Have you ever watched someone get praised for something you knew was mediocre?
A colleague presents a strategy you recognize as basic, and the room treats it like breakthrough thinking. A consultant delivers a standard framework, and the client acts like they’ve just unlocked a secret. Someone gets promoted, gets funded, gets followed, and you wonder what you missed.
Perhaps you’re highly technical and your CEO is presenting an idea that is all too basic. Everyone in the room looks as though they’re witnessing the next big thing since Steve Jobs. You look around, wondering if you’re missing something. You’re not.
Boardrooms, classrooms, job interviews, social media. The dynamic is the same. And it explains more about who rises, who gets hired, who gets followed, and who gets paid than most people want to admit.
You Can Only Judge What You Can Do
In 1999, two psychologists at Cornell named David Dunning and Justin Kruger ran a series of experiments on logic, grammar, and humor.
Imagine lining up 100 test-takers from lowest score to highest. Your position in that line is your percentile. If you’re 12th in line, you’re at the 12th percentile, meaning 88 people scored higher than you. If you’re 62nd in line, you’re above average, with only 38 people ahead.
Dunning and Kruger found that students who actually stood at the 12th position believed they were standing at the 62nd. They thought they had outperformed most of the room when in reality nearly everyone had outperformed them.
It’s like finishing a marathon in the back third of the pack, drenched in sweat and proud, genuinely believing you crossed the finish line ahead of most runners. The delusion isn’t arrogance. It’s blindness. They simply cannot see where they actually stand.
The famous finding, though, isn’t the one that matters most.
Dunning and Kruger also found that incompetent individuals “will be less able to recognize competence when they see it.” The same deficit that prevents someone from performing well also prevents them from judging performance accurately, whether their own or someone else’s.
To evaluate a chess player, you need to understand chess. To know that a doctor is giving you bad advice, you need to know something about medicine. To recognize that someone’s strategy is actually basic, you need to have studied strategy yourself. The skills required to perform in a domain are the same skills required to evaluate performance in that domain.
Skill Is Altitude
Skill is like altitude on a mountain.
You’re standing at 1,000 feet. You look up and see someone at 3,000 feet. From where you stand, they look like they’re near the summit. They’re so far above you that you can’t tell how much mountain remains above them.
Someone standing at 7,000 feet looks at that same person at 3,000 feet and sees a beginner. They can also see the real summit at 10,000 feet and understand the distance still to climb.
Same person at 3,000 feet. Different observers. Different conclusions.
Evaluation Ceiling = Your Skill Level
You cannot accurately judge skill beyond your own. If you’re at 20 out of 100, anyone above 20 starts to blur together. You can tell they’re better than you, but you can’t tell how much better, or how far they are from actual mastery.
When a novice at 20 watches someone at 40, they see:
40 − 20 = 20 points above me = impressive
When an expert at 80 watches that same person at 40, they see:
40 − 80 = 40 points below me = beginner
And the expert also sees:
100 − 40 = 60 points still to climb
The novice cannot do that second calculation. They don’t know where 100 is. They’ve never been there. So they assume 40 is close to the top because it’s so far above where they stand.
Good Enough Wins the Room
Most people are not experts in most things. Obvious, yes, but the implications are severe. If most consumers of content, advice, or services lack the evaluative capacity to distinguish good from excellent, then the marketplace rewards those who are just good enough to impress the majority.
Think about any domain where you lack deep expertise. Art. Tax law. Auto repair. Structural engineering. You can tell when someone sounds competent. You cannot tell whether they actually are. You lack the internal reference points to know what excellence looks like, so anyone who clears a basic threshold of credibility registers as “good.”
Now realize that in most rooms, on most topics, most people are in exactly that position. They’re evaluating without the tools to evaluate. And the person being evaluated doesn’t need to be excellent. They just need to clear the threshold.
Studies consistently show that audiences evaluate performance based on surface indicators rather than actual quality. Researchers have demonstrated that people judge expertise using simple cues like word length, confidence, and the amount of advice given. These cues are not reliable indicators of actual competence. But to an audience that cannot evaluate the substance, the surface is all they have.
In one study, less knowledgeable evaluators based their judgments on the number of specific statements a person made, regardless of whether those statements were true or false. More knowledgeable evaluators, by contrast, penalized false specificity. Same performance. Different audiences. Different verdicts.
Interviewers Can’t See Past Their Own Ceiling
Companies often use interviewers who are less skilled than the candidates they’re evaluating. Voters choose leaders using heuristics that have nothing to do with policy competence. Audiences amplify voices based on confidence rather than correctness, certainty rather than nuance.
Research in organizational psychology has shown that employees frequently get “promoted beyond their own competence levels,” not because the promotion committee made a mistake, but because the evaluators lacked the framework to detect the candidate’s ceiling. They saw someone who was better than them. They assumed that meant the person was good.
One researcher documented candidates who “sound like they can do a good job, they can do this and do that, until they’re actually in the job. We find that a lot, don’t we? They can’t actually, when they’re physically doing it, they can’t do it.”
The interviewers weren’t fools. They were evaluating from a vantage point that didn’t allow them to see what they needed to see.
Dunning-Kruger Works Both Ways
Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher and Nobel laureate, once wrote, “The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”
People often read this as advice. Be confident. Fake it till you make it. The confident win, so act confident.
Russell wasn’t offering a strategy. He was describing a tragedy. The cocksure win not because confidence is powerful, but because most people lack the ability to see through it. The audience can’t tell the difference between someone who knows what they’re talking about and someone who merely sounds like they do.
The classic Dunning-Kruger formulation says: incompetent people overestimate their own abilities because they can’t think clearly about their own thinking. They lack the skill to step back and evaluate themselves accurately.
The inverse is just as important: incompetent evaluators overestimate the abilities of others because they lack the same skill. They can’t step back and assess what they’re seeing. They have no framework for recognizing the gap between intermediate and expert.
The person who thinks they’re great at something will also think the slightly better person is amazing. They’re calibrated to the wrong scale. And since most people are calibrated to the wrong scale in most domains, the person who is only slightly better than average becomes indistinguishable from the actual master.
Gurus flourish because of this. Bad advice spreads faster than good advice because of this. Mediocre performers accumulate audiences and accolades while truly exceptional ones remain obscure because of this.
Excellence is invisible to those who cannot see it. And most people cannot see it.
And Now Everyone Has a Teleprompter
AI has made this worse.
Before, you needed actual knowledge to sound knowledgeable. You needed years of reading to reference the right frameworks, the right studies, the right names. Surface competence still required some depth.
Now anyone can prompt their way to a polished answer. The consultant who used to need ten years of experience to speak fluently about strategy can now generate that fluency in ten seconds. The manager who never studied organizational psychology can now quote Dunning-Kruger in their next presentation.
Remember the person standing at 3,000 feet who looked like they were near the summit? The one the novice mistook for an expert? They now sound like they’re at 9,000. Same skill. Shinier packaging. The novice still can’t tell the difference. They never could. Only now, the packaging is more convincing and the gap between real and performed expertise is wider than ever.
We’ve democratized the appearance of expertise without democratizing expertise itself. The bar for admiration was already low. We just handed everyone a ladder to step over it.
“But Hey, They Must Be Doing Something Right”
When a domain expert points out that the celebrated guru is actually a novice, someone inevitably says this “Look at their following. Look at their clients. Look at their success. They must be doing something right.”
And they are. Just not what you think.
They are skilled at reading rooms. They are skilled at projecting confidence. They are skilled at packaging ordinary ideas in language that sounds profound to people who have never encountered those ideas before. They are skilled at matching their delivery to the evaluative capacity of their audience.
These are real skills. Valuable ones, even. But they are not the skills people believe they are observing. The audience thinks they are watching someone who has mastered the domain. What they are actually watching is someone who has mastered the performance of mastery.
The guru is not doing strategy well. The guru is doing audience capture well. The consultant is not doing analysis well. The consultant is doing confidence well. The thought leader is not doing thinking well. The thought leader is doing distribution well.
So yes, they must be doing something right. They are. It’s just a different game than the one you thought you were watching.
This Is How It Is
Most rooms will be filled with people who can’t tell the difference. Most clients will treat a standard framework like a revelation. Most promotion committees will mistake “better than me” for “actually good.”
The strategist who spent a decade studying the craft will be passed over for the one who speaks with confidence about frameworks they read yesterday. The technical expert will watch the novice get promoted, get funded, get followed, and wonder what they missed.
No point in being resentful about this. No point in being miserable. This is the game.
I have watched highly technical people become bitter observers of this dynamic. They sit in meetings, watching mediocrity get celebrated, and they seethe. They become the skeptics, the eye-rollers, the ones everyone quietly avoids. I have been there too.
However, at some point you have to step back and see humanity for what it is. Deep technical skill is not available at scale. It never has been. Most people are doing their best with the evaluative tools they have, which are limited, because no one can be expert in everything.
So explain what you can. Hand hold when it helps. And when it doesn’t, step back and let things be. The outcomes won’t be as catastrophic as your overly competent self fears. If they were, people would have noticed long ago. We would have evolved sharper detection. We didn’t, because good enough has always been good enough for most of what matters.
But in your pursuit of excellence, do it for you. What follows follows. If the masses don’t notice, it’s fine. The real question is why you started in the first place. Did you pursue mastery to be recognized? Or because it mattered to you?
If it was the former, and recognition is what you’re after, change the game. Learn just enough to impress those who know less. Collect your applause and move on.
If it was the latter, keep going. Just know who you’re playing for.
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