Medical specialists — pediatricians and proctologists — probably believe themselves to occupy a higher plane than general physicians. Their extra training feels like a badge of specialness. They're the specialest! We cling to what makes us feel special and ignore the rest. And it's that second part that I'd like to discuss.
In the long arc of their education, an orthopedist's specialty training is barely an eye blink. From 30,000 feet, they are 90% doctor and 10% specialist. From 50,000-foot view, they're 95% educated humans, 4% doctor, and 1% specialist. And from the interplanetary view, they are babies who came an unimaginably long way before learning the word "orthopedist." The banal stuff was the miraculous accomplishment. The rest is frosting.
We talk about standing on the shoulders of giants, but we all stand on the shoulders of our younger selves. One's specialness is just a thin extra layer. We accomplished much more before, but we casually dismiss all that because it's common. Entranced by our thin frosting, it's easy to view common accomplishment as a blank — as no accomplishment at all.
The barista never acknowledges the complex chain of expert exertions that bring beans, machines, and techniques to his café. For him, the clever little clover he creates in the cappuccino foam is the elevated part, because it required two intense hours to master, and feels like his "signature". The rest of his day is just coffee stuff.
We deprecate the vast work of getting up to par, simply because it's par. And we massively overemphasize the top layer. The foam. The frosting.
The aforementioned baby, who internalized human civilization in a few quick years, hovers massively overhead like Kubrick's sky baby. Not that we'd notice. But we're all that baby, no matter how we fuss over our foamy clovers.
Dunning-Kruger proposes that low competence people tend to overestimate their abilities because they lack the competence to recognize their own shortcomings. And, conversely, competent people tend to be uncertain, astutely recognizing their capacity for error.
But both low competence and high competence people have mastered human civilization. They've learned tens of thousands of words, and to drive, use chopsticks, and pick up babies without breaking them. This immense mundane attainment dwarfs any shiny power-up. Those who've added a jazzy ribbon stand a micron taller, if that.
This explains the puzzling phenomenon of ordinary-seeming people showing swaggering pride, seemingly unearned. No, they're right; they earned it. That's their frosting, even if we mis-frame it like a neurologist sneering at GPs taking pride in their teeny tiny medical skills. Coddling our foamy clovers, we miss the contour.
Flip things over and we all look like clods. How many distinguished neurologists can take a punch, or play the viola, or speak Swahili? But if we're going to focus on accomplishment, we must acknowledge that anyone functionally present in day-to-day life has done impressive work.
The vaunted Dunning–Kruger distinction collapses into a tiny calibration error — a microscopic distinction between grand masters and slightly jazzier grand masters. The supposed "incompetents" have PhDs in human civilization, even if they type "your" instead of "you're".
In 2019, I wrote "Why Hacks Think They're Geniuses". It explains why people in the creative arts are so stuck-up even when they seem to have no talent at all:
It's super hard to write a lousy book, compose a lousy symphony, direct a lousy film, or paint a lousy mural. It takes ten years of instrumental training plus another decade of improvisation experience to even begin to call oneself a jazz musician - far longer than med school! - so it's little wonder that every unexceptional player considers himself some sort of genius.This explains not just creativity, but the whole world.
Every purveyor of crap feels - with good reason! - like they've made the Big Sacrifice.
