Logic itself almost demands this lack of self-insight: For poor performers to recognize their ineptitude would require them to possess the very expertise they lack. To know how skilled or unskilled you are at using the rules of grammar, for instance, you must have a good working knowledge of those rules, an impossibility among the incompetent. Poor performers—and we are all poor performers at some things—fail to see the flaws in their thinking or the answers they lack.
This is why we should always assume we are wrong, or at least doubt we are right, even where we think we have expertise. It's not as debilitating as it sounds. An outcome does not need to be certain to put effort into achieving an outcome. I'd argue you're more likely to achieve some positive outcome when you're skeptical of how your desired outcome is achieved. It's helped me to not focus on being right, to not focus on knowing anything for certain, and instead be satisfied with simply thinking about and acting on what I think is right at the time - regardless of whether I'm eventually proven right or wrong.
It makes arguing especially frustrating for me, because what I mostly want from my counterparty is to make logical progress with me instead of telling me I'm wrong and they're right in a bunch of creative ways that have nothing to with facts or logic.
In the classroom, some of best techniques for disarming misconceptions are essentially variations on the Socratic method.
For individuals, the trick is to be your own devil’s advocate: to think through how your favored conclusions might be misguided; to ask yourself how you might be wrong, or how things might turn out differently from what you expect. It helps to try practicing what the psychologist Charles Lord calls “considering the opposite.” To do this, I often imagine myself in a future in which I have turned out to be wrong in a decision, and then consider what the likeliest path was that led to my failure. And lastly: Seek advice. Other people may have their own misbeliefs, but a discussion can often be sufficient to rid a serious person of his or her most egregious misconceptions.
If most programmers weren't so arrogant, I'd assume they'd be trained to do this generically, because it's fundamental to making something that works well. But often, outside of being able to definitively test that something works, I've noticed we fail to question our own thinking as much as anyone else.
15 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 23 Jun
If I don't doubt my confidence in the power of doubting, am I falling prey to Dunning-Kruger?
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Probably not
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I don’t know
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