Kruger and Dunning, backed by copious research, assert that one of the primary competencies that is lacking is that of metacognition.
Metacognition is knowing what we know; being able to determine that our knowledge and skills are, in fact, “correct” and sufficient. To do this, we need to know what “correct” is—how much and how complex is the knowledge that exists (or must be discovered) in this domain of expertise?
But how could one determine this? Kruger and Dunning’s paper makes four predictions:
With empirically low levels of knowledge, and exposure to the domain knowledge, people may dramatically overestimate their abilities.
They are also less able to recognize true competence in people who actually do have these abilities.
Because of 1. and 2. they are less able to use information (ie., learn from) about how others perform.
They will only gain insight into their lack of competence by becoming more competent.
A Paradox of Competence
We can see how challenging and paradoxical this is: it seems we cannot see how incompetent we might be and actually become genuinely competent until we achieve competence. Another paradox. But this is hardly a surprise since we’ve already seen that recursion and paradox are always at the heart of any consideration of knowledge. How do we know what we know? That is knowledge about knowledge. How do we know something is “knowledge” (as opposed to, say, noise)? That is meta knowledge. If we are aware that we don’t know something, is that knowledge?
Well, yes it is, in a way—it is knowledge about ignorance; something we will investigate with the Five Orders of Ignorance: