leads to their undoing on some level.

Here’s a really dumb example that has no sense of real importance in the world, but helpful to illustrate.

Back in 2011, I knew that snatches were bad for your shoulders. I avoided them entirely and I advised others to do the same. It was completely misguided based on selecting low hanging observational fruit: ill-prepared people performing them poorly. It was not until I went to hear a professional teach weightlifting where he said something that kicked me in the teeth as a 27 year old know it all. “People who say snatches are dangerous are really just expressing that they have no idea how to properly teach them.”

Straight facts.

Now, I still don’t love snatches as a tool for functional fitness but I was way off on my take that they were just net bad. I was using bad snatches to misjudge good snatches. Doesn’t mean that everyone performs them poorly, but that kind of selective bias is exactly where the Dunning Kruger is born and it’s used to back nearly every idiotic argument.

While the snatches are unimportant, the mentally I carried with me was extremely dangerous. We all sit behind a wall of faulty logic and false superiority on certain topics, whether we know it or not. My challenge for you is to make your fitness and the exploration for body’s ability the very last place on Earth where you self impose limitations born from an illusory sense of self importance.

Explore and discover what is true. Don’t lean on your selective bias. You’re probably wrong on some level.

-Dave