Magnets: How Do They Work?

There’s a sort of reverse Dunning-Kruger phenomenon out there.

Classic Dunning-Kruger is a cognitive bias where people with little knowledge or skill tend to overestimate their abilities, while experts often underestimate their competence. You’ve probably seen a graph like this:

LittleT889, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

In this classic scenario, you know almost nothing at first, and you believe you know almost nothing. As your knowledge begins to increase, your confidence in how much you know tends to go up much faster. Paradoxically, someone with six weeks of experience in a subject might be more confident than someone with six years of experience, mainly because the person with six years knows there’s a lot they don’t know.

In my version of reverse Dunning-Kruger, it’s ignorance, not confidence, that seems to experience an early and a later spike. I can think of no better way to showcase this paradox than by sharing two videos and …