The Ruffled Crow

The term “Peter Principle” has been around forever – one rises to the level of their incompetence – but I think there is more at work than merely putting the “In” in Ineptitude. The Dunning-Kruger Effect may explain it; our incompetence masks our ability to recognize our incompetence. (download the paper here)

From the wiki:

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which an unskilled person makes poor decisions and reaches erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to realize their mistakes.^[1] The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their own ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their abilities, suffering from illusory inferiority.

Now please, don’t try the old “They’re just pushing their limits/boundaries/safety zones and failure is a learning experience”.

That idea just allows people the practice to fail even more spectacularly at some critical moment in the future. One isn’t always able to learn the right lesson from any given failure, especially if one can not understand their own complicity. I think the main driver to the highly skilled person’s feeling of inferiority is that they do see and understand that.

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