The unawareness of lack of skill

This appears to be a funny note, but actually it is really something ultimately true: Unskilled and Unaware of It.

Justin Kruger and David Dunning made several studies to support following concepts:

1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.
2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it—be it their own or anyone else’s.
3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.
4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

If self-assessment is a crucial part of learning, then gaining insight about own shortcomings (and a good judgment about if and what to do about it) seems to be key.

The longer more detailed article from several years ago is here.