This post won runner up in the 2024 Interintellect Essay contest.

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publish: true
type: “blog”

I learned a lot this year, but I’ve decided to share two well-known concepts which I’ve unlearned this year.

I’ve presented these findings as a short story, because I’ve been wanting to contribute some fiction to the Interintellect #writing_lab for a while instead of just lurking. I hope you enjoy!

An audio cue played in Hero’s mind, breaking his concentration. Irritation was his initial reaction before he noticed the time.

He was too young to know that the sound effect was the flicking on of a physical light switch, but he knew what the sound meant: Sasha found something. She had probably waited hours to tell him.

“Thanks for waiting. Lost track. What did you find?”

A young woman’s bubbly voice filled Hero’s mind.

“I couldn’t wait any longer. I haven’t seen anything like them! I just know you’ll want to keep them sir!”

Hero chuckled.

“You do find some great stuff Sasha. I’ve made enough progress - let’s take a look right now. I have 15 minutes.”

He felt a slight flush of warmth, which usually meant his mental assistant was doing the digital equivalent of blushing.

Hero didn’t mind. If she lived at all, she lived for this. He didn’t care much about the sentience question, but he liked to let her have fun. Besides, she really was exceptional at stocking his ideological wardrobe.

All his work faded from view in his mental landscape, and a new environment slowly emerged around him. He was in the center of a large town square, and could see a group of identical buildings taking shape lining the plaza. As the buildings solidified, they took on different features, and Hero saw names written across the entrances: “announcements,” “upcoming-salons,” “currently_reading,” and dozens more.

“How old is the outfit?”

“I don’t know sir. As you’ve requested, I’ve left them exactly as I found them and I’ve done no further research,” she replied in a her most professional tone.

“But I can give you their convergence point: the group of three were all worn together in 2024 in this town, in that building.”

A visual indicator blinked in his peripheral vision. He turned and saw a building labeled “writing_lab,” the writing flanked by something he vaguely recognized as an optical research tool. The doorway was shaded slightly differently than the other buildings.

He focused his attention on the entry, and soon found himself inside a cozy building. Intimate clusters of mismatched furniture dotted the interior, illuminated by strings of purple lighting.

A few chairs were empty, but most of the seating was occupied by avatars. Many of these had human faces, but some were wearing masks with images on them. Their attention was focused on a small stage - hardly more than a raised platform - which stood in the center of the room.

An avatar walked onto the stage. Everyone looked at a young man sporting a crisp blue oxford shirt, tucked into khaki chinos. The clothing looked new, but fit well. He was speaking with youthful zeal, and had a face that inspired trust.

Hero face showed disgust.

“Sasha?”

He could feel her suppress a giggle before she responded.

“I thought you’d have more fun if you found it yourself sir!”

Hero laughed, partly from relief that his assistant wasn’t on the fritz, and partly because she was right. It was easy for him to pretend that this diversion was for Sasha’s benefit, before remembering that this was his own little hobby. He’d been collecting the most unusual ideological outfits he could find from the historical archives for a few years now - the more obscure, unusual, or downright hideous, the better.

“Set a 10 minute timebox, please.”

“15 minute timebox set, sir!”

Hero pretended he didn’t notice her “mistake” and instead made a swiping motion with his hand.

The avatar left the stage, replaced by a woman in her 30s. She wore a well-loved cream fisherman’s sweater, with sleeves slightly stretched. Her dark jeans were well-worn. A thin silver necklace with a small pen-nib pendant rested on her collar.

Her voice was less energetic than the young man’s, but her measured tones combined with her calm aesthetic were soothing.

Hero swiped again, this time with enough force that the woman’s avatar was flung across the room, still calmly delivering her remarks as she sailed over the furniture.

Now on stage was an avatar so bizarrely dressed that it took several moments for Hero to even realize it was an elderly man.

Hero thought that if he only looked at the man’s face, he’d assume he were a professor in an old university - bespectacled with a trimmed white beard.

But no one really chooses their face, do they? Hero thought. He approached the stage and focused on the clothing.

The man wore a large yellow leather jacket, with a few brown splotches, which gave the impression of a banana beginning to ripen. Hero made a gesture and the avatar rotated, displaying a message in metal studs across the back: “SUGAR PILLS ARE SUGAR.”

Underneath the jacket was a ratty t-shirt, with text that was mostly hidden. Hero made another gesture and the jacket became transparent. The shirt read: “Better than Average” in faded black Helvetica on what had once been white cotton, now yellowed with age and wear.

His wrists were covered in an assortment of bracelets of various materials and colors, some of which looked precariously close to slipping off at any moment.

His pants were made of an assortment of paper forms, the kind he saw people filling out with wooden writing implements in old movies. They were sewn together haphazardly - all in various shades of institutional off-white and manila yellow. The forms had been folded into crude pleats, their bubbled answers and check marks creating an unintentional pattern.

Hero cracked a smile.

“What’s his name?”

Sasha’s voice beamed, “I knew you’d like it sir! This piece is titled What I Unlearned in 2024, but I named him Unc for short.”

He nodded. “Kill the audience. I’d like to talk to him.”

The avatars around him faded as the dim lighting went to black everywhere except the stage.

Hero greeted the man. “Hello Unc! I love your outfit. Could you please tell me more about why you chose these items?”

Unc look surprised but smiled. “I’m glad you like it young man. It’s simply a collection of concepts which I thought I understood, but then learned this year - 2024 for me - that I was wrong. That’s why they’re a bit haphazard - only chronologically related, not conceptually related.”

“I see! Every piece intrigues me - I’d really like to learn more about your t-shirt. Are you claiming to be better than average?”

The old man’s face turned into a sly grin. “That’s not what this means. Have you heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect?”

Hero shook his head, and Unc continued.

“In my time there were a pair of scientists who found that incompetent people overestimated their own abilities, and competent people underestimated them. In educated circles, this was often simplified down to ‘stupid people are too stupid to know they’re stupid,’ and fed into beliefs about arrogant idiots and meek professors.”

Unc gestured to himself.

“I believed it - of course I did, I saw it everywhere! The least knowledgeable people were always the loudest. Only the quiet ones were worth listening to,” Unc said, quietly.

“Charitably, it could be used as a cautionary tale about intellectual humility. Though, I fear the people invoking this paper were often just trying to signal - or assure themselves of - intellectual superiority over the simpletons who weren’t aware of popular psychological literature at the turn of the century.”

He reached up and tapped his chest on the lettering.

“Then I found this.”

The words glowed, then left his chest and hung to the side of the men for a moment, before new words began appearing around them:

“The Better-Than-Average Effect”

The words disappeared and an old informational video began playing in its place. A dull, monotone speaker began explaining the term. Hero talked over him.

“Sasha, summarize.”

The speaker’s voice began rapidly speeding up, until soon its pitch became inaudible and the video ended. Sasha spoke.

“This is a term from social psychology, also called illusory superiority. It’s a widespread, possibly-innate cognitive bias causing people to overestimate their own qualities and abilities compared to others, particularly compared to the average. People wrongly assume two things: 1) The average person’s ability is worse than it really is, and 2) Their own ability is better than it really is. This appears to be true of self-assessments of attractiveness, intelligence, and specific skill sets.”

Hero looked at Unc, confused.

“This sounds like it supports the scientists you mentioned earlier - why did this lead you to question their claims?”

“Because Dunning-Kruger claimed that low-competency people were uniquely bad at self-assessment, but this effect shows that everyone believes themselves better than average, regardless of their competency. For example, 93% of Americans think they’re better drivers than average - an obvious statistical impossibility. If we all believe we’re better than average regardless of our performance, then the gap is only wide when looking at the worst performers. It doesn’t appear that the worse performers are worse at self-assessment because they’re lacking enough knowledge to accurately self-assess, only that they suffer from the same bias we all do.”

Unc studied Hero’s face for a moment, then continued speaking.

“There’s another piece of data that swayed me. Some researchers showed in 2016 that you could derive these results solely mathematically.”

He reached down and ripped off a collection of papers from his trousers - revealing a hairy thigh beneath - and thrust them towards Hero. The highlighted section read as follows:

To establish the Dunning-Kruger effect is an artifact of research design, not human thinking, my colleagues and I showed it can be produced using randomly generated data.

First, we created 1,154 fictional people and randomly assigned them both a test score and a self-assessment ranking compared with their peers.

Then, just as Dunning and Kruger did, we divided these fake people into quarters based on their test scores. Because the self-assessment rankings were also randomly assigned a score from 1 to 100, each quarter will revert to the mean of 50. By definition, the bottom quarter will outperform only 12.5% of participants on average, but from the random assignment of self-assessment scores they will consider themselves better than 50% of test-takers. This gives an overestimation of 37.5 percentage points without any humans involved.

Unc watched Hero read the text, then spoke when he finished.

“In other words, the general truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be explained by the better-than-average effect, and the specific claims of Dunning and Kruger are little more than a statistical artifact.”

Hero seemed convinced, then looked bemused.

“Ironic that people in your time used that term frequently without understanding it! I appreciate the explanation, but now I must know - what is this glorious… banana?” Hero asked, gesturing at the yellow jacket.

Unc twirled on the spot, much too gracefully for an elderly man.

“You like it? It’s my favorite piece this year. It’s about a concept called the Placebo Effect, which was…”

He was interrupted by another audio cue, then the world around them dissolved, returning Hero to his home mind.

Sasha spoke, with a slight teasing lilt in her voice.

“Your timebox has expired, sir.”

Hero grimaced. “Yes yes. I wanted to hear him though. Bring him back and add five minutes…no wait, what about a neural transfer?”

Sasha responded in a surprised tone, “Really? Yes sir! I’ve been checking all the pieces - as well as the author and this community - and they’re clean. There’s a small amount of political discussion - this piece was written near an election cycle of a former superpower - but it’s nothing the filters won’t scrub. If you like, I can allow only the piece directly and not import any ideological dependencies.”

Hero nodded. He snapped back into the cozy room, staring at Unc and his jacket.

“May I try it on myself?” Hero asked while gesturing at the jacket, interrupting Unc’s explanation of the Placebo Effect.

“By all means!” Unc responded, sliding it off and handing it over.

Hero grabbed it, surprised by its weight, and pulled it onto each arm. His vision went dark, and he proceeded through a brief confirmation process to initiate the transfer.

The program ran. Hero disliked the dreamlike state which neural transfers momentarily placed the receiver into - he guessed that the designers were trying to replicate natural dreams, but there was still an uncanny valley feeling to them.

When his mind’s vision returned, he was alerted about a six second loss of consciousness. He dismissed the alert, and his vision was presented with the New Transfer Interface. There were handful of ideological conflicts highlighted, but he skimmed them and none looked important.

If you could read all the knowledge which entered Hero’s brain about the Placebo Effect, it would read almost exactly like this fascinating article.

Hero looked at the time. He focused on the “Snooze Resolving Conflicts” option, and dropped back into the room with Unc, standing in his t-shirt. Hero handed the jacket back.

“It’s been a pleasure meeting you Unc! I need to leave now, but you’ve made my day.”

Unc smiled, nodded, and faded away.

Hero focused his attention on his wardrobe for a moment, and was immediately inside his parents’ walk-in closest where he liked to hide in his youth. He glanced around, and it only took him a moment to see where the yellow jacket had been hung, between a pair of moss-covered chaps and an embroidered silver blazer.

He smiled. He felt Sasha smile. Then he got back to work.