The Dunning-Kruger Effect

by Madeleine Kando

“You have to be relatively intelligent in order

to realize how stupid you are” - John Cleese.

Once upon a time a little girl was born. Her mommy and daddy were so proud and happy, that they gave her not just one name but three. That way, if she got bored being called Samantha, she still had two other names in reserve.

She was very well taken care of. There were no brothers or sisters, so everything was hers: her room was hers, her potty and bath toys were hers, her room was hers and especially her mommy! She was ALL hers.

Samantha was very curious to learn about the enormous world she was born in. So many things she had to figure out! Why doesn’t the sun fall out of the sky? Who makes the day turn into night? Where do kittens come from?

Sometimes she asked as many as 300 questions a day and they all needed to be answered because that’s what questions do; they wait for an answer before they go away and make room for the next question.

Samantha was really lucky, however. She didn’t have to go far to get answers to the millions of questions that popped up in her head. Her daddy was right there, on the other side of the room because he worked from home.

Her daddy knew the answer to pretty much everything. Nobody really knows how he knew everything, but some people suspected that he had been exposed to a virus when he was younger; a virus that caused the host to develop a condition called the ‘Dunning-Kruger effect’.

Either way, it was a wonderful way to grow up. Samantha became smarter and smarter. Her friends all knew so much less than she did. They didn’t know that the sun doesn’t fall out of the sky because it is attached to a long rope or that eating lots and lots of carrots makes you see in the dark.

Every morning the little girl jumped on daddy’s bed to give him a hug, but one particular morning she had to stretch her little arms to fit around his head. Maybe daddy needs a haircut, Samantha thought and immediately asked him a new question to which daddy gave the answer.

And so it went. Samantha was now 5 years old and had more questions than ever. By now, daddy’s head had grown so big that he had a hard time getting out of bed without holding it with both hands, like a bowling ball. On the advice of the latest specialist, he was now wearing a neck brace to support the weight, but he was still as full of knowledge as ever.

But Samantha was worried. She noticed that the more answers her daddy gave, the bigger his head grew. She couldn’t stop herself from asking questions, so she went to her mommy instead, figuring that her head was normal sized and that Samantha’s questions wouldn’t hurt her.

‘Mommy’ she said with her cute little voice, ‘I know that the sun doesn’t fall out of the sky because it hangs from a rope, but is that also true of the moon?’

‘What kind of a question is that’ said mommy. ‘The sun doesn’t hang from a rope. And if anything were to fall, it would be the earth that would fall into the sun. But it rotates and that’s why it doesn’t. Tell your teacher not to fill your head with nonsense.’

The little girl was silent. She glanced at her mom sideways to see if her head was getting bigger, but nothing happened, so she kept asking questions. The same questions that she had asked daddy, but now the answers were all different!

‘But mommy’ she said. ‘Daddy gave me all these other answers. How do you know that what he said is wrong?’

‘Well’ said her mommy. ‘Questions are very picky. They only like answers that are correct. All the wrong answers stayed in daddy’s head and made it blow up like a balloon. The problem is that daddy not only doesn’t know the right answers but he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know! We have to be very careful now. If he keeps giving you wrong answers his head might explode!’

So the little girl and her mommy wrapped a soft covering around daddy’s head, just in case it would topple and make a dent in his chest and they took him to several research institutions.

They showed him charts and tables, planetary maps, books and magazines and so many reports and academic papers that daddy started to feel faint and almost passed out.

But it helped. Daddy’s head started to shrink as more and more stuff that he thought he knew was replaced with stuff that he didn’t know.

Samantha is now a grown woman. Her head is a little big, but not extraordinarily so and she has a little girl of her own. Of course that little girl has many questions as well, but Samantha is very careful to give the right answers, especially since she witnessed a major outbreak during the  2016 Presidential elections.

She always palpates her head and when there is an inkling of growth, she tells her little girl to put her question in a special ‘unanswered questions’ box with the warning label ‘Answer at your own risk’. leave comment here