I'm sure glad I'm nothing like those people!

It's hard enough for a writer to know if she's good at what she does (there was a line in a Broom Hilda cartoon decades ago in which the vulture character declares that he has everything he needs to be a writer: A ream of typing paper and the delusion that I'm talented.) and those who are completely incompetent seem generally oblivious of that fact. A cocky "editor/agent" comes along and confidently asserts that the writer is fine but lacks expertise in the workings of the publishing business.

The writer admits a lack of competence in how publishing works and is pleased to find an "expert" on the publishing industry who also enthusiastically claims to enjoy the writer's work. The "author/agent" is cocky, confident, and clearly appreciates fine writing. Success, fame, and a more than adequate return on the investment which must be made to crack the market are clearly within reach!

Heisenberg, Goedel and Chomsky walk into a bar...

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt."

Of course it does! I've never been able to figure out how to get it inside the cameras, though.

I tend to say annoying things like, "Wouldn't it be better to teach them to be good at doing stuff?"

a. A bias for stuff that makes us feel smart/good, particularly stuff that agrees with our starting beliefs.

b. A tendency to fuzz out overly-complicated arguments and ignore them, because the mental energy and time to evaluate them is too high.

There are (imperfect) countermeasures. The most immediate one is to ask whether massive confidence is really possible to an informed, honest student of the subject. When someone tells me confidently of his certain-to-succeed way of getting peace in the Middle East, fixing US healthcare, or changing the US energy infrastructure to minimize global warming, I smell a rat--these are all really complex problems, with hundreds of niggling details and existing arrangements.

Yep. People who offer simple solutions to complex problems are lying. I'm confident in tha...

oh hell.

IIRC, the study found there's a correllation in self-reporting -- those in the top third of whatever skill or ability is being tested tend to underestimate how good they are.

(I really wish more HR departments would pay attention to this study -- it seems to me the loud, boastful incompetents get more than their share of jobs and job interviews. But me, I'm just a competent and fruitless job seeker, so I may be speaking from frustration.)

My head hurts.

Mine often goeths by hopping away on one foot, the other firmly lodged in its mandibles.

Now that's talent. . .

- Linda Ronstadt

C'est moi! C'est moi, I'm forced to admit.
'Tis I, I humbly reply.
That mortal who
These marvels can do,
C'est moi, c'est moi, 'tis I.
I've never lost
In battle or game;
I'm simply the best by far.

- Lancelot in Camelot

However, most people find smug certainty more appealing in general, even when the smug and the certain have demonstrably failed to deliver as promised. In my opinion, this accounts for the ridiculously high vote totals the GOP continues to command, despite their utter failure to live in the real world and act accordingly.

Then again, I could be wrong.

The impostor phenomenon is where these two effects collide, I think. People who are really impostors -- in the sense that they're actually bad at their jobs and are fooling everybody -- are often full of confidence and cockiness.

People who feel like impostors are usually good at their jobs -- but could often be better and more successful if they realized their success and had better self-confidence. Sometimes they'll sabotage themselves out of fear of success, because if they succeed, then someone might start looking closer and "realize they're a fake." Sometimes they'll just refuse to take risks out of fear of failure, when those risks could pay off bigtime.

(You can tell where my particular neurosis lies, can't you?)

Serge @ #27: Correct spelling of "Ronstadt"

OK, drive-by nit-pick over. Carry on.

I absolutely, smugly -- dare I say "cockily"? -- sure that you are wrong on this; and I can say this lacking any expertise on the matter (indeed, I've never heard of the song before) simply because I'm so great.

(...never able to avoid the obvious joke. Oh well. I can do them fabulously! Everyone always laughs at them! Because I'm so great! (&c))

Oh yes. And then they GET the jobs, and because the people who hired them either don't see the bad or can't admit they made a mistake, their behavior is rewarded and amplified. Meanwhile everyone they work with gets bitter and cynical. See _The No Asshole Rule_ by Robert I Sutton. (Yes, you can tell where I am today -- NOT on sabbatical anymore, obviously!)

Ronstadt hasn't performed a whole lot of her own songs, but the ones she has tend to be good. See "Winter Light" and "Try Me Again."

And Serge? Not to nitpick, again, but the lyrics to Camelot were written by Alan J. Lerner. (The music was written by Frederic Loewe.)

I've seen schools which try to make this seem the case (USC Occupational Therapy, for example; where a C average is a course failing aggregate, and a course grade of D = a fail, so the class must be made up).

I think.

That boils down to everyone, clever or stupid, thinking that other people are more like them than they (we) really are. So if true we all think we are normaller than we are.

Which implies that if I am really normal than I am less normal than I think I am. And I am less good at the things I am bad at that I realise but better at the things I am good at. But the only way I can tell them apart is if someone else tells me I am good at something, based on a statistical comparison with large numbers of others. Suddenly I am in favour of exams. Thank you London University, I now know I am really really good at genetics and ecology and bioinformatics.

Where can I go to take a sense-of-humour exam?

Actually I'm a little dubious about the paper linked here.

The grammar test was based on a very small sample. Also us devotees of Language Log know that American Standard Written English is full of Bad Things that Good Writers Don't Do. (Their latest riff on it is that following the rules of Strunk and White rots your brain - literally. Well, maybe, they only speculate on causality. There is a claim that people - Nuns - who used more complex sentences with more qualifiers in their 20s were less likely to get Alzheimers later in life. So I'm alright, I thought. And then remembered Terry Pratchett who I suppose is the exception that proves)

And quantifying sense of humour sounds like hard thng to do. They say they used the correlation between the test subject's assessment of jokes and some professional comedians. But that isn't measuring how "good" your sense of humour is, its measuring how much it is like everyone else's (assuming that pros know what works)

I'm not going to go so far as to claim that every day is a grown-up day for me, though. But it is best to try, both for the sake of yourself, and for others'.

The lower end of ability are often clueless, and this extends to their self-assessment on the skill in question.

The higher end of ability tend to underestimate themselves because of a problem with "reference group". They often know lots of people whose skills and knowledge are higher than their own. For example, if I assess my knowledge of SFF literature by comparing it to the fluorosphere, instead of the general public, I will rate myself much lower.

But then, Terry Pratchett is not a nun.

Come to think of it...that sounds about right, really.

I make chocolates. If I could never watch anyone eat them again, or receive any kind of praise for them, I would stop making them. It's too much effort to do just for myself; the enjoyment of the people eating them is what I live on, what makes it worthwhile to spend hours fussing over ganaches.

I guess maybe that's NOT very grown up. But I respectfully submit that the world would be a poorer place without some people who need that external validation.

He made it as far as the chorus line of a West End musical or two so maybe he was right. What do I know?

Like fidelio@52 opines, the altruistic motive is a separate issue. I don't think many performance artists (whether writers or musicians or something else entirely) who I think are any good actually care whether I think they are any good. Audience is important to them, but they must have some internal way of separating good and bad art. It rarely seems to be maximizing the audience.

Hopefully this is sufficiently confused that the hundreds of working artists reading will be sufficiently irritated to explain what actually makes them produce art. In all likelihood I really, really suck at knowing the reason. I mean, I thought I knew, so Messieurs Dunning and Kruger say I suck.

I've seen them spout lots of buzzwords on a few podcasts as if they are really plugged into the Web 2.0 mindspace, but they really don't seem to say anything concrete.

Some Valley pundits are now taking a second look at what they are saying, and finding very little of substance. In my experience with government civil servants, I've always seen the Peter Principle at work, and this seems to reinforce that old adage.

The clueless people who overrate their own work, OTOH, are immune to evidence.

I suspect that a lot of the people who are so sure of their own competence ("delusions of adequacy" as the saying goes) are the result of the self-esteem program that Bronson is arguing against. If you aren't required to actually do something to be praised, why would you learn to do something?

So how many imaginary friends are we talking about?

They're not as wrong as we might at first think, due to a different phenomenon - The (hypothetical) survey only pretends to measure one objective thing. Where actually "good driver" means different things to each of us, and I value the things I'm good at.

So for me Good Driver might mean "quick at the lights", for you "good at navigating on the move", another person "Observant", "I Always signal/obey signs/drive speed limit", "knows the limits and rides them"... and so on.

In each criterion, the average will be half, yes. *I* might think you're a hopeless driver - But the survey is rating us against our own measure, not each others. Taken together, we can all be above average.

I do the work, for me. I stand in the blazing sun, or squat in the snow, or just wait in the shade with a book, and a camera on a tripod, so I can take a picture I like.

That is gratifying. I write a poltical rant, because it pleases me to vent. That is gratifying. I center a lump of clay, and raise a pot because it feels good in my hands. That is gratifying.

As is said at Passover, "That would have been enough."

But I also share them. Because they please other people. Other people get to share in my joy. Sometimes they don't like what I have done. Sometimes they tell me what I have thought well of is, to them, "crap.". Other times they tell me that things I consider crap, are lovely.

If I didn't enjoy it, for it's own sake, I'd quit. The effort wouldn't be worth the candle. If I didn't get something out of sharing it, I'd lock it all away (as if I were an Emily Dickinson), and enjoy it in secret.

But I get the benefit of both. The considered opinions of others increases my focus. Finding out what they like in a piece I think is dreck, makes me look at how I take pictures, play the whistle, throw pots (oftimes against the wall, forcefully).

No one can be an island in everything.

1) When told their actual results, competent subjects' estimation of their own abilities improved.

2) When told their actual results, incompetent subjects' estimation of their own abilities got WORSE - i.e. they assumed that however stupid they might be, everyone else must be worse.

*I think that bit's really important*

3) Practice improved everyone's competence on the tests AND their self-assessment.

*That's quite important too*

"The deeply sinful thrill of watching people who have no idea how much they don't know." --Ta-Nehesi Coates