The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters

As it turns out, however, the more specific reason that unskilled or incompetent people overestimate their abilities far more than others is because they lack a key skill called “metacognition.” This is the ability to know when you’re not good at something by stepping back, looking at what you’re doing, and then realizing that you’re doing it wrong. Good singers know when they’ve hit a sour note; good directors know when a scene in a play isn’t working; good marketers know when an ad campaign is going to be a flop. Their less competent counterparts, by comparison, have no such ability. They think they’re doing a great job.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect, in sum, means that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. Dunning and Kruger more gently label such people as “unskilled” or “incompetent.” But that doesn’t change their central finding: “Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.”

Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, wilting under a barrage of perfectly reasonable questions in 2011, clearly didn’t know what was in the ACA either, and she blurted out her widely quoted admission that the Congress would have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it.