# The Dunning Kruger Hijack (and Other Criminally Stupid Acts)

An episode of [Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1484511465), 26 Mar 2021, 33 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pdrl.fm/18db03/tracking.swap.fm/track/SxlTEPDY7xDg35RXkASs/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/c0ae8c6e-22f0-4e9b-ac1c-ae390037ac53/0f9b3cc4-7ef1-4de1-b710-ae39003c525b/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=7f5a4714-6b10-4ccf-a424-ae390037ac70

The hijackers of flight 961 wanted its pilot to fly them to Australia - and wouldn't listen to his pleas that there simply wasn't enough fuel for the mammoth trip. What would cause them to totally disregard the advice of an expert when the stakes were so very high? The Dunning Kruger effect. But being too stupid to recognise the limits of your knowledge isn't confined to such prize idiots - it's something we are all guilty of at times and has huge implications for society. Starring Jeffrey Wright (Hunger Games, Westworld, and the Bond films) as Ethiopian Airlines captain Leul Abate. Read more about Tim's work at http://timharford.com/ Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

## Transcript

[0:15] Speaker 1: Pushkin. It wasn't a particularly sophisticated hijacking. Three somewhat drunk
[0:34] Speaker 1: young men charged into the cockpit of the Ethiopian Airline's
[0:37] Speaker 1: plane and grabbed a fireman's axe from the wall. Everybody
[0:42] Speaker 1: should be seated, I herbim bump. They beat up the
[0:45] Speaker 1: first officer and pushed him out of the flight deck,
[0:47] Speaker 1: then made their demands. The pilot, forty two year old
[0:53] Speaker 1: Leel Abata, was an Ethiopian Airlines veteran. He had dealt
[0:57] Speaker 1: with two previous hijackings. Both times he had eventually managed
[1:01] Speaker 1: to talk the hijackers into giving themselves up. Both times,
[1:06] Speaker 1: nobody had been hurt. This new hijacking was alarming, but
[1:12] Speaker 1: perhaps manageable. So outnumbered three to one in the cockpit,
[1:18] Speaker 1: Laoll played it cool. He assumed the hijackers were not
[1:21] Speaker 1: interested in murder. This was five years before nine eleven.
[1:26] Speaker 1: Laoll reckoned the men who took over his plane wanted
[1:29] Speaker 1: money or attention, or maybe they were desperate to be
[1:33] Speaker 1: taken somewhere, and he was right. This was a simple
[1:36] Speaker 1: old school hijacking. The hijackers just wanted the plane to reroute.
[1:42] Speaker 1: It was November the twenty third, nineteen ninety six. The plane,
[1:46] Speaker 1: a Boeing seven sixty seven, was flying from the capital
[1:49] Speaker 1: of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, to the capital of Kenya, Nairobi,
[1:54] Speaker 1: and the hijackers wanted to go somewhere else, namely Australia.
[2:01] Speaker 1: There was just one problem. There wasn't the slightest chance
[2:06] Speaker 1: that they could fly the distance. Ethiope In Airlines Flight
[2:10] Speaker 1: nine six one was in the middle of a Dunning
[2:14] Speaker 1: Kruger hijack. I'm Tim Harford and you're listening to cautionary tales.
[2:43] Speaker 1: This tale is about the Dunning Kruger effect, what it is,
[2:47] Speaker 1: how it became famous, and what we get wrong about it.
[2:51] Speaker 1: But we should probably start by explaining what the Dunning
[2:54] Speaker 1: Kruger effect is, and for that we have to start
[2:57] Speaker 1: with a gentleman named MacArthur Wheeler. You wouldn't have thought
[3:02] Speaker 1: you'd have much trouble picking mister Wheeler out of a lineup.
[3:05] Speaker 1: He was five ft six and two hundred and seventy pounds,
[3:09] Speaker 1: the height of a jockey and the weight of a linebacker.
[3:13] Speaker 1: But when detectives knocked on his door in the early
[3:16] Speaker 1: hours of the twentieth of April nineteen ninety five and
[3:20] Speaker 1: arrested him on suspicion of carrying out two bank robberies
[3:23] Speaker 1: in his hometown of Pittsburgh. He was astonished, but I
[3:28] Speaker 1: wore the lemon juice. OW wore the lemon juice, a
[3:32] Speaker 1: perplexed Wheeler declared to the equally perplexed detectives. MacArthur Wheeler
[3:39] Speaker 1: was destined to be convicted in court. He was also
[3:42] Speaker 1: destined to become a minor legend in the field of
[3:45] Speaker 1: behavioral science, as an inspiration for two academic psychologists, David
[3:51] Speaker 1: Dunning and Justin Krueger. When David Dunning read about MacArthur Wheeler,
[3:56] Speaker 1: he thought, here is an incompetence so fascinating, so profound,
[4:02] Speaker 1: as to be worthy of close study. It turns out
[4:07] Speaker 1: that mister Wheeler had been told that squeezing lemon juice
[4:10] Speaker 1: on his face would render him invisible to security cameras
[4:13] Speaker 1: and thus able to rob banks with impunity. Exactly where
[4:18] Speaker 1: this theory came from is unclear. Maybe it's because lemon
[4:22] Speaker 1: juice can be used to make invisible ink. Maybe it's
[4:26] Speaker 1: because well, I don't know. I just don't know. But
[4:31] Speaker 1: MacArthur Wheeler didn't just take some guy's word for it.
[4:34] Speaker 1: That would be just plain stupid, wouldn't it. No, he
[4:37] Speaker 1: decided to test the idea. He bathed his face in
[4:41] Speaker 1: lemon juice, and then he pointed a polaroid camera at
[4:45] Speaker 1: his stinging face, with his blinded eyes streaming tears through
[4:49] Speaker 1: closed lids, and took a test selfie. And you know what,
[4:54] Speaker 1: he wasn't in the shot. The juice worked. Now You
[4:58] Speaker 1: or I might think maybe he didn't give the photograph
[5:01] Speaker 1: time to develop, or maybe blinded by the juice, he
[5:05] Speaker 1: pointed the camera at a blank wall rather than at
[5:08] Speaker 1: his own face. But it did not seem to have
[5:10] Speaker 1: occurred to MacArthur Wheeler that anything might be amiss. One
[5:15] Speaker 1: thing is clear enough, Wheeler was no better at photography
[5:18] Speaker 1: than he was at robbing banks. But beyond this quite
[5:23] Speaker 1: riveting ineptitude. Why was the academic researcher David Dunning so
[5:28] Speaker 1: intrigued by the case of MacArthur Wheeler. It's because the
[5:32] Speaker 1: thing about MacArthur Wheeler was not just that he was
[5:35] Speaker 1: an incompetent bank robber, but that he had no idea
[5:39] Speaker 1: that he was an incompetent bank robber, and people who
[5:43] Speaker 1: did not know they were incompetent were just the kind
[5:46] Speaker 1: of people that David Dunning and Justin Krueger had begun
[5:49] Speaker 1: to study. Dunning and Krueger set tests of competence to
[5:54] Speaker 1: groups of undergraduates. Then they asked them how they stacked
[5:58] Speaker 1: up to others in the group. For example, were they
[6:01] Speaker 1: better able than other students to distinguish funny from unfunny jokes.
[6:06] Speaker 1: Let's hear two of the jokes. Have a think about
[6:08] Speaker 1: which one of him is funny? Joke one, question what
[6:13] Speaker 1: is as big as a man but weighs nothing? Answer
[6:17] Speaker 1: his shadow or joke Two. If a kid asks where
[6:22] Speaker 1: rain comes from, I think a cute think to tell
[6:24] Speaker 1: him is God is crying. And if he asks why
[6:28] Speaker 1: God is crying, another cute think to tell him is
[6:31] Speaker 1: probably because of something you did. Now, I don't need
[6:34] Speaker 1: to tell you that. The first joke is not really
[6:37] Speaker 1: a joke at all. It's more of a riddle. Riddles
[6:40] Speaker 1: aren't usually funny, and we have a special name for
[6:42] Speaker 1: riddles that are funny. We call them jokes. The second
[6:46] Speaker 1: joke is written by Jack Handy, one of the funniest
[6:49] Speaker 1: men in the world, and was highly rated by a
[6:52] Speaker 1: panel of professional comedians Now, since I agree that joke
[6:56] Speaker 1: two is funnier, I guess that means I'm pretty good
[6:59] Speaker 1: at recognizing what's funny. But when Dunning and Krueger asked
[7:03] Speaker 1: their experimental subjects exactly that question, how good is your
[7:08] Speaker 1: ability to recognize what's funny? They found something interesting. The
[7:13] Speaker 1: students had no idea, or, to be more precise, all
[7:18] Speaker 1: the students thought they were pretty good. Some were right,
[7:21] Speaker 1: and some weren't. Those who had no sense of humor
[7:26] Speaker 1: just didn't realize it. But humor was just one of
[7:29] Speaker 1: the things that Dunning and Kruger tested. They also gave
[7:33] Speaker 1: tests of logical reasoning and of grammar. For grammar, they
[7:36] Speaker 1: found the same story as for humor. For logic, Dunning
[7:40] Speaker 1: and Kruger found something even more striking here. The good
[7:45] Speaker 1: but not great students realized they were good but not great.
[7:49] Speaker 1: But there were two groups of students who thought they
[7:52] Speaker 1: were outstanding logicians, the ones who'd done very well and
[7:57] Speaker 1: the ones who'd done very badly, Ladies and gentlemen. This
[8:03] Speaker 1: is the Dunning Kruger effect. Cautionary tails will return in
[8:12] Speaker 1: a moment. On flight nine six one, things aren't going well.
[8:28] Speaker 1: The hijackers remember have beaten up the co pilot, whose
[8:32] Speaker 1: name is Jonas Mercuria. They're threatening Layola Bata, the pilot,
[8:37] Speaker 1: and they're demanding that he fly them thousands of miles
[8:40] Speaker 1: to Australia. The hijackers are a strange bunch. They claim
[8:45] Speaker 1: they're a group of eleven. Maybe there are only three
[8:49] Speaker 1: of them on the flight deck with Layol. They're young,
[8:52] Speaker 1: in their mid twenties, clean shaven, they're nervous. One of
[8:56] Speaker 1: them has a stocking cap pulled down over his face
[8:59] Speaker 1: to conceal his features, but the other two haven't bothered,
[9:03] Speaker 1: so go figure. The leader has grabbed the public address system.
[9:08] Speaker 1: He tells passengers, speaking in the Ethiopian language, AM harrick,
[9:13] Speaker 1: we skipped from prison. Yeah, against the government. We are
[9:17] Speaker 1: hijacking the Blint. We have an explosive. If anybody morse,
[9:21] Speaker 1: we'll exploded. Le can't actually see an explosive. One of
[9:27] Speaker 1: the hijackers has grabbed a little fire axe from where
[9:30] Speaker 1: it's been stowed in the cockpit. That makes some sense
[9:33] Speaker 1: as an improvised weapon, although it also suggests he didn't
[9:36] Speaker 1: manage to smuggle a weapon on board. He also has
[9:39] Speaker 1: a bottle of whiskey that he's looted from the duty
[9:42] Speaker 1: free cart. A second hijacker has a fire extinguisher, again
[9:47] Speaker 1: opportunistically grabbed from stowage and the cockpit. That makes a
[9:51] Speaker 1: lot less sense. The third man has a glove. He says,
[9:56] Speaker 1: there's a bomb in the glove. Okay. In his other
[10:00] Speaker 1: hand he's got well, another bottle of stolen whiskey. The
[10:05] Speaker 1: men are not easy to understand. They're drunk and what
[10:09] Speaker 1: demanding seems crazy. But there are three of them and
[10:13] Speaker 1: there's only one of leol. So he's trying to do
[10:16] Speaker 1: what they tell him to do. Dick us to Australia.
[10:19] Speaker 1: Take the plane to Australia. There is not enough fuel
[10:22] Speaker 1: to go to Australia. Don't lay to us. They're smacking
[10:26] Speaker 1: him around, punching him, threatening him with the axe and
[10:28] Speaker 1: with a now broken whiskey bottle. There is not enough
[10:31] Speaker 1: fuel to go to Australia. The plane is only fuel
[10:33] Speaker 1: to fly to Niadobe. If you want to go to Australia,
[10:35] Speaker 1: we have to refuel. We can land at Mombassa and refuel.
[10:39] Speaker 1: Stop laying. We know you're lying. Take us to Australia.
[10:45] Speaker 1: We are not landing in Mombassa. LAOL is already trying
[10:49] Speaker 1: to work out how to get a message to Mombassa Airport,
[10:53] Speaker 1: but the hijackers have other ideas. We need to refuel ah.
[10:59] Speaker 1: We know the plane can fly for eleven hours without refueling.
[11:05] Speaker 1: This plane does not have enough fuel for that. Stop laying.
[11:09] Speaker 1: We know you're lying. We read this in your own magazine.
[11:14] Speaker 1: It's true. The in flight magazine of Ethiopian Airlines was
[11:18] Speaker 1: called Salamta. It still is, and the magazine did indeed
[11:23] Speaker 1: have one of those about our aircraft sections. Ethiopian Airlines
[11:28] Speaker 1: whilst the very first airline in the world to place
[11:31] Speaker 1: an order for the extended range version of the Bowing
[11:34] Speaker 1: seven sixty seven, so I imagine they were pretty keen
[11:37] Speaker 1: to boast about it. But just because a fully fueled
[11:41] Speaker 1: extended range Bowing seven sixty seven er could, in theory
[11:46] Speaker 1: get you from Addis Ababa to Australia six thousand miles
[11:50] Speaker 1: or so away, well it didn't mean that this particular
[11:53] Speaker 1: plane fueled for a short hop to Nairobi could make it,
[11:57] Speaker 1: because it couldn't. This plane has only a light fuel load.
[12:01] Speaker 1: We must land in Mumbasa. Dodds lay we've done our
[12:06] Speaker 1: zech they really had. Later police would raid the hijackers
[12:11] Speaker 1: hideout in Addis, they'd find a copy of salam To magazine,
[12:16] Speaker 1: and true enough, the Boeing seven sixty seven's maximum flight
[12:20] Speaker 1: time was underlined. These drunk young men thought they were
[12:24] Speaker 1: so smart that they had no idea how dumb they
[12:28] Speaker 1: really were. For Dunning Kruger hijack, Dunning and Krueger wrote
[12:38] Speaker 1: up their findings in a nineteen ninety nine research paper
[12:41] Speaker 1: titled Unskilled and Unaware of It. It's fun to read.
[12:46] Speaker 1: They even begin with the story of MacArthur Wheeler. Their
[12:50] Speaker 1: study was noticed in the cloisters of academia, but didn't
[12:53] Speaker 1: make much impression beyond them, not at first anyway. I
[12:57] Speaker 1: tracked Google searches for Dunning Kruger effect since two thousand
[13:01] Speaker 1: and four, and by way of comparison, I picked another
[13:04] Speaker 1: concept from social science, the tipping point, made famous by
[13:09] Speaker 1: Malcolm Gladwell himself in his first book, which of course
[13:13] Speaker 1: you should read, Ah, tim, what a sweet thing to say,
[13:17] Speaker 1: Not at all. In two thousand and four, nobody was
[13:21] Speaker 1: searching for Dunning Krueger. Loads of people were searching for
[13:24] Speaker 1: the tipping point. Gradually Over time, the Dunning Kruger effect
[13:30] Speaker 1: started to attract some attention. It first seemed to enter
[13:33] Speaker 1: the popular consciousness around the summer of twenty ten, and
[13:37] Speaker 1: it grew and grew. For a few years. It was
[13:40] Speaker 1: neck and neck with the tipping point, which, remember is
[13:44] Speaker 1: one of the most popular of all popularizations of an
[13:47] Speaker 1: idea in social science. Then in the summer of twenty sixteen,
[13:53] Speaker 1: interest in Dunning Krueger really starts to searge. You know,
[13:57] Speaker 1: all of my life, I've heard that a truly successful person,
[14:01] Speaker 1: a really really successful person, cannot run for public offers.
[14:07] Speaker 1: The US presidential election campaign is building. People are talking
[14:11] Speaker 1: about Donald Trump as the Dunning Kruger candidate, the presidential
[14:16] Speaker 1: hopeful who's so dumb he doesn't know how dumb he is.
[14:20] Speaker 1: But maybe Trump doesn't much care about that, because, of
[14:23] Speaker 1: course he wins, I'm a very stable genius. And the
[14:27] Speaker 1: Dunning Kruger effect is more famous now than it's ever been.
[14:30] Speaker 1: It's become a straight up insult now, a highbrow way
[14:34] Speaker 1: to accuse someone of the stupidest stupidity of all, to
[14:37] Speaker 1: accuse someone of being such an idiot they don't even
[14:40] Speaker 1: know they're an idiot. Suddenly we're all living in a
[14:44] Speaker 1: dunning Kruger world. We're surrounded by more ROMs who don't
[14:49] Speaker 1: know their more ROMs, and like Pilot Naoula Bata, we're outnumbered.
[14:57] Speaker 1: MacArthur Wheeler was by no means the only incompetent bank robber.
[15:02] Speaker 1: One Florida gentleman handed a bank cashier in Delray Beach
[15:06] Speaker 1: a misspelled note which read a berm, I can blow
[15:11] Speaker 1: you sky high. The note was passed around the bank staff,
[15:15] Speaker 1: most of whom were reduced to hysterics foiled, the humiliated
[15:20] Speaker 1: thief ran away. You don't have to go very far
[15:24] Speaker 1: to find collections of these bungling incompetence online, but my
[15:28] Speaker 1: favorite source is an old book by the British writer
[15:31] Speaker 1: Nigel Blundell, called the World's Most Daring Ragabonds and Villains.
[15:37] Speaker 1: Some of Blundell's protagonists are smart and ruthless. Some of
[15:40] Speaker 1: them are so creative and daring as to deserve the
[15:43] Speaker 1: title of criminal mastermind, but some of them not so much.
[15:49] Speaker 1: There was the Texas bank robber. This is a sticker.
[15:54] Speaker 1: The cashier, just twenty years old, replied, you're in the
[15:57] Speaker 1: wrong line. Please wait over there. He tamely obeyed and
[16:02] Speaker 1: was still in the line when the police arrived. Burglars
[16:07] Speaker 1: offer equally compelling examples of incompetence. One French gentleman robbed
[16:13] Speaker 1: the home of a Parisian antique dealer, having first opted
[16:17] Speaker 1: to don a suit of fifteenth century armor. The plan was,
[16:23] Speaker 1: I think, to appear more intimidating. While some men might
[16:27] Speaker 1: have quailed at the sight and indeed the clattering sound
[16:31] Speaker 1: of a suit of armor climbing the stairs in the
[16:34] Speaker 1: middle of the night, the quick witted homeowner shoved the
[16:38] Speaker 1: intruder down the stairs and then pinned him by pushing
[16:41] Speaker 1: a heavy antique sideboard over on him. When the police arrived,
[16:46] Speaker 1: they found that the armor had been sufficiently dented as
[16:49] Speaker 1: to make it impossible to easily remove, so the miscreant
[16:53] Speaker 1: had to be fed through his visor until an armorer
[16:55] Speaker 1: could be found. Another burglar tried to squeeze through a
[17:01] Speaker 1: skylight into a store in the middle of the night.
[17:04] Speaker 1: Finding that his clothes were bunching up and getting in
[17:07] Speaker 1: the way, he removed them, dropped them through the skylight,
[17:11] Speaker 1: then tried to squirm through after them, as he still
[17:16] Speaker 1: couldn't quite fit, leaving his clothes inside the store, and
[17:21] Speaker 1: the burglar buck naked on the roof. By the way,
[17:26] Speaker 1: I should tell you that while I have sources for
[17:29] Speaker 1: the other stories, the one about the naked burglar and
[17:32] Speaker 1: the skylight is one I merely recall reading decades ago,
[17:36] Speaker 1: and all I really remember is that I laughed until
[17:38] Speaker 1: I cried. So I googled around trying to find more details,
[17:44] Speaker 1: and instead I found a much more recent example of
[17:48] Speaker 1: a naked burglar trapped in a ventilation shaft in Milwaukee,
[17:52] Speaker 1: again because he felt he would make more progress through
[17:55] Speaker 1: a narrow space without his garments. I am forced to
[18:00] Speaker 1: conclude that not only did this actually happen, it happened twice.
[18:07] Speaker 1: The idiocy isn't always in the crime itself, as one
[18:10] Speaker 1: criminal suspect proved. He was accused of snatching a purse
[18:14] Speaker 1: at a shopping center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in October nineteen
[18:18] Speaker 1: seventy six. Unwisely, he decided to act as his own
[18:22] Speaker 1: defense lawyer. Cross examining the victim, he asked, did you
[18:26] Speaker 1: get a good look at my face when I took
[18:28] Speaker 1: your purse? The entire court burst out laughing, including the
[18:33] Speaker 1: robbery victim. If I'd been the one that was there.
[18:40] Speaker 1: He was promptly found guilty. The spectacular ineptitude of mister
[18:45] Speaker 1: Lemon Juice MacArthur Wheeler may have inspired Dunning and Krueger,
[18:50] Speaker 1: but he is not alone. Cautionary tales will return in
[18:59] Speaker 1: a minute. I love a good story about stupid people
[19:10] Speaker 1: doing stupid things, but I worry that perhaps we're missing
[19:14] Speaker 1: something very important about the Dunning Kruger effect. In eighteen
[19:19] Speaker 1: ninety six, an Austrian doctor named Gabriel Anton stood up
[19:23] Speaker 1: at a medical conference to discuss some curious cases in
[19:27] Speaker 1: what we would now call neuroscience. Anton is remembered partly
[19:32] Speaker 1: in the medical eponym Anton Babinski syndrome. People who suffer
[19:36] Speaker 1: from Anton Babinsky syndrome are blind, but that's not what's
[19:41] Speaker 1: strange about this condition. Now. What's strange about people with
[19:46] Speaker 1: Anton Babinski syndrome is that they don't realize that they
[19:50] Speaker 1: can't see. Doctor Anton had other examples. There was a
[19:55] Speaker 1: gentleman who was quite deaf and also quite unaware that
[19:59] Speaker 1: he was deaf. He knew that he struggled in conversation,
[20:03] Speaker 1: but his explanations didn't make much sense. For example, he
[20:07] Speaker 1: blamed background noise for the fact that he couldn't hear
[20:09] Speaker 1: what people were saying to him. He'd ask people questions
[20:13] Speaker 1: and didn't seem too worried by the fact that he
[20:15] Speaker 1: never perceived their answers. Such cases are typically the result
[20:20] Speaker 1: of damage to the brain itself, resulting in a lack
[20:23] Speaker 1: of self insight that strains imagination. They're very rare and
[20:28] Speaker 1: very strange. But I worry that we've come to think
[20:33] Speaker 1: of the Dunning Kruger effect as a bit like the
[20:36] Speaker 1: Anton Babinski syndrome, that it's a special kind of disability
[20:41] Speaker 1: that afflicts a distinct class of clueless idiot, like the
[20:45] Speaker 1: hapless bank robber, that since you and I, dear listener,
[20:49] Speaker 1: are not clueless, we are therefore thankfully immune. But Dunning
[20:54] Speaker 1: Kruger isn't like that at all. Rather, their research paper,
[20:58] Speaker 1: Unskilled and Unaware of It describes a common truth about
[21:03] Speaker 1: the way we think. We all lack self insight some
[21:07] Speaker 1: of the time, and in particular, when we've strayed beyond
[21:11] Speaker 1: our sphere of competence, we may lack the competence to
[21:15] Speaker 1: know it. The Dunning Kruger effect isn't just about stupid
[21:19] Speaker 1: people doing stupid things. It's about clever people doing stupid
[21:23] Speaker 1: things too, and those clever people may include you and me.
[21:29] Speaker 1: One example that struck me was the sudden popularity of
[21:32] Speaker 1: me too on social media, more than a decade after
[21:36] Speaker 1: being introduced by the activist Tarana Burke. Me too is
[21:40] Speaker 1: often described as a movement against sexual abuse and sexual harassment,
[21:45] Speaker 1: which of course it is, but think about what me
[21:48] Speaker 1: too is really doing. It all went big in late
[21:51] Speaker 1: twenty seventeen when the actor Alissa Milano encouraged women to
[21:56] Speaker 1: post me too if they had suffered sexual harassment or assault.
[22:01] Speaker 1: She wrote, we might give people a sense of the
[22:04] Speaker 1: magnitude of the problem. She could have written it's time
[22:08] Speaker 1: that abusers face consequences, or it's time to stop blaming
[22:12] Speaker 1: women for their own harassment, but she focused like a
[22:15] Speaker 1: laser on a dunning Kruger issue. Men who thought of
[22:19] Speaker 1: themselves as decent, considerate, nice guys who had no idea
[22:25] Speaker 1: what many women were having to deal with. I'd put
[22:28] Speaker 1: myself squarely in that category. I don't think I'm stupid.
[22:32] Speaker 1: I don't think lemon juice makes me invisible to cameras.
[22:35] Speaker 1: But on this point, until Me Too, I didn't begin
[22:40] Speaker 1: to get it, and that I think was Milano's point.
[22:45] Speaker 1: Men need to understand how often this is happening to
[22:48] Speaker 1: the women around them. They don't know what they don't know.
[22:53] Speaker 1: David Dunning found that he had given birth to an
[22:55] Speaker 1: academic idea that became a cultural touch point. But Professor
[23:00] Speaker 1: Dunning has spent the last few years running around telling
[23:03] Speaker 1: people their misunderstanding the effect. The first rule of the
[23:07] Speaker 1: Dunning Kruger Club, he told the website Vox, is you
[23:11] Speaker 1: don't know you remember, and while we're all members, we
[23:14] Speaker 1: drop in and out of the clubhouse without knowing it.
[23:17] Speaker 1: As David Dunning wants put it, there's a borderline between
[23:21] Speaker 1: what we know and what we don't know. And it's
[23:24] Speaker 1: so easy to cross over that borderline. One moment we
[23:27] Speaker 1: know what we're doing. The next moment we've strolled into
[23:30] Speaker 1: the Dunning Kruger Clubhouse, and we still think we know
[23:33] Speaker 1: what we're doing, but we don't. Any of us can
[23:37] Speaker 1: step over that threshold at any moment, and like Wiley
[23:41] Speaker 1: coyote walking over a cliff and standing suspended in mid air,
[23:46] Speaker 1: it might take a while before we realize that we've
[23:48] Speaker 1: wandered away from solid ground. Sometimes we know we're unskilled
[23:55] Speaker 1: or ignorant. I can't play the flute, and I know
[23:58] Speaker 1: I can't. But very often the failure of skill or
[24:02] Speaker 1: knowledge goes hand in hand with a failure of self insight.
[24:07] Speaker 1: We don't know what we don't know. Dunning Kruger isn't
[24:10] Speaker 1: about stupidity. It's about blind spots. Everyone has blind spots.
[24:16] Speaker 1: And the thing about blind spots, both literal and metaphorical,
[24:20] Speaker 1: is that the brain just fills in the gap. We
[24:24] Speaker 1: don't perceive them as blind spots. We don't perceive them
[24:27] Speaker 1: at all. There is, of course, a cure for the
[24:35] Speaker 1: curse of dunning Krueger, and that to ask for advice
[24:40] Speaker 1: is lemon juice, an invisibility potion as well as an
[24:43] Speaker 1: invisible ink. MacArthur Wheeler could really have used a second
[24:47] Speaker 1: opinion on that point, but doing so alas would first
[24:51] Speaker 1: have required him to doubt his own reasoning on the matter.
[24:54] Speaker 1: And the problem with Dunning Kruger, remember, is that we
[24:57] Speaker 1: don't know what we don't know, or whether what we
[25:00] Speaker 1: don't know is important. But the other reason MacArthur Wheeler
[25:04] Speaker 1: might have been reluctant to ask for advice is that
[25:07] Speaker 1: he was planning to commit a crime. He couldn't get
[25:10] Speaker 1: a second pair of eyes on his plans because his
[25:13] Speaker 1: plans were illegal. I don't think it's a coincidence that
[25:17] Speaker 1: so many Dunning Krueger stories are about criminals, because while
[25:21] Speaker 1: we all find it hard to ask for constructive criticism,
[25:25] Speaker 1: it's particularly difficult to ask for constructive criticism of your
[25:30] Speaker 1: plan to rob a bank. But what really worries me
[25:38] Speaker 1: is the prospect that as a society, we're backing ourselves
[25:42] Speaker 1: into a place where we can't ask each other for advice.
[25:46] Speaker 1: Look at politics right now. It's so polarized, so hostile.
[25:50] Speaker 1: Whatever the Republicans do or say, the Democrats will say,
[25:54] Speaker 1: it's stupid and evil. Whatever the Democrats do or say,
[25:58] Speaker 1: the Republicans will say it's stupid and evil. Now, not
[26:02] Speaker 1: here to wring my hands and call for a return
[26:04] Speaker 1: to civility and politics and making a very specific point
[26:09] Speaker 1: about the Dunning Kruger effect. If whatever you do, whatever
[26:13] Speaker 1: you say, is treated with a howl of protest, there's
[26:17] Speaker 1: no way for information to flow. When somebody tells you
[26:20] Speaker 1: you're being stupid, you'll ignore them. You'll ignore them because
[26:25] Speaker 1: they always say you're stupid. You'll ignore them because for
[26:28] Speaker 1: good reasons you don't trust them once we only trust
[26:32] Speaker 1: ourselves and people who think like us. We've abandoned our
[26:36] Speaker 1: best defense against the Dunning Kruger effect. Just ask Lao Labata.
[26:44] Speaker 1: It is not enough fuel to good to Australia. Dun't
[26:48] Speaker 1: lay to us. Of course, it was all fake news
[26:52] Speaker 1: to them. They didn't know what they didn't know, and
[26:56] Speaker 1: when he told them, of course, they weren't going to listen.
[27:00] Speaker 1: I want you to Australia. It is noon on board
[27:05] Speaker 1: call Australian now unless you want it bad. I am
[27:09] Speaker 1: not Jockie very well. Please give me the telephone number
[27:12] Speaker 1: you want me to call Leo. His presence of mind
[27:16] Speaker 1: is unbelievable. The hijackers flip through the Ethiopia Airways timetable
[27:22] Speaker 1: until they find the phone number of the Ethiopia Airways
[27:25] Speaker 1: ticket agent. When they get it, Leol explains that he's
[27:29] Speaker 1: going to have to route the call via air traffic
[27:31] Speaker 1: control in Nairobi. He gives air traffic Control his position,
[27:36] Speaker 1: his heading, and his fuel reading, and then when air
[27:40] Speaker 1: traffic Control tells him he hasn't got a chance of
[27:43] Speaker 1: making it to Australia, he agrees. I just wanted our
[27:48] Speaker 1: hijackers to hear what you are communicating, and if you
[27:50] Speaker 1: have anything to say, go ahead and tell them. I
[27:53] Speaker 1: am advising you that with two hours fuel you will
[27:57] Speaker 1: be unable to reach your destination and he will probably
[28:00] Speaker 1: douch in the ocean. The best solution for you is
[28:03] Speaker 1: to lend the ambassa and pick some more fuel. The
[28:06] Speaker 1: hijackers told him to switch off the radio. Laol had
[28:11] Speaker 1: been flying south along the coast of Africa, trying to
[28:14] Speaker 1: make sure he didn't get out of reach of an airport.
[28:17] Speaker 1: He was ordered again to call Australia and again took
[28:21] Speaker 1: the opportunity to inform air traffic control of his situation.
[28:26] Speaker 1: It was the last straw turn, lift flay away from
[28:30] Speaker 1: the gust. We are going to Australia. Laol was now
[28:34] Speaker 1: headed towards the Commorous Islands, where he knew there was
[28:38] Speaker 1: a runway. The plane was almost out of fuel. The
[28:42] Speaker 1: chief hijacker was sitting next to him, drinking whiskey, messing
[28:45] Speaker 1: with the controls and kicking the rudder. Laoll pointed to
[28:50] Speaker 1: the empty fuel gage. The hijacker kept prodding away at
[28:54] Speaker 1: the controls, with the Commorous Islands in view. Laoll begged
[29:00] Speaker 1: again to be allowed to land. The right engine ran dry.
[29:06] Speaker 1: As the lead hijacker got up to talk to his friends,
[29:09] Speaker 1: Layol grabbed the intercom and warned the passengers, ladies and gentlemen,
[29:14] Speaker 1: this is your pilot. We have run out of fuel
[29:15] Speaker 1: and we are losing one engine. This time mean we
[29:17] Speaker 1: are expecting crash landing in. That is all I have
[29:19] Speaker 1: to say. We have lost already one engine, and I
[29:22] Speaker 1: ask all passengers to react to the hijackers. The hijacker
[29:25] Speaker 1: returned and knocked the microphone out of his hand. Layoll
[29:28] Speaker 1: descended to try to prevent a store with the hijacker
[29:32] Speaker 1: screaming at him to maintain altitude. The fuel is gone.
[29:35] Speaker 1: The engines have no power. If you touched those controls,
[29:40] Speaker 1: I will kill you. I'm already did, because I am
[29:44] Speaker 1: flying in an airplane with odi engine power. The plane
[29:48] Speaker 1: is gliding down within sight of the shore, but there's
[29:52] Speaker 1: so little power that only the most basic controls are working.
[29:56] Speaker 1: The hijacker is still trying to operate the flaps himself
[29:59] Speaker 1: from the co pilot's seat. He doesn't know, but he
[30:02] Speaker 1: doesn't know at that moment. First Officer yon Us Mercuria
[30:08] Speaker 1: forces his way back into the cabin. What do any
[30:11] Speaker 1: of them have to lose? The cabin now contains Layol
[30:15] Speaker 1: and Yonas and three drunk hijackers fighting for control of
[30:20] Speaker 1: a dead airplane. While Yonas wrestles with the attackers, Layol
[30:25] Speaker 1: wrestles with a plane. Somehow he manages to get her
[30:29] Speaker 1: down in shallow water. The landing is witnessed by the
[30:33] Speaker 1: ghast holidaymakers. They're sunbathing on the beach, interrupted by the drama,
[30:38] Speaker 1: just five hundred yards offshore. The first touch is gentle,
[30:44] Speaker 1: the left wingtip slicing into the water at about two
[30:48] Speaker 1: hundred miles per hour. For a moment, it seems like
[30:52] Speaker 1: the plane might just make it. Then the engine scoops
[30:57] Speaker 1: into the water, dramatically, slowing the plane. She hits a reef,
[31:06] Speaker 1: and then she cart wheels breaks apart. Fifty people survive,
[31:27] Speaker 1: but the dunning Kruger hijack kills one hundred and twenty
[31:31] Speaker 1: five people, including the hijackers. People who don't know what
[31:37] Speaker 1: they don't know can be dangerous, and when they refuse
[31:41] Speaker 1: to listen to what they're being told, when they dismiss
[31:45] Speaker 1: it as lies and fakery, they can be Deadly. Key
[31:56] Speaker 1: sources for this episode include Nigel Blunt Deel's The World's
[32:01] Speaker 1: Most Daring Vagabonds and Villains and an interview with David
[32:05] Speaker 1: Dunning on the You Are Not So Smart podcast. For
[32:09] Speaker 1: a full list of references, see Tim Harford dot com.
[32:14] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
[32:18] Speaker 1: It's produced by Ryan Dilley and Marilyn Rust. The sound
[32:22] Speaker 1: design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise.
[32:26] Speaker 1: Julia Barton edited the scripts. Starring in this series of
[32:30] Speaker 1: Cautionary Tales Helena Bonham Carter and Jeffrey Wright, alongside Nazar Alderazzi,
[32:37] Speaker 1: Ed Gochen, Melanie Gutteridge, Rachel Hanshaw, Cobenerholbrook Smith, Greg Lockett,
[32:44] Speaker 1: Messiam Unrowe, and Rufuss Wright. This show wouldn't have been
[32:48] Speaker 1: possible without the work of Neil LaBelle, Jacob Weisberg, Heather Fane,
[32:53] Speaker 1: John Schnarz, Carli mcglory, Eric Sandler, Emily Rostick, Maggie Taylor,
[32:59] Speaker 1: and Yellow Lakhan and Maya Kanig. Cautionary Tales is a
[33:04] Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please
[33:09] Speaker 1: remember to rate, share, and review.

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