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0 pointsthehardsphere9y ago0 comments

Yeah, most people know "too dumb to know I'm dumb." The "too smart to know I'm smart" is less well known but it has a lot of implications.

For instance, highly skilled people will often underestimate the difficulty of a task for average skilled people, because they complete it with relative ease. It's effectively an overestimation of what "average" is, because they think of themselves as average when they're really not.

"Relative" is the key word here. Your natural high skill performer may think a task is difficult, but they don't necessarily find the same sources of difficulty as average people.

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ThrustVectoring9y ago· 1 in thread

I've always heard the "too smart to know I'm smart" as manifesting differently. Getting better improves two distinct sub-skills: excution, and perception of performance flaws. Dunning-Krugar effect, to me, just says that flaw perception grows faster with skill than execution does.

At a concrete level, I remember watching a lecture from a Jazz instructor by the name of Hal Galper, who said something like "Not liking the music you're playing is a sign that you're getting better, since it means you can now hear the mistakes you've always been making". It's really stuck with me through learning other creative pursuits (dance, in particular).

thehardsphereOP9y ago

I have heard someone else say a similar thing about writing, and I believe it. They described it as "having or developing taste", and were encouraging people to keep writing through those feelings because as they got better it would help them know what to write and what not to write.

Dunno if I've seen it in software development, but I also don't have any real objective estimation of how good I am at software development.

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