Impostor Syndrome vs. the Dunning-Kruger Effect

35 点作者 dvcoolarun大约 1 年前

19 条评论

helpfulmandrill大约 1 年前

Just because you have imposter syndrome doesn't mean you#re competent ;)

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Aurornis大约 1 年前

> 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.> Failure is not something to be feared—it’s an opportunity to learn and improve.These pithy quotes can be good for shaking someone out of a perfectionism-induced freeze, but they take the concept too far.Failure is not a good outcome and should be reasonably avoided to the best of your abilities. You can and should learn from it, but removing all fear of failure isn't realistic.This doesn't mean you should never start anything that might fail. I think that's what these quotes are trying to get people to avoid. Instead, they set unrealistic expectations about how failure can't/shouldn't/won't have any consequences when, in fact, it often does.Likewise, making some mistakes is normal. Nobody is perfect. However, mistakes have consequences. It's how you handle and even prepare for those consequences that makes the difference. It's true that you shouldn't be so afraid of mistakes that you can't get yourself to take any risks or do anything, but you shouldn't go so far as to imagine mistakes as having no consequences. If someone is making mistakes at an unreasonably high rate, something needs to change: More training, more supervision, more education, or if all those fail, try a different role.These little feel-good quotes might shake some people out of being too afraid to try anything, but they also mislead a lot of people into unrealistic ideas about how failure and mistakes shouldn't have any consequences.

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dclowd9901大约 1 年前

> For me, the first step towards that mindset was understanding that you can make mistakes without it reflecting on your competenceWorks well for impostor syndrome folks. But I think what the people in the back (the DK folks), need to consider is that you can also do well without it reflecting on your overall competence.It's more about putting ego aside altogether. You're a mushy piece of meat that thinks. Feel good about your accomplishments, feel bad when you fuck up, learn and move on.

fsckboy大约 1 年前

I feel like some perspective needs to be applied to these popular terms. Imposter syndrome: there's a "sadness is not depression" thing going on here.There is an actual Imposter Syndrome that afflicts people who are highly qualified/credentialed, people who have qualified for entrance into elite programs, and put in the time and effort to progress to graduation; and yet for psychological reasons, they have great self doubts about their "worth". This is akin to depression. (a third party would look at you and say "wow, you are super competent and qualified, it's terrible you feel you aren't," and no pep talk they give you is going to help you.)Then there are bouts of insecurity and guilt whereby any of us can feel like "I fibbed on my resume and interview to get this job, and I now I'm surrounded by people who know what they are doing, I hope nobody figures out I snuck in." This is akin to sadness. (a third party would look at you and say "ha ha serves you right, but it's always fake-it-till-you-make-it, everybody feels this way to start out, just grit your teeth, you'll be fine," and that pep talk will help you.)Everybody experiences sadness; sadness clears up and goes away. Not everybody suffers clinical depression, and it does not go away on its own.Dunning Kruger? it's not really an Effect, it's an observation/tendency that is explained by simple logic along the lines of, "you don't know what you don't know".

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chiefalchemist大约 1 年前

One is over-estimating what you know and are capable of. The other is, under-estimating.The former is a problem because it often comes from a lack of self-awareness (and peers willing to speak up when you faulter). The latter can be a problem because it prevents you from fully offering what you have to offer.Of course there's a sweet spot, but if you had to favor one or the other, lean towards Imposter. When you're in DK-mode you're far more likely to make "bad yeses" and those can be painful.

efitz大约 1 年前

I think that impostor syndrome is inextricably linked with Dunning-Kruger.I believe that impostor syndrome is a lack of overconfidence in one's abilities- that implies that you have the ability to assess competence and to assess the skills needed for a job or task, and you don't default to "I know I can do it well". When you encounter a novel job or task, you don't immediately assume competence, and you will remain uncertain until you fully understand the requirements of the job or task. A lot of impostor syndrome comes from "don't fully understand what's required, but it looked complicated from the outside", and will go away with greater understanding provided you actually have the skills and the competence to self-assess.If you lacked the ability to assess competence in yourself, then you likely would not have impostor syndrome.I don't see why it's a balance. Impostor syndrome typically lessens over time as you become familiar with the job/task and the requirements necessary to perform well, and are better able to assess your own skills against those requirements.If impostor syndrome doesn't go away with time, maybe you are correctly assessing that you don't (yet) have the requisite skills.If you never get impostor syndrome, then you either aren't challenging yourself or you might not have the subject area competence to assess your own skills level vs. the jobs/tasks you take on, e.g. Dunning-Kruger effect.

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kazinator大约 1 年前

What syndrome is: "I'm decent, though nothing special and have obvious limitations and weaknesses I acknowledge and work around; most others are incompetent."

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cfr2023大约 1 年前

I heard David Letterman say within the past decade that on the days he did not feel the show was very good, he couldn't bring himself to even leave the building until it was dark outside, out of shame.Meanwhile, at home, I would practically be shaking with excitement waiting for the show to start, I so appreciated it.This tale somewhat suggests that people who perceive themselves as incompetent and inauthentic might spend more of their time striving at work, which could raise the bar, maintain a high standard and eventually breed something resembling confidence.Or it could just continuously undermine their natural confidence and sense of self-worth and debase them such that they are easy to overwork and manipulate. It can also just feed into fears that invalidate the satisfaction of any jobs well done, leading to burn out and feelings of futility.People who are overly confident can behave brashly and do damage, while automatically imposing costs on others, in the form of the time it takes to crack through their false beliefs or the duplication of effort it takes to walk back their mistakes.So, this is kind of a nothing post, basically a lament. It's not clear whether suffers of Impostor Syndrome or Dunning-Kruger type symptoms have an easier path to a more moderate position, but each one seems likely to be rampant in just about any workplace.

somenameforme大约 1 年前

Dunning-Kruger should go the way of the Stanford Prison Experiment. For those who may not know about the latter, it was also largely faked. Guards were coached in how to act, the famous 'Jesus Christ, I'm burning up inside. I can't stand another night!' prisoner was a student who wanted to go study (which he was told he was allowed to, but wasn't) and so he faked a mental breakdown, and so on.Back to Dunning Kruger, it's largely a statistical trick. Wiki actually has a pretty decent section on this [1], alongside some nice examples. The gist of the trick is that the more random a sample is (in other words the more people are unable to accurately self evaluate) the stronger a Dunning-Kruger effect you'd show. The way Dunning-Kruger achieved the really beautiful perfectly linear graph people always reference is by having people self evaluate their ability to... determine a funny joke. And so broken was their test that they had to eliminate one of their 8 professional comedian judges, because he couldn't determine a funny joke, by the standards of their test. And the remaining 7's scores were judged, by the paper itself, as "moderately reliable."And I suspect this was intentional. The first thing they would have done is to plot a scatter graph of their results. And they would certainly have quickly realized the transform (by bucketing) and the scatter plot tell radically different stories (again the illustrations on Wiki make this more than clear), but only one of them is true![1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#Statistical" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect#...</a>

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RobMurray大约 1 年前

Dunning-Kruger has been thoroughly debunked. <a href="https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/202012/dunning-kruger-isnt-real" rel="nofollow">https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-do-you-know/2020...</a> <a href="https://scitechdaily.com/math-professor-debunks-the-dunning-kruger-effect/" rel="nofollow">https://scitechdaily.com/math-professor-debunks-the-dunning-...</a>

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KwisatzHaderack大约 1 年前

The advice “don’t be too hard on yourself” only works on Imposter Syndrome. I don’t think this works on “Dunning-Kruger” though.

static_void_大约 1 年前

You can't have imposter syndrome with out the conscious or unconscious idea that you've "fooled" all the rubes around you into thinking you're good at something.Even in doubt you're still doing some mental gymnastics that allow you to place yourself above your peers. It's inherently self centered and arrogant way of thinking about yourself. The opposite of self aware.

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mugiseyebrows大约 1 年前

Dunning-Kruger Effect may or may not exist, study that "found" it used motodological tricks to get desired results.

pierat大约 1 年前

Shitty pop-psychology is shitty pop-psychology.A more realistic "impostor syndrome" is the IT idea of 'fake it till you make it'. In other words, its a tacit admission you dont know shit and you're googling for ideas until you get something that sticks. And yeah, most IT is like this. Even Stack Overflow is a meme - search here and copy/paste regardless the quality.And, well, it's not impostor syndrome if you're a know-nothing idiot.And the crap about Dunning-Kruger.. It just serves a way to shut experts up and dismiss their experiences and knowledge. Its basically the pseudo-science crap way of saying "My quiet ignorance is better than your direct assurances".Then again, business types also believe in shit like forcing all employees in Myers–Briggs Type Indicator crap, and then comparing that across everyone. And if you know anything about psychology, you don't do longitudinal comparisons of this sort of crap.

darkerside大约 1 年前

Impostor syndrome for me, Dunning Kruger for thee

TrackerFF大约 1 年前

Dunning-Kruger effect has become the most abused and overused piece of pop psych in the history. God I wish we could just erased it from the collective vocabulary.

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throwD7136BA974大约 1 年前

This is a personal anecdote about this topic so feel free to ignore, but I recently had one of those epiphanies that you only see in movies that is somewhat relevant here.Background: I'm a software developer that has worked for 30 years professionally and has used computers for at least 40. Languages and technologies range across pretty much everything popular (and many that were not).I've always considered myself intelligent to very intelligent. I own lots of books, love learning, etc. So much so that I considered it a deep part of my self-image. Except while attending a very good engineering school, I generally considered myself the smartest person in the room (yes, insufferable, really).Now, internally (stored in one of those places in your mind that you know are there but you just pretend isn't), I knew this wasn't the case. I have a terrible memory and have always seemed to have to work at least twice as hard in math and sciences and still only had a vague understanding of what was going on. Even to this day I can tell you a lot of findings about the fundamentals of computer science theory but I couldn't explain them to you except in broad sketches. And if you asked me specifics about a book I just read I would likely draw a blank. That said, I've had very successful career as a developer.Recently, I began playing Go more seriously after playing casually for years with another (much higher ranked) player. I've joined a local group, play online regularly, study books, etc. While I previously thought I was a pretty good amateur I was quickly disabused of this notion. I was beaten handily by almost everyone I played. Worse, studying made almost no difference. This caused me a bit of a intellectual breakdown. It was as if what I always knew deep down was actually true: that I'm NOT particularly smart or gifted. That I'm at very best "average" if not below. Go shined a big, bright floodlight on all of those insecurities that I hide from myself. My entire self-image was shattered.I'm still picking up the pieces of this realization but over the past few months it has radically changed how I deal with other people as well as how I perceive myself. I think I'm a little more understanding, a lot more humble, and maybe a bit more "human". I'm still a successful software developer, but now when I'm studying something new I'm not doing it out of some misguided belief that learning it will somehow make me better than other people, but because it will make me a better software developer that can help solve problems better. I don't treat knowledge as something that I can lord over people to show that I'm smarter than them. And I seem to assume better of people than I did before.And I still play Go, poorly.

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JaggerFoo大约 1 年前

Chicks dig the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

mike_hearn大约 1 年前

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] <a href="https://fortune.com/2023/05/08/what-is-dunning-kruger-effect-smart-intelligence-competence-john-cleese/" rel="nofollow">https://fortune.com/2023/05/08/what-is-dunning-kruger-effect...</a>[2] <a href="https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/" rel="nofollow">https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/numeracy/vol10/iss1/art4/</a>[3] <a href="https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dunning-kruger-effect-and-its-discontents" rel="nofollow">https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dunning-kruger-effect-an...</a>