It is difficult for new divers to self-assess their competence. Partly this is due to lack of knowledge or feedback about how they are performing, partly to cultural attitudes that success is always readily available, and partly due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is often stated as the inability to recognize one’s own incompetence, thus leading to inflated self-assessments. Paraphrased, if you are incompetent, you lack the skills needed to recognize that incompetence.
But there is another side to Dunning-Kruger: people with high ability underestimate their own ability, leading to the presumption that what they do so easily should be equally easy for all.
We see both these aspects of Dunning-Kruger on ScubaBoard, often in the New Divers or Basic Divers forums; examples: “I’ve got ten logged dives now, am I ready to go tech?” Or, recently, “Should I carry a pony bottle?” The first example question illustrates the illusory superiority of someone who does not yet know enough to make a good judgment on their competence. The second example question was a good question, but more than one respondent piled on with suggestions that back-mounted doubles, highly-trained teams, and conservative gas management would be better than a pony bottle, revealing the other side of Dunning-Kruger, namely that the responder had lost (or never had) any awareness that trained teams and managing back-mounted doubles was both a sledge-hammer approach to the question raised by the original query, and that a new diver – barely able to manage a simple single tank – was far from ready to approach the technical realm of equipment, trained-teams and gas management.
How to self-manage Dunning-Kruger?
We need (as both posters and responders) to be aware of overestimating our abilities and qualifications, and we need to be aware of “hubris,” i.e. overconfidence in our knowledge leading to arrogance.
You don’t give a brand-new piano player a Tchaikovsky Concerto to play right away, you work up to it. Our technical advice to new divers should be similar. Offer good advice, make them stretch, but don’t make it so far out of reach that only frustration results.
But there is another side to Dunning-Kruger: people with high ability underestimate their own ability, leading to the presumption that what they do so easily should be equally easy for all.
We see both these aspects of Dunning-Kruger on ScubaBoard, often in the New Divers or Basic Divers forums; examples: “I’ve got ten logged dives now, am I ready to go tech?” Or, recently, “Should I carry a pony bottle?” The first example question illustrates the illusory superiority of someone who does not yet know enough to make a good judgment on their competence. The second example question was a good question, but more than one respondent piled on with suggestions that back-mounted doubles, highly-trained teams, and conservative gas management would be better than a pony bottle, revealing the other side of Dunning-Kruger, namely that the responder had lost (or never had) any awareness that trained teams and managing back-mounted doubles was both a sledge-hammer approach to the question raised by the original query, and that a new diver – barely able to manage a simple single tank – was far from ready to approach the technical realm of equipment, trained-teams and gas management.
How to self-manage Dunning-Kruger?
We need (as both posters and responders) to be aware of overestimating our abilities and qualifications, and we need to be aware of “hubris,” i.e. overconfidence in our knowledge leading to arrogance.
You don’t give a brand-new piano player a Tchaikovsky Concerto to play right away, you work up to it. Our technical advice to new divers should be similar. Offer good advice, make them stretch, but don’t make it so far out of reach that only frustration results.