Another poor soul not destined to become a famous artist....

Not long ago, my mother sent me a link to a wikipedia page. Wikipedia being my bible, I opened the link immediately and came upon something that pretty much summed up my entire life: the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This theory postulates that the more stupid, incompetent, and generally annoying you are, the less able you are to realize it. It means that an idiot is able to disregard any and all objective measures of himself, thereby maintaining high self-esteem in the face of near-universal scorn. Getting a 700 on the SAT – which I believe may be the number of points you get for correctly bubbling in your name – doesn’t make the idiot question his intellectual abilities. He doesn’t consider his degree from an online diploma mill to be in any way inferior to a degree from an accredited university. When he gets fired, he blames not his poor performance, but his boss’s inability to truly understand his unique genius. Doesn’t the idiot ever wonder why he continually fails in every aspect of his life? The answer, evidently, is no. He simply doesn’t recognize his setbacks as the personal failures they are.

An unfortunate corollary of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that just as the incompetent tend to overestimate their abilities, the competent tend to underestimate. The person with a 700 on the SAT is pleased as punch with his score, and would be more than happy to share it with the world, unaware that the world is not impressed. On the flip-side, I went to a prep school where the average SAT score was 1300, and if you didn’t score well above 1400, you kept that shameful secret to yourself. The idiot expects to conquer the world with his diploma-mill degree; my classmates and I had full-blown nervous breakdowns at the thought of winding up at one of the lesser Ivies. The smarter you are, the higher the expectations, and the more susceptible you are to self-doubt and self-loathing.

Perhaps even more importantly, this corollary implies that intelligent people are unable to accurately gauge the intelligence of others. If you’re smart, you likely assume that everyone around you is equally smart. When you get an award or accolade, you might be under the impression that the people not getting it have other great talents that you don’t possess. This is probably not the case. They could just be dumb and untalented. And probably ugly.

I guess what I’m trying to say in a roundabout way is that we are not all endowed at birth with the same potential. It’s insane to presume that all people born without obvious physical or mental disabilities have an equal capacity for success. We don’t. Growing up in an absolutely ideal environment isn’t going to turn someone with an IQ of 93 into a world-class physicist. Conversely, growing up in a terrible environment isn’t going to turn someone with an IQ of 137 into a bumbling fool. I could not, with all the practice in the world, become a singer or an athlete or an artist; not only do I not excel in music and sports and art, I’m actively BAD at them. Like, significantly below average. Truly, truly godawful. But now, aged 28, I’ve acknowledged and mostly come to terms with that. It’s high time people who are bad at thinking did the same.