That graph is shaped like a gun.
this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2025
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Please shoot me with it, I cant take any more of those smart people
Pretty sure most lemmy users are up there. But now that I say that.. could very well be wrong. Sorry everyone
most replies to my comments on here seem to think their are foolproof geniuses while espousing that there is no such thing is nuance or complexity in the world. there is only good (agree with them) or bad (disagree with them).
super big-brained thinking, that.
Everyone has an opinion and nobody holds the absolute truth. Fun thing, reality is.
that sounds like it's part of the homosexual/trans agenda!
Its at least partially a statistical trick. People of lower competence rate themselves closer to the middle, but people with high competence also do this.
I also find it hilarious how virtually everyone acts like an expert in diagnosing dunning-krueger. Like looking at a graph for a second and then repeating an academic mystification and 5-10 word snippet repeated ad nauseum is pretty fucking ironic given the subject
No no you see, because I have heard of the Dunning-Krüger effect on no fewer than two separate occasioms, I am a master at recognizing it in people no matter where they fall on its spectrum. You just don't understand because your overexposure to the concept has dulled your natural instincts, unlike me. /s
As far as I can tell, we all have this, even people who are experts, it's just in different domains that those of their expertise.
what baffles me is that so many experts just willfully refuse to apply there general intelligent to problems outside of their field of expertise in the most basic ways.
like so many 'genius' techies who can't cook or understand a sentence with more than two clauses. it's not really that hard... just break it down into the functional components like you do with your code, bucko.
It has been my experience that actual domain experience almost invariably beats genius-level intelligence, even that which is all the way up at the level of Einstein (so well beyond mere genius IQ).
What intelligence does bring is a faster ability to grasp things when explained and even to ask the right questions and piece a few more things together naturally than most people would, but that's still not enough for a very high intelligence newbie to beat somebody with years of expertise on a domain: a newbie doesn't just lack direct knowledge, they even lack knowledge of what are the right things to do to get that knowledge are as well as, in many domains, training to do it in a time effective way (or to put it another way, they don't just lack the answers, they even don't know the right questions to ask).
A last point: don't confuse tech domain expertise with very above average intelligence - domain expertise in a complex intellectual domain tends to look from the outside as very high intelligence but that's really an error in perception due to the unbalance in knowledge of the domain expert versus a non-expert. In my experience, there aren't that many actual geniuses (IQ of 120 or above) in Tech even if some areas of it seem to require above average intelligence to master.
I don't. Most techies are idiots outside of anything technological.
and they overcompensate hard by trying to turn everything into a problem to be solved with a convoluted technological solution.
That's a general problem with domain experts in highly specialized intellectual areas: everything looks like a nail when the only tool in your toolbox is a hammer.
It also dovetails with what I wrote before and the Dunning-Krugger effect - just like everybody else, they are prone to think they know a ton about things outside their expert domain they really know little about, so come out as a idiots in those things. It doesn't help that Tech has been glorified in present day society causing a lot of people within it to have seriously inflated egos well beyond what their actual achievements would justify - you see this kind of thing in all "glamour" areas: for example in my experience lots low-level barely-making-ends-meet actors seem to think of themselves as "superior to the common man".
I like to think most people affected by such delusions about their inherent worth and capabilities get over it as they get older, after life has had the time to slapped them a couple of times.
Today?
It has been a fad for some time.
Ironically mostly used by people who think they're smart bcs they've heard of it.
smart doesn't mean anything.
It means a lot of things according to the dictionary.
You might want to look it up.
Knowledge doesn't just diffuse into everyone's minds when it hits a fad threshold. There's still a point where one first learns about it. Shocking, I know.
You gotta be part of the hive mind man, it's pretty cool
I find that folks that just keep their mouths shut, do their jobs quietly, competently and correctly are far better to have on your team than the loudmouth know-it-all.
Bonus is that when the former does open their mouth you know you should be paying attention.
I think they call it "quiet competence".
IME the loudmouths are mostly mouthing off about things that are totally unrelated to the problem at hand. all in some weird big to appear confident and in control.
All too common I've seen those loudmouths promoted, and the quiet competent are then talked down to about something they know far more about. Then they leave.
Middle management doesn't understand a skillset unless someone tells them directly they are skilled, it's a culture of failure.
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The more I’ve learned about email while writing my own email server, the more I’ve realized I knew basically nothing about email when I started. Now, I’m at least somewhat knowledgeable, but god damn it’s so fucking complicated. Even something as seemingly straightforward as email has such a deep complexity that it takes years of study to even approach being an expert.
The single most useful thing I’ve learned doing this is that you should never assume you know a lot about a topic. There are a. always more things to learn, and b. always people who know more than you.
I have long said the only truly stupid people in the world are those who think that have nothing left to learn.
"All I know is that I know nothing", Socrates.
With time I came to understand this as meaning that there's always far more left to learn than one could possibly know.
Maybe not the original meaning (the whole Cave Allegory apparently comes from him via Plato, so maybe it's about how the World is not really what we perceive), but it kinda fits.
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This is, of course, a perfect example of D-K in action. This dude is writing his own email server, FFS, and he characterizes himself as, "at least somewhat knowledgeable".
I've read a bunch of the old RFC's for email services years ago, when you needed some of that info in order to do interesting things with sendmail. I figure that might have put me in the top 20% of programmers/admins/techies back in the day. But to actually consider writing an email server - no way. That's a different level of "at least somewhat knowledgeable" .
The 500 mile email comes to mind.
https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Next. Level. Troubleshooting.
Oh man, that’s such a good debugging story. I really like the can’t print on Tuesday bug too:
Running your own email server is a dark and lonely road that can only lead to crippling insanity. We can thank Google for that.
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"I'll just validate email addresses with a bit of regex. How hard could that be?"
Right!? Fun fact, this is a perfectly valid email address:
"Pooper Scooper 💩"@[69.69.69.69]
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The world needs more humble geniuses. We're few and far between nowadays.
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A mindset I just fell into as a much younger man for reasons I no longer remember was assuming everyone knew more than I did and did things the way they did them for a reason. And I should learn what that reason is before I go proposing changes.
That mindset has never steered me wrong. Even when I change something someone else put in place what I come up with is a better solution for taking the time to understand why the previous person did it the way that they did.
This principle is sometimes called "Chesterton's Fence" (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence)
i assumed there was some kind of story here - it being a parable - but its kinda more like a koan.
I had a soccer coach from age 7-18. Same guy, brilliant dude, Dean of law at a very large state school. He told me at 12 to never talk to the other kids at the summer camps (competition) about what i was working on. "Just go out and do it and shut your mouth about it. That's how you impress on the field."
It's stuck with me since then.
So much anger I see in the world is directed at policies, laws, procedures, whatever, that make perfect sense if one understands the background.
Sucks, but we can't all understand everything. I try, but I ain't that smart, and certainly can't be that experienced.
Isn't it more that people who are given a test will tend to think that the test was easy when they score well (when they actually scored well because they're an expert) and people will think a test is hard when they aren't familiar with the subject (nobody could've answered these question!) .
So it's more that experts and non-experts both assume their knowledge level is more average than it actually is. Not as fun as "dummies think they're smart and smarties think they're dumb." We all just tend to think we're average and most people are at a similar level of expertise to ourselves.
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People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
— Isaac Asimov
I don't think DK is really about intelligence but more on how averages work. I don't know, I don't have a degree in statistics just a basic biochem one.
We see what you did there
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