The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias manifesting in unskilled individuals suffering from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude (from Wikipedia).
The phenomenon was first tested in a series of experiments published in 1999 by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the Department of Psychology, Cornell University. The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras. They noted that earlier studies suggested that ignorance of standards of performance lies behind a great deal of incorrect self assessments of competence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.
Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:
- tend to overestimate their own level of skill;
- fail to recognize genuine skill in others;
- fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;
- do recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they are exposed to training for that skill.
Dunning has since drawn an analogy (“the anosognosia of everyday life”) with a condition in which a person who suffers a physical disability because of brain injury seems unaware of or denies the existence of the disability, even for dramatic impairments such as blindness or paralysis.
If you’re incompetent, you can’t know 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.
—David Dunning
I was reminded of the Dunning-Kruger effect today when I read the title of this post: White House cybersecurity czar brags about his lack of technical expertise
Could it be true that a person in a position to suggest and coordinate policy regarding technical matters was bragging about his ignorance of technical matters? Couldn’t be. I had to read on. Yep, the article points to an interview that Michael Daniel gave to GovInfoSecurity.com in which cites him:
Michael Daniel sees his lack of technical expertise in IT security as an asset in his job as White House cybersecurity coordinator.
“Being too down in the weeds at the technical level could actually be a little bit of a distraction,” Daniel, a special assistant to the president, says in an interview with Information Security Media Group.
“You can get enamored with the very detailed aspects of some of the technical solutions,” he says. “And, particularly here at the White House … the real issue is to look at the broad, strategic picture and the impact that technology will have.”
I know there are many facets to cyber security, cyber operations, cyber attack and cyber espionage. And I’ll be the first to tell you there is no such thing as a person who masters every nuance. But I’ll also say this, you succeed in any discipline by recognizing your weaknesses and taking steps to mitigate them, usually by a mixture of educating yourself and ensuring that you have trusted experts around you to make up for your weakness. You never make up for that by bragging about your ignorance the way this interview comes off.
