The Fable of Dunning and Kruger

Oct 15

Written by R B

Once upon a time, in a place older than memory, there lived two children named Dunning and Kruger. They were not bad children. Just regular children—which is to say they knew very little and felt, as children often do, that this was a temporary condition rapidly approaching its end.

They had been sent into the forest by parents who meant well and packed poorly. Their satchels contained credentials—small laminated cards, neatly embossed, that stated in authoritative typeface the many things Dunning and Kruger had successfully completed. A course in forest theory. A seminar on edible flora, attended via correspondence. A certificate of distinction in navigational concepts, awarded for an examination taken indoors, in daylight, at a desk.

The forest, which had not read the certificates, continued to be a forest.

They wandered for three days, bickering about which direction was north. Dunning had read about moss. Kruger had read about stars. They had read different books and were equally certain, which meant they traveled in a confident spiral that brought them, on the morning of the fourth day, to a clearing.

In the clearing stood a house; it looked magickal to them.

It was not made of candy, exactly. It was made of something better, for their particular hungers: it was made of affirmation. The walls were constructed of gilded certificates. The roof was tiled with published papers. The windows were framed in tenure letters. The garden path was lined with small plaques commemorating achievements, and every plaque bore one of their names, and the names were spelled correctly, and the font was tasteful.

They walked inside before they were invited. This felt natural to them.

The witch was very old and smelled of old books and mint tea. She wore reading glasses on a chain and had the specific posture of someone who had spent decades being deferred to. She was not, in the classical sense, a witch. She was something more dangerous: a system. She had simply lived long enough to calcify into one.

She looked at them over her glasses.

"Ah," she said, tapping her pointer fingers together. "The intelligent ones. I've been expecting you."

Dunning and Kruger exchanged a glance of profound, beaming satisfaction.

She fed them well. Not bread and sweets but something more nourishing to their particular constitutions: agreement. Every morning she confirmed that their credentials were real and their implications vast. Every afternoon she explained, with supporting citations, that intelligence was a fixed and certifiable quantity, and that theirs had been certified, and that certification was therefore the thing itself. Every evening she reminded them that the forest was, at its core, a problem to be analyzed, and that they had demonstrated—repeatedly, on paper, under controlled conditions—a remarkable aptitude for analysis.

They grew fat on it. Not in body but in certainty, which is a harder thing to notice and a more dangerous thing to carry.

They stayed for many years. It felt like weeks. The house had that timeless, vortex-like quality.

When the quasi-witch died—quietly, in her reading chair, surrounded by things she had convinced others to believe—she left no instructions. This was her one genuine cruelty: she had never once suggested they might need any.

The house dissolved slowly, the way certainty does when the thing maintaining it stops breathing. The certificates yellowed. The plaques fell from their posts. The tenure letters composted themselves with unseemly speed. Picture pouring hot coffee onto papier-mâché.

…

Dunning and Kruger stood in the clearing, holding their original laminated cards, which had survived because laminate always survives. The certainty oozed off them as they set out to conquer the forest.

"The forest," said Dunning, squaring his shoulders, "is essentially a systems problem."

"Yes," said Kruger, nodding with the authority of a girl who had read about nodding. "And we are, essentially, systems thinkers."

They walked back into the trees.

…

Dunning died first, on a beautiful Wednesday evening, of mushroom poisoning.

He had read the seminar materials on edible fungi. He had, in fact, scored highest in his cohort on the identification examination, which featured full-color photographs taken under studio lighting against a white background. He found a cluster of mushrooms near a rotting log and identified them with confidence as chanterelles, which they resembled in the photograph and in no other meaningful respect. He ate them with the satisfaction of a man applying knowledge correctly. The forest, which did not grade on a curve, offered no partial credit for the correct genus.

He had three hours in which he could have walked to the stream he'd passed an hour back, where there had been a farmhouse visible through the trees, with smoke coming from the chimney, indicating inhabitants who might have had charcoal or milk or simply the local knowledge he had categorically failed to account for as a resource. He spent those three hours certain the symptoms were something else, then certain they were resolving, then certain that certainty was a form of treatment.

He died having never once considered that the person who had issued the certificate might not have ever even been in a forest.

…

Kruger lasted another two weeks, which she experienced as evidence of her superior resilience and intelligence.

She had read about shelter. She had constructed something she called a debris hut, a term she had encountered in a survivalist text she'd skimmed in the waiting room of an office she could no longer remember visiting. The debris hut in the text had been built by someone with thirty years of wilderness experience who had included the technique as a footnote to seventeen other techniques that should be learned first. Kruger had read the footnote.

Her debris hut was structurally ambitious and thermally catastrophic. It looked, from a certain angle, like what someone who had read about debris huts would build. It kept out the rain in the sense that the rain mostly went around it. It kept in the cold in the sense that cold requires no assistance to permeate things. She slept in it with the conviction that discomfort was a sign of authenticity and woke each morning slightly less warm than the morning before, which she attributed to the season rather than to the hut, because attributing it to the hut would have required admitting the hut was wrong, and the hut was the product of her analysis, and her analysis had been certified.

On the fourteenth night the temperature dropped dramatically—old forests do that when they mean it. Kruger, who had read that the body generates its own heat and had understood this to mean that the body generates sufficient heat under all conditions, did not add the second layer she had dismissed as unnecessary three days earlier when she'd found it in her satchel. She set it aside because the first layer had felt adequate and adequate was a passing grade. C’s get degrees, right? ;)

They were found, some weeks later, by a woodcutter who had not read anything about the forest and had lived in it for forty years. The woodcutter noted the location of the debris hut and its construction with the brief assessment of someone who knows exactly what went wrong and has neither the time nor the audience to explain it.

He buried them both. He said nothing over the graves, because there was nothing to say that the forest had not already said more efficiently.

He did note, with the mild curiosity of a man not given to abstraction, that both of the laminated cards had survived. They always do.

The woodcutter walked away calmly, humming “Oh My Darlin’ ” on his way home.

…

Moral:

The certificate says what you completed.
It does not say what you know.
It does not say what you don't know.
It says nothing about the mushrooms.
The mushrooms don't GAF what it says—neither does the forest or the weather, for that matter.

…

In some versions of this story, there is a third child who also wandered into the forest. She had no certificates. She had been through the kiln. She knew she didn't know things, which is the beginning of finding out. She found the farmhouse. She knocked on the door. She asked.

She is not the subject of this fable.

She didn't need to be.