Mount Stupid: Views from the Top
The Dunning-Kruger effect and its role in my own life
It was a dreich autumn afternoon in Portland and I was hanging around outside a huge conference room, repurposed as a dance hall for a major tango festival. In the break between tango events, I was riffling through a stand of dresses, alternately silky, stretchy and stiff with sequins and struck up conversation with an elegant veteran dance teacher whose masterclass I had attended earlier that day. She told me that she was tired from having spent so much time travelling to teach Argentine tango. I told her (truthfully) that I was also on a kind of mini-tour (too grand a designation for it, but the closest I could find) of small American tango scenes, to teach and dance.
The woman is a kind person and would never have been intentionally scornful, but she couldn’t hide her initial surprise—shock even, expressed in wide pupils and an awkward pause—at this revelation. And I was shocked by her shock. I’m embarrassed to say that my initial internal responses were hurt and upset, followed quickly by hot anger. My dignity had been affronted. I thought of myself as a dancer by profession. Though I would not have claimed to be able to dance anything like as well as her, I still considered myself a colleague, a lesser ranked peer, but still a peer of hers.
I was perched precariously atop the Mountain of Stupidity, as it’s called in many interpretations of the Dunning-Kruger effect (see diagram above) and her startled look had nudged me, set me scrambling to regain my footing lest I tumbled down the slope. I’m not self-loathing about this. My dancing was certainly not bad; I was a very competent social dancer and often expressive and musical. But I would surely never have embarked on a career of trying to teach dance had I not been just a tad deluded about how far off I was in skill and beauty of movement than almost all the regulars on the dance teaching circuit. Had I been more realistic in my self-assessments, though, I would have missed out on so much. I would never have been there in Portland at all, amid the persimmons and rusts and Indian reds of the autumn leaves, catching glimpses of the lovely cone of Mount Hood through mist, brunching on mimosas and strips of streaky bacon till I had to write off the day—stomach sloshing with food and drink, mind replete with the joys of great conversation in wonderful company. I would never have visited in summer either or sipped ice coffee slowly as I meandered through a trio of beautiful rose gardens, burrowing my nose in each variety, taking huge snuffly in-breaths and making notes on which roses were the most fragrant, for later reference. Nor would I, indeed, have ever had the experiences I had had on the dance floor there: a kind of self-propelled tandem flight tickled by the soft breezes of violins and buffeted by the strong winds of bandoneon variations. And the same is true of a dozen other cities I visited and where I taught dance, in both America and Europe.
Rewatching some of my first dance performances from those years, I’m tempted to be harshly critical: my footwork was often clumsy, my knees and ankles awkwardly bent, creating crooked angles where I should have displayed the elegant line of a stretched leg, a taut calf and a pointed toe. My posture in those early days was often ever so slightly hunched, my neck dipped as I looked downwards towards my feet—the dancerly equivalent of a young child unknowingly sticking her tongue out in concentration as she painstakingly traces her first letters, pen clutched in a clumsy fist.
They say you should dance as if no one’s watching. I’ve never really believed that. At best, the consciousness that people are watching you should make you square your shoulders, stand up straight and tall and move with conscious pride in the beauty of your movements. But I think you should watch as if you were dancing: with empathy for your past self. Rather than looking at the motions themselves—which might be elegant or clumsy—you should try to reinhabit that dancing self, remember how it made you feel.
In almost any endeavour worth attempting, in fact, you must steer a path between the Scylla of crippling self-doubt and the Charybdis of blind conceit. If you’re unlucky, you’ll find yourself trapped on an endless rollercoaster, climbing up to the heights of self-confidence and then plummeting queasily downwards, again and again and again. Unlike in the classic diagram that illustrates the Dunning Kruger effect, those slopes don’t necessarily flatten out over time. It’s Sisyphean: you can just keep riding the sine curve forever. Being a dancer is often like that—and writing is another activity that lends itself to those vicissitudes of the ego.
Samuel Johnson, probably my own all-time favourite writer, describes it this way:
He that writes may be considered a kind of general challenger, whom every one has a right to attack; since he quits the common rank of life, steps forward beyond the lists, and offers his merit to the public judgement. To commence author is to claim praise, and no man can justly aspire to honour, but at the hazard of disgrace.
To dance or write for an audience at all—even one as small as that of this Substack—requires a minimum degree of self-assurance. It would be paradoxically more arrogant to expect people to read or watch if you believed you had nothing worthwhile to show them. It would be unfair on the ranks of gentlemen and ladies kitted out in their finery to watch the spectacle; it would be shameful for the page boy who had to saddle up your horse and the servant who helped you buckle on your breastplate; it would be insulting to your opponent, in his painstakingly polished armour—if you rode out onto the lists and immediately fell off your horse.
For a very long time, I wrote only what I had to write: academic essays and articles, which were part of my job requirements, and the odd personal letter. A large part of the problem was that I was making the wrong comparisons. When I thought of writing, I thought of Jane Austen, Henry James, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins. No wonder it seemed like hubris. “I can’t write,” I told myself—and others, “I have nothing to say. I’m just not a creative person.” And even academic writing—the one kind I supposedly could do—was daunting. Writing a PhD seemed like an impossible task. But I got the courage to do so by following the advice my doctoral supervisor, the wonderful John Mullan, gave me. “Read other people’s dissertations,” he told me, “You can find them all on file in the university library. I think you’ll quickly realise that it’s doable, that you don’t have to be a genius to get your PhD.” He was right. After leafing through half a dozen of them, I knew that if they could do this, I could do it do. But for some reason, I didn’t apply that advice—to compare my efforts with the average, not with the outstanding—to creative writing.
I’ve never been a perfectionist: I’m not someone who spends endless hours editing and tweaking and agonising over individual word choices. It’s more that I simply couldn’t get started with creative writing at all. It’s still difficult. Writing for me is often a hit-and-run business. I’m like an impulse shopper who can only ever purchase a piece of clothing if she sees it hanging on a mannequin in the display window and can rush in and buy it straight away. I can’t browse the racks and hold up fabrics to the light. I can only grab and go. Sometimes I feel like an increasingly hungry person trudging wearily past restaurant after restaurant with a fussy companion who rejects every place we encounter for one spurious reason after another, until finally, as the time of last orders approaches, ducking into the dodgiest-looking Chinese place and staving off hypoglycaemia with a double order of the prawn crackers and lo mein. That’s how I felt writing this today: I was both the hungry person (wanting to write) and the finnicky companion, rejecting a dozen topics until I had to grab the first available.
What ultimately gives me the chutzpah to write and silences the self-critical voice in my head is this: I know from past experience how difficult it is to predict how people will respond to any individual piece. Some essays that took long and painstaking work garnered no reaction at all. And the ones that received the most positive responses were usually written at 2am, when I was drunk and feeling especially incoherent. Whenever I think, “I can’t publish this; it’s crap,” the piece is more popular than usual.
The top of Mountain of Stupidity is a precarious location. Some people remain completely oblivious to their own incompetence, ignorance or lack of talent. Some carelessly gallop along those vertiginous mountain tracks, never fearing a stumble, never questioning the valuations of their own egos. But most of us experience a queasy sense of vertigo up there, an unavoidable cognitive dissonance. We can’t fully escape our own knowledge of how much we suck, of how close we are to the precipice.
It’s a much happier state to simply admit that you are terrible at something and to not allow that fact to define you. This is a realisation that took me years to come to.
I’ve always loved singing—and I’ve always been terrible at it. My voice has a harsh, raspy edge to it and is liable to squeak and crack. And, above all, I’ve always found it impossible to hold onto a melody. I’m not tone deaf. I’m capable of learning a tune with a great deal of practice. I’ve even had a few happy moments in which I sang along, sustaining my line, through a simple two-part harmony. But I have put more effort into trying to become more musical than into most other endeavours in life: hundreds of hours of singing lessons, a lot of coaching from first a boyfriend and later a close friend who teach music for a living. I even joined a fairly decent choir: somehow getting through the audition with an inordinate amount of coaching (no chorister was ever better prepared than I was).
But I was never, in all the years of choir, able to sing the alto part on my own. The process of hearing a sound in my head and then producing it with my throat remains mysterious to me. I can sing along; I love to sing along. I can add my voice to those of others. But ask me to reproduce even a melody I know well and I will quickly wander off key and lose the thread. In my case, unheard melodies certainly are sweeter.
This has caused me a great deal of unnecessary anguish—self-imposed anguish that came from constantly trying to maintain the pretence that I could sustain my part, hold my line, independently find the notes, all the while hot with shame at the thought that the lie might be discovered.
In later life, by contrast, I took up chess. It gives me tremendous glee to freely own how badly I play. As with the singing, this is not a question of lack of willpower. I’ve invested many hours into study and puzzles, read chess books, learned openings, received coaching. Spending time learning certainly improved my chess: but it hasn't compensated for my lack of natural ability. In some parallel universe, if Magnus Carlsen and I were both fifteen years old, say, both beginning to learn chess at the same moment, both spending equal amounts of time on it and being taught by the same masters, I think within a year—perhaps less—he would still outrank me almost as much as he does today. And not just Carlsen—this is true even of mid-ranked players.
As I’ve written here and elsewhere (see below), I love chess. But it’s an unrequited passion. I am happy about that. In fact, one of the things that makes chess so painful to many of those who are competitive by nature, is its merciless, clear evaluation of how good you are. It’s not subjective. There’s an exact number that defines your level at chess: your ELO. If you’re no good at chess, you can’t fool anyone—especially not yourself. The paths up the Mountain of Stupidity have all been roped off. You can’t climb it even if you want to.
It’s a very difficult tightrope to walk: between arrogance and despondency, between neuroticism and sloppiness. You’ll have to decide on a case-by-case basis whether it’s enough to simply enjoy something or whether you owe it to others to be objectively good at it or relinquish the field. That’s often a tough call. The only thing you can do is try to face the fact that you may suck even at the things you most highly prize, even at the things you are proudest of or that have cost you the most effort to achieve. It may feel especially shameful if you have spent many years trying to master something and it has defeated you. In fact, you can only really consider yourself bad at something if you have invested enough time in it to prove you are. As I’ve written elsewhere, “a beginner dancer isn’t a bad dancer by definition. It takes years to become a bad dancer.” Maybe I am as bad a dancer and a writer as I am a singer and a chessplayer. That would sting. But it would not be a tragedy. I would still be unique. I would still be loveable. I would still be me.