this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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Some broad answers:
Adding on to this: people overestimate their own expertise.
Dunning-Kruger also has a corollary: the very intelligent under estimate their intelligence.
Ask a really smart person if they know a lot about a topic they know a lot about...
And they'll tell you about all the things they don't know about the subject.
Ask an idiot about a topic they know nothing about, and they'll bullshit about how they know everything.
It's why the smartest people at any company are rarely running shit. Overconfidence always sells better than being realistic about your ability.
In other words, people saying they know everything are selling something. In your example, themselves.
Yes. You have summarized the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Except it's completely normalized to teach people to "sell themselves" to be able to get a job. It's not necessarily that they think they know more than they do. They might be very aware of their limitations, but have no shame and are willing to bend the truth to "get ahead."
If you go in trying to get an expert position and start talking about all the things you don't know, you're probably not getting the job, you know?
Outside of the context of job interviews, I find when talking informally with someone who truly knows a shitload, they tend to know enough to know how much more there is to know and may make mention of that along the way. And those that don't know how much they don't know of course can't really mention that because they can't even convince of all the stuff they don't know.
I always pay attention to people who are like the former and who are comfortable with maintaining an appropriate level of uncertainty because it usually means they think more scientifically.
Or put another way, he who speaks loudest knows least.
Good answer!
Very much 4
We wanted to get an engineer to audit something we set up, talking like 1 hour phone call, maybe 1 hour of work beyond that if something needed to be adjusted
We wasted like 4 hours on the line with different agencies (talking to sales people) who wanted to connect us with a DIFFERENT agency to do the actual work, who wanted us to sign a 3 year service contract.
Like no, "please just let us talk to one of your senior engineers and bill us $500/hr for his time"
While a 3 year service contract was clearly overkill, your estimate of 1 hour is ridiculously tiny. Nothing of any worth can be audited with a 1 hour phone call.
Not true at all.
It's just a bad idea. You need to have a minimum contracted price.
There's plenty of "$0.10 for the screw $1m for knowing that's the solution" stories.
In this case, by "audit" it was more of a metaphorical "here is our setup, do we plug this into slot A or B, we don't want to read the 300 page manual", so 1 hour was literally all it needed
Spoiler: I ended up reading the 300 page manual, it took a week. That was 3 years ago and we have never touched it since
#1.
Don't you just know it?! I work in media and I have pitched commercial projects to business executives many times only to see them completely choke on the costs. They say things like "Can't we just film the commercial on an iPhone, I see that on YouTube all the time?" FFS. I'll be like "Sure, we can. What's your budget for that? You realize I still have to pay the cameraman, the makeup artist, the writer, the producer, the director, the gaffer, and the talent. Do you want music with that, too? Oh, you want a Credence Clearwater Revival song in the background? That'll cost you."
I'll pull out some sheets explaining what they see on YT that they think is so cheap... I mean, sure, it's less expensive than other options, but crew and talent gotta eat and pay bills, too.
People have no idea...
This is something that people often don't know about. For certain things there can actually be little to no experts. One example, ski lifts. There are only a handful of people in the entire world who know how to splice together ski lift cables.
A more concerning one is nuclear engineers. There's been such a stigma against nuclear power that the amount of people who know how to build a nuclear reactor has fallen to incredibly low numbers. Also, the US had to reverse engineer some of their own nuclear weapons because the people who built them all died and the knowledge of how they were built died with them.