The Dunning-Kruger Effect: My Favourite Razor For Understanding Society
I know the world is a treacherous place these days.
(Not that it ever wasn’t - recency bias and all that).
One of the things I have found to be of critical importance to my sanity, is using razors, principles, thinking models etc. to help me make sense of the carnage. To become more at peace with it.
Fortunately, these tools and pearls of wisdom have allowed me to realise a couple of important things that can be applied to improving health and fitness:
Not everyone knows what they are talking about, even if they have a large following and a loud voice. Some people just say and do things because they don’t recognise their lack of competence or the damage it causes.
Some people have a high level of knowledge and intelligence in a given area, but knowingly deceive for their own gain, eg. to promote their supplement, knowing there is damaging evidence against it.
This is why we are constantly inundated with public shouting matches and finger pointing. There is so much information out there, and such a wide, gaping space from end-to-end on the lateral scale of competence, and the top-to-bottom vertical scale of deceit vs. stupidity, that sometimes it is hard to decipher where the inflection point is for a given individual.
To what extent are they right or wrong?
To what extent are they being intentionally deceitful or just misunderstanding?
As we regularly see in politics and media, it can be difficult to ascertain how malicious a person of influence may be in a controversial moment. But I guess in attempting to be a good human, it would be ideal to assume stupidity before malice - AKA Hanlon’s Razor.
Hanlon’s Razor
Never attribute to malice, that which can be adequately explained by stupidity
I love the Dunning-Kruger Effect, as this principle perfectly displays this relationship between competence and confidence, and how it evolves and changes for individuals over time (depending on their willingness to move forwards, that is).
True confidence is quiet - insecurity and false confidence is loud
We see leaders and senior figures all across society, in sports, politics, media personalities, corporations, and everyone will be at a different point along this curve.
You’ve got your Sam Allardyce-type football managers, who on their lucky day can beat a Jose Mourinho side. That day he giggled away that they ‘out-ticky tacky’d him’ - those familiar with 00’s football know that Mourinho was never known for the ‘Tiki-Taka’ style of football, associated with Spain and Pep Guardiola - he was just Portuguese foreign manager in England, known for being very, very good.
*FYI even Pep didn’t identify with Tiki-Taka. English morons slapped the label (as they do) and it stuck.
You’ve got your politicians, who don’t know a thing about how complex problems unravel in the real world among the working class, but because they went to a certain school, they have a theory, a platform, connections, they know the politics game and exactly how to play it.
Then there’s the personal trainer who’s done the online level 3 course for a grand, dropped 2kg and now claims to have “cracked the code” to weight loss, as if biology was a riddle to be solved once, and not a constantly adapting system impacted by hormones, psychology, lifestyle, and a dozen other variables.
You check out ‘the code’ out of curiosity, and find it consists of burpees, lunges, quarter squats and starvation.
This is peak ‘Mount Stupid’.
I often see this in these social media ‘call outs’ that seem to be really popular (because people love drama).
Confidence turned all the way up to 11, ridiculing another professional, while their actual understanding of nutrition, training load management, recovery, or even basic human anatomy hovers somewhere between GCSE PE and ‘I searched it on Google AI’ - and because they’ve mastered the algorithm better than the fundamentals, their nonsense spreads.
In the health and fitness world, the Dunning-Kruger effect is a handy tool for figuring out the ‘why?’ that would otherwise have you pulling your hair out.
It’s why people fall for detox teas, £50 meal plans that are just chicken, rice and broccoli, or the latest 6-week shred promising “abs or your money back”. Everyone starts with a sliver of knowledge and a mountain of enthusiasm. Confidence skyrockets. It’s only when you begin to truly understand the depth and complexity of the subject that humility sets in - that’s the Valley of Despair.
Ironically though, this is where real progress begins.
I remember being in this place many times:
Opening lectures on my Masters degree - being told I’ll need to have a firm understanding of biomechanics and statistics in order to pass.
Being 6 months into my Hogarth employment and barely having any private clients.
Doing a Spanish course for 3 months and wondering why I felt nowhere near stringing a confident sentence together.
Ditching employment to start a business and wondering where all the new clients were going to come from!
The Slope of Enlightenment isn’t sexy. It’s the grinding result of long-term work and persistence.
It’s understanding that good sleep trumps a new supplement.
It’s learning how to train smart, not just hard.
It’s making peace with the idea that the same plan won’t work forever
I’ve had to confront my own Mount Stupid moments.
Back in the day, I thought bulldozing could work - if someone didn’t progress, it was because they ‘didn’t want it enough’.
As if that alone could override chronic stress, lack of sleep, or an undiagnosed thyroid issue. That’s the danger of early success—it gives you the illusion that you’ve mastered something, when you’ve barely scratched the surface.
And that’s what the Dunning-Kruger curve is: a mirror. If you’re lucky, it humbles you. If you’re not, it turns you into the kind of person people make memes about.
Wherever you find yourself on that curve—whether you’re crawling through the Valley or inching up the Slope—stay there. Stay curious. Stay uncomfortable. Because the moment you think you’ve figured it all out, the curve reminds you: you probably haven’t.
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