. Introduction: The Problem

I take what I do seriously. When I sit down to write reviews and longer critical pieces, I am not filling in the time before dinner, I am doing something that I am emotionally invested in. I am emotionally invested in becoming the best critic that I can possibly be, this is why I write and this is why I read books that add fresh elements to my theoretical arsenal. However, while I think that (all things considered) I am not doing too badly, I am very much aware that I am not yet Roland Barthes, David Bordwell, Nick Lowe or Adam Roberts. In fact, I am not even Kim Newman or Armond White. I know this because I know that these people write with a level of control and insight that I do not yet possess. I also know this because I have yet to be invited to write a column for the New York Times… or even the Kensington and Chelsea Times for that matter. But while I know that I am not yet quite there, I think that I could probably do a bit more cool stuff than I am currently doing. The problem is that every time that I produce something that I am particularly proud of, a hubris alert goes off in my head because I know that it is the easiest thing in the world to think that you’re brilliant when you are in fact shit. In fact, there are studies that prove it.



Back in 1999, Justin Kruger and David Dunning published a paper entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (pdf). In this paper, Kruger and Dunning argued that the skills that allow you to become competent at something are the same skills that allow you to evaluate your own competence. As a result, people who are shit at things tend to massively over-estimate their competence. As Kruger and Dunning put it in the article:

We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.

The article mentions two possible causes for the Dunning-Kruger Effect. The first is that the success or failure of a particular undertaking tends to be massively over-determined in so far as quite a few things have to go right in order for it to work but only one thing needs to go wrong in order for it to fail. However, because of the complexity of cause and effect, it is just as easy to take credit for success as it is to shift responsibility for failure on to other people. So if I get commissioned to write a column it’s because I’m awesome at what I do but if someone else gets approached to write the same column instead of me it’s because they know the editor personally or because the editor is an emotionally stunted alcoholic who wouldn’t know good writing if it pissed through their letterbox. The other possible explanation for the Dunning-Kruger effect is that our culture tends to lack sources of honest and reliable feedback. People are very good at being supportive and encouraging to people who are starting out but they tend to disappear when the time comes to tell that person that they have a number of weird tics in their writing that are as distracting as they are stupid and ugly. Given the massive online imbalance between the Demand For and the Supply Of opinion, I think we should just go ahead and make Kruger and Dunning kings of the blogosphere and have done with it.

Given how easy it is to fall prey to this sort of cognitive bias and given the fact that established writers and critics have better things to do than go around ‘fixing’ other people’s writing for them, I’ve been thinking about how to go about gauging my own progress and I think I may have encountered something useful.

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