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Comment on Can you be too incompetent to understand just how incompetent you are?

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Read your greeks...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_that_I_know_nothing

This actually had impressed me already at an early age (despite not really having read Socrates/Plato directly). I can only hope that it protected me against the DK effect at least a little bit.

Also note that Socrates ended up being poisoned by his enemies.

I also subscribe to the "all code sucks" variant of the theorem.

Abbreviating Dunnking-Krueger as DK -- not sure if the publisher of the DK educational books want that to become widespread!

I read it as "Donkey Kong effect" at first. Do the incompetent tackle problems by lobbing barrels at them like an angry gorilla?

If barrels = the conventional tools that worked before, then that's not a bad way to start, so long as you stop after hitting your cranium on some brick walls and go and do something else. The answer often comes to me over breakfast the next day.

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