A few days ago, I watched a really good YouTube video about how stupid people think they’re smart. This video changed my perspective of how I view myself. As a diligent student, I have achieved great heights in high school. I would consider myself as one of the top students in class and a great student-athlete who won several trophies for my school. However, things changed in these past few years. I did not realize that I have been on top of Mount Stupid all this time.

The video that Better Than Yesterday talked about the Dunning Kruger effect. Dunning and Kruger are social psychologists that found an anomaly in the confidence of less intelligent people. In 1995, one person robbed two banks with his face covered in lemon juice. After the police caught him, they found out that the robber was convinced that lemon juice could make him invisible since it is one of the ingredients of hidden ink. To further experiment this phenomenon, Dunning and Kruger asked undergraduates about their first-year finals. To their surprise, students that say they did well got marks below class average while students that say they could not do it achieved higher than the class average. In other words, incompetent students overestimate themselves and competent students underestimate themselves. Dunning and Kruger then made a graph that explained the correlation of confidence and competence.

Stupid people think that they are smart. When someone just started learning a particular field, they know little about the whole subject. Therefore, they feel like they have mastered most of the subject. As an illustration, someone just studied science in high school and let’s call him A. A has studied all high school worth of material in junior year. All that is left is to study some more further explanations on quantum physics. In this case, A believes that he has studied 80% of science materials. On the other hand, there’s B who is an international science Olympiad. B has studied more than what A studied but B knows that there are still more to science than what he knows. Therefore, B believes that he has only studied 50% of all science. When A and B are met together, A would feel more confident since he feels that he has studied almost all of science. This is what Dunning and Kruger calls as Mount Stupid.

In my own personal experience, being on top of Mount Stupid feels good. When you feel confident of your competence, it makes you feel like you’re the best. As a top student, I have always felt that I have really good math understanding. I could pass a test without studying at all. However, I finally realized that I overestimated myself. I enrolled in an A-level course to prepare myself for a university entrance examination. When I first took the course, I felt confident that I was competent enough to be better than anyone. In this course, there’s a monthly assessment to test our understandings. This was the moment that I realized I was stupid this whole time. On this first test, I got an 8 out of 100. I clearly remember the test till this very day. It was an integral test where we only have to choose 8 questions out of 10. I could not finish one single question on that test. On the other hand, several students in the same course got a perfect mark in the test. Someone even answered the whole 10 questions. This was when I came to realize that I overestimated myself this whole time.

Dunning and Kruger calls this realization as the valley of despair. I finally realized that there is much more to learn. This experience in high school taught me something really important.

Above the clouds, there are other clouds

It’s a local proverb that more or less means that there’s an Asian better than you. This hit me really hard. As someone who usually receives academic awards, I came to realize that I was nothing compared to other people.

However, when people are in the valley of despair, the only way left is up. This is the good thing about realization. We become more open to improvement. Stupid people do not have room for improvement. They believe that they know everything. Therefore, the earlier we realize our state of competence, the more improvement we can work on.

As a conclusion, I would like to put heavy emphasis on being open for improvement. Learning is a lifelong process. The faster we realize our state of competence, the more we can learn. Additionally, we should always be open to criticism. In my opinion, criticism is a process of learning. Criticism makes us realize the possible rooms for improvement. Only stupid people avoid improvement. Hence, don’t be stupid and keep on learning.