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herval parent
it's called dunning-kruger, the epidemic syndrome of silicon valley
rsynnott
It's definitely similar, but I think it's _subtly_ different (though it's often found in the same people).

Dunning-Kruger is, approximately "I'm good at the thing I do" (by someone who is actually incompetent).

What I'm talking about is "That thing that other people are doing is really easy; I'd be good at it" (the thing is not easy, and they would not be good at it).

If the person in the latter case actually ends up doing the allegedly easy thing, they may realise that actually they are not good at it, in which case it's not Dunning-Kruger. This is pretty common, I think; person barges in, saying "this will be easy, because I've decided the thing I'm good at is more difficult than it", admits it's not easy, and either leaves or learns. Alternatively of course they may retreat into full Dunning-Kruger; see the Musk Twitter debacle, which is _both_, say.

herval OP
100 years from know, it'll be known as "the musk-trump complex"
rsynnott
I think, and, well, here's a phrase I've never used before, that may be slightly unfair on Trump. Trump does actually take 'expert' advice; he's just astonishingly bad at choosing experts (witness the amazingly weird lawyers he surrounds himself with). But he does seem to at some level realise that he doesn't know everything.
jimmydddd
I think it's because not many non-wierd folks want to work for him. If he were just 5% better at supporting those who work for him, he might increase his success rate by 50%.
herval OP
having worked in his general vicinity briefly, I can attest he doesn't take any advice unless it's pushed on him. His PR people, at least, seem to be constantly manhandling/damage-controlling the man
hnfong
the "Musk-Trump complex" is more commonly known as "narcissism". I think what is being discussed here is somewhat different.
herval OP
fair :-)
dahart
> Dunning-Kruger is, approximately “I’m good at the thing I do” (by someone who is actually incompetent).

Nope, but I can overlook because DK is misunderstood this way by almost everyone, and the authors have caused & encouraged the misunderstanding.

Dunning and Kruger didn’t test anyone who’s actually incompetent at all! The use of that word in the paper is so hyperbolic and misleading it should have been rejected on those grounds alone. They tested only Cornell undergrads. They didn’t check whether people were good at what they do, they only checked how well people could estimate the skill of others around them. The participants had to rank themselves, and the whole mysterious question in the paper is why the ranking wasn’t perfect. (And is that a mystery, really?) It is hypothesized that DK measured nothing more than a statistical case of regression to the mean, which is well explained by having to guess how good others are: https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2010/07/07/what-the-dunning-...

Contrary to popular belief, DK did not demonstrate that people wildly overestimate their abilities. The primary data in the paper shows a positive correllation between self-rank and skill. There’s no reversal like most people seem to think. Furthermore, they only tested very simple skills at and least one of them was completely subjective (ability to get a joke.) Other papers have shown that no such effect occurs when it comes to complex subjects like engineering and law; people are generally quite good at knowing they didn’t major in a subject.

dahart
Meaning people in SV are subject to the same cognitive biases as everyone? Knowing how to say Dunning-Kruger doesn’t exempt one from it’s effects, right? The paper didn’t show less skilled people estimating their abilities to be higher than skilled people, it only showed a self eval / skill curve that has a slope less than 1.

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