David Dunning Quotes

“For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack.”

“If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. When you’re incompetent, the skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”

“To fall prey to another person you have to fall prey to your belief that you’re a good judge of character, that you know the situation, that you’re on solid ground as opposed to shifty ground.”

“To recognize superior expertise would require people to have already a surfeit of expertise themselves.”

“We’re living in a world in which we’re awash with information and misinformation. We live in a post-truth world.”

“What’s curious is that, in many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.”

“When people are uninformed, they know they don’t know the answer, and so they will be more open to hearing from others with real expertise. If we think they know enough, however, we’ll just cobble together what seems to us to be the best response possible to someone asking us our opinion, or a policy, or what we think. Unfortunately we’re programmed to know enough to cobble together an answer.”

“In many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize — scratch that, cannot recognize — just how incompetent they are.”