YouSaid · the spoken record

David Dunning

lines on the record: 41
first: 2024-07-16
most recent: 2024-07-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Journalist once described my office as you can't really tell how many nuclear bombs have gone off inside. Yeah. And that hasn't corrected itself. It's only gotten worse. But unfortunately, that is not a Dunning Trigger situation since it's patently obvious to everyone, including me, that that's the case.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is a comfort that you have that fear. That is the best protective you have. Go forth and be confident in your anxiety.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, you really don't know what your work is about. You find out what other people think about. I often walk away kind of going, oh, that's what I'm doing. That was valuable. That's what you get by talking to people far outside of the usual bubble.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is part of the reason why I like talking to reporters. You don't know what paragraph one is until you talk to reporters of the public. And I have found out what paragraph one is, much more than I thought by talking to the public. It's been very enriching. I was once at a science communication workshop and a lot of the other people there were graduate students and postdocs in physics who were doing work on dark matter. And there was no hope in understanding what they were doing. But what you could understand was their sheer enthusiasm. And so they would be talking, and all you wanted to do was to give them a hug and fund them. The one thing I would say is let your enthusiasm show because they were so excited and anything that can excite people that much and was clearly that hard was something. We're”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You deal a lot with the public. In terms of doing scientific communication communicating science to the public. What's the one thing you want scientists to know? They should always keep in mind because as hard as they try they always get it wrong and they have to be mindful.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That really was about the Internet and social media until recently, socially, we've been trained to do one-on-one interaction in person face-to-face. And so we have a bunch of norms about how we interact with one another, about politeness and repair when social harmony is a little askew and so forth. But that's all about being synchronous, interacting. But social media isn't that you proclaim. Pause, pause, pause, pause, pause, and then someone proclaims back. There's no interaction. It's just a different billboards being put on the highway and a few miles down another billboard being put on the highway. And so it's not a surprise that things can get a little testy, contentious, and at times toxic because we've been taught how to get away from the toxicity when we're together in a room. We know how to hug it out.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes. The Vernon Law quote is life is the cruelest teacher because first it gives you the test and then it gives you the lesson. Nowhere else is a truer thing ever been said. And the thing that I can assure people out there, especially those of their lives that it never ends. I'm approaching the sunset of my career and am nowhere near approaching the finish line of learning. There are new lessons every day. They say life begins at 40, and when I hit 40, I began to understand why they say that. If you're not forty yet, I'm not going to tell you you have to get there, and then you'll go, oh, I get it. So when those older people give you a few helpful hints, do jot them down. They might be saying the truth. It will be good to remember after the test.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One issue I have is I'm old, so things that people have told me I'm bad at I don't do anymore. I know the literature on when you're older you have more positivity bias and I often wondered when I was younger is that because when you're older you just don't do the things that you're bad at. I don't have the data. I just have my personal data. The answer is yeah if you're bad at it you just don't do it anymore. You just avoid it. You pay someone else to do it if it needs to be done.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“butter cells are problematic. A lot of people say that they're helpful. People tend to hold over flattering views about themselves, at least in the United States and Western Europe that is overwhelmingly the bias people have. They think they're very healthy. They're very intelligent. They're very moral. They're very good drivers. Won't be hurt by climate change. Never be a victim to a crime relative to other people, for example. They make these statements to a degree that is mathematically impossible. And a lot of people will say that that's not only not a problem that is helpful. My position is that that can actually be helpful or it can be not consequential or it can be harmful. But we don't want to get caught in the trap of making it either or.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this falling cadre of people who say that the Dunning Cooker effect is just a statistical artifact, that it's something but regression to the mean? And this will be the too long didn't read version of my response, is that those who make that critique haven't actually read the 25-year literature on the Dunning-Kruger effect or the even longer literature multidisciplinary literature on the regression to the mean. So they're making a critique without knowing what they at least don't reference into a very large literatures, but a lot of the complaints are about three things. One is whether or not the Dunning-Kruger effect exists, whether motivated reasoning exists. And I can agree that you can overplay motivated reasoning and its impact in the world, but it does operate in the world. And finally, whether biases that we all have”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“ChatGPT can be anything or anybody you want it to be. Right now, I'm asking ChatGPT to play act famous thinkers through the centuries and tell me what they think of the Dunning Truger effect. It's a summer pastime. And ChatGPT is doing very wonderfully well. It's written a tremendously good John Lennon song and then explained why John Lennon would have written that song. I was impressed. And I can imagine other people can find ways in which ChatGPT can be the friend you never thought you had, especially a literate friend.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, here I go. Now I'm going to be real unpopular. All those people invested in the little mysteries and puzzles in their career, when they're retired and approaching their demise, they're not going to be worried about them. They're going to be worried about purpose.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is genius because what it was meta, it said that all these puzzles, all these mysteries. They were all distraction, they didn't matter what mattered was the people you were with. The whole series didn't matter it was the people all along and the search for purpose. That was a series about the search for purpose because”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah, I think that the ending of the TV series lost was a classic brilliant piece of television writing. No. Yes. Oh, absolutely.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“True, but there's a way in which they are entangled. That is, we don't like things that don't make sense to us. So if we expect to see A because it goes with B and they don't go together, we find that aversive. That's cognitive dissonance. And we find ways to bring the world back into harmony.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest thing I ever rethought, and it wasn't late, but the biggest thing I ever rethought is I used to dismiss motivated reasoning. I don't dismiss motivated reasoning anymore. I used to be motivated reasoning is just way overplayed. People don't do that. Now I've completely switched off that. And I know you're surprised given my research history.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that turns out to be what we're finding in the data. This is unpublished, but I've literally done this study where I have people solve logical puzzles and judge how good they're doing on each of the puzzles and have them judge how another person has done on these logical puzzles. And they have much more insight into what other people are getting wrong than they themselves are getting wrong and how could it be otherwise.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you start with the second opinion, you still have to go to the first opinion because you want to see if you get two for two on the opinion. If you get a disagreement, you want to hit pause, I think is the story there.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With Carmen Sanchez at the University of Illinois, we just wrote a review trying to organize this literature. And the issue is no one agrees about what an expert is. I mean, is it a person with a title? Is it a person who's done this thing for a long time? Or is it a person who knows a lot? You do want to take a look at performance. That clearly matters. And in the main, experts are more accurate, but they do remain overconfident. Experts are better at it, but with a twist, experts are better at knowing when they're right. When they're right they're much more confident than non experts. When they're wrong when they've made a wrong choice, they're much more confident than are non experts. That is, they don't show more appropriate doubt when they're wrong compared to people who are novices.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would also put on the table how exactly did they come to that conclusion? Sometimes we can overweight motives. And as a scientist, I'm sort of interested in, okay, did they follow the correct procedure? If there are scientists, did they do the science right? If their lawyers or the courts, did they do the law right? Did they do the craft right?”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, that's absolutely right. And you want to make the best bet, but know that it's a bet. And things may turn out differently. And you do want to listen to dissent as well. Living with Dunning Kruger, and we all do live with Dunning-Kruger, is I'm quite comfortable with being wrong or other people or even the experts being wrong and changing path. You don't want to think in terms of absolutes. You want to think in terms of ideas or bets and be willing to change course.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody should do their own research, but you should be careful when you do it. Because, well, first off, no one is actually doing their own research. They're actually just examining the research of other people. I mean, let's say that you're not breaking out your own lab, getting out the beakers, getting the reagents, and doing the biology. No, you're not doing your own research. You're reading other people's accounts, secondhand, third-hand, fourth hand about what's going on. And you may not necessarily be in a position to know who the experts are. You have to think a little bit more like a journalist. And what journalists do is they do look at more than one source. They don't report something unless they have more than one source, for example. So who's the best expert to follow? The best expert to follow is experts in the plural, for example. Is there a consensus emerging?”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to credit Ethan Ballantyne of a philosopher for coming up with it and then dragging me into it is the idea of taking your knowledge and skill and trespassing into the field of expertise of another field. And the best examples of episymic trespassing actually come from the COVID-19 pandemic era, where people who knew math Knew a little bit about evolution, decided to start making predictions and policy pronouncements about COVID-19 and about treatment. So they were trespassing into epidemiology without knowing epidemiology. That's epistemic trespassing.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if we completely switch over to something completely new, oh, things are going to be different in ways we have not anticipated at all. There are going to be a tremendous number of unknown unknowns. There are going to be challenges we never prepared for because we had no idea they existed. So not only do we have to rely on what we think about us, we have to really think hard about the situation that we're getting ourselves in and do a good analysis of it and its demands. And we're not necessarily focused on that. It's moving to the new that produces a lot of the problems that we talk about in our papers.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really do have to think about the situation or the circumstances or the tasks that you're getting yourself into. We've all accumulated knowledge. We all have skills. We all have expertise. But we have to really think hard about, okay, what's the next step? And if the next step is pretty familiar, that is, it looks a lot like things we've done before, great or unfamiliar ground, we have the experience to guess what's going to happen to us. New things may happen, but it's not going to be wildly new. So things can change.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I absolutely agree with you because there is work showing that if you ask people to come up with their best case scenario and their worst case scenario, okay, now come up with your most realistic scenario. What you get is your best case scenario again. Okay, they've thought of their worst case scenario and their best case scenario. The worst case scenario, no, it doesn't matter. People just don't take it into account. They can articulate it, but they don't take it into account. And part of that is defensiveness. But part of that is that we have agency, we have control, and we rely on that. And that's a difficult.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's right. Or you can think about the past. You're setting up a project What are projects that are like this that have happened in the past that have failed? What went wrong with them? That's data.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You may think of possibilities you wouldn't have thought of otherwise. That's called a pre mortem. And a lot of businesses do that in organizational planning.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Advocate and what they do is their job is to point out the errors or the shortcomings or the oversights and what people are thinking about when they're coming up with research plans. And that's also used in good businesses. Or you make yourself the team. For example, doctors when they diagnose medical issues don't reach a diagnosis. They reach a differential diagnosis. They have to not only diagnose what you have, they have to differentiate it from other plausible alternatives. They have to consider alternatives. You think different or you think about how you could be wrong, for example. You have a project in mind and, okay, how could I be wrong? Project yourself into the future. You've done this project. And it went disastrously wrong. What's the story about how it went wrong?”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do know that if Justin and I are right about what produces the Dutting for effect, I am the last person you should ask about when I fall victim to the Dunning Cooper effect. I do have a great chorus of people who like to tell me when I'm falling prey to the Dunning-Cruger effect. And maybe that is the corrective you seek. A lot of the issue with the fact that our ignorance or incompetence or what we don't know is invisible to us means that we do have to seek information outside of ourselves. And that can be done in two ways. One is to have a supervisor or rather have a team, if you will, that can be an early warning system to ask the right question or note or warn us when we might be making an error. The best research teams, for example, when they have research meetings, have a person who's designated to be the devil.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to supervise longer than you may think because people may relax in supervising themselves. That's the beginner's bubble.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look. So there is something that we've called the beginner's bubble where confidence outraces competence at the beginning quite a lot. And people suddenly begin to realize they need to reconsider and begin to backtrack about their optimistic views of their competence. And you see these bubbles already in the real world in flying. There's something known as the killing zone, which is pilots won't be especially dangerous until they've flown about 600, 800 flight hours. Then they start getting overconfident. They start getting the little sloppy, if you will, and then they start making mistakes that end up with serious injury or even fatalities because they're overconfident. Surgery mistakes start about 15, 20 surgeries in when surgeons begin to relax. Become overconfident. And so as supervisors,”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some situations where we think we're good at this so we enter into something. And our optimistic beliefs about ourselves get corrected. But a lot of the time we're starting off something and we know we really don't know what we're doing. We know it's going to be challenging. Like, congratulations, UN pilot's lessons. Let's go and fly a plane. You're not going to start off a very optimistic. Or let's start surgery school. You're going to be cautious. But after a few surgeries, you might think you have the hang of it. And you are more competent, but you're not as competent as you think. That is, there's a learning curve to complete new tasks. But there's a subjective learning curve. And the problem with the subjective learning curve is it runs far ahead of the real learning curve. You may have had some experiences and some successes and you've learned some lessons, but a lot of those lessons may be based on”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're suddenly screaming, help me, help me. I don't know how to swim. And you look for a life reserver on the dock by the lake, but there is no life reserver, but you see a basketball and you see a bowling ball. You know which one you should throw to them to save them? And that's the issue with life. You can sort of figure things out. And more or less, we typically solve things correctly. The problem is we can solve things incorrectly, but those solutions have the look and smell of correctness to us. And because the look and smell of correctness, we think we already know, or we ask a friend because we only need to do a minimal check. And so the problem about our ignorance and about our incompetence is it's born out of our admitted genius as a species, which often we can rely on quite well until we can't. And that's the part of the human.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dunningkruger effect is born of our human genius. The thing about the human species is that we're born problem solvers who can deal with a lot of very different novel situations every day. So imagine you're at a lake and you have a friend who jumps in the water because it's a hot day and it's a day for swimming and they jump in and then they realize they don't know how to swim.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has floored me through these years that this turns out to be a question that everybody else is interested in. Now, the irony, however, is that everybody is interested in the fact that other people don't seem to know when they might be wrong or lack expertise. And by the way, the Dunning-Kruger effect is those who lack expertise lack the expertise that they need to know that they lack expertise. And people see it in other people all the time. The core of the effect is you fail to see it in yourself. And that continues to be the case. It really is a phenomenon about self-reflection. But people are quite enthusiastic about seeing it in others, but they should pause and think about there may be times it might be happening in themselves as well.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Justin I did not name it the Dunning Cougar effect. I've asked Chad GPT to go back and find out who named it that, and in its very gracious ways it first came up and said that I, I, David Dunney, named it the Dunning-Kruger effect, and I assured him that I did not. And it apologized in its very polite and professional way. That came about because I did notice that people would say things that were obviously wrong or have students in my office complaining about an exam and waiting for me to apologize for designating the wrong answers as correct on the exam that I had just given. And I was thinking that was odd because I was the one who was the professor with the PhD and there might be some, at least acknowledgement of that. I just wanted to know how much people had any insight into the idea. They might be wrong”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there was any particular moment, but there were moments that were eerily repetitive. And a lot of them were people saying outrageous things and seemingly not knowing that they were outrageous, or at least not showing any perception that someone else might think they're a little bit odd or maybe completely bonkers, if you will.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've always been interested in to what extent do people's perceptions of the world match the reality of the world? And a big part of people's world is themselves and what they believe about themselves. And so confidence is a natural thing to study. That is, you believe you know something. How good are the quality of those beliefs when you're sure, should you be sure, and when you have doubt are those appropriate doubts? Our actions depend on those sorts of beliefs. And so it was a natural thing for me to become obsessed with because I didn't know what to believe. And so I wanted to know what I could become sure of.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Living with Dunning Kruger, and we all do live with Dunning Kruger, I'm quite comfortable with being wrong or other people or even the experts being wrong and changing path. You don't want to think in terms of absolutes. You want to think in terms of ideas or bets and be willing to change course.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This question I've always wanted to know is when people are wrong how much might they know or suspect that they're wrong or are they completely blind to it? And so we decided to go forth and see.”
2024-07-16 · WorkLife with Adam Grant · ReThinking: Explaining the Dunning-Kruger effect and overcoming overconfidence with David Dunning · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source