“the trouble with the
world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of
doubt" --Bertrand Russell
While watching Wimbeldon
a couple of years ago I thought to myself "that doesn't look so hard; I bet
I could do that."
But I caught myself
in a moment of reflection and asked myself whether, in reality, I could. To put
it bluntly, I have as much chance at success as the proverbial snowball on the
ferry across the Styx. I can count the number of times that I have picked up a
tennis racket on one hand.
With that in mind,
why would I watch the world’s elite tennis players and think that I could
somehow just pick up a racket and play like them?
My daughter is taking
guitar lessons. When she started she thought that it looked really easy. But
each time she learns something new, she realizes how much more there is that
she doesn't yet know.
It turns out that
this is a widespread psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning-Kruger
Effect (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). When we lack knowledge of a subject or
skill, we lack the wherewithal to know how much more there is to know.
Dunning-Kruger tells us that the less we know about something, the less we
realize just how ignorant we are. When we don't know, we don't know what it is that
we don't know. The more we know, the more we realize how much more there is to
know.
