Tell me everything you don’t know. That’s a confusing command isn’t it? If you don’t know how much is left to learn, how would you know how much have learned? So how do we know how much we know? That simple question explains a natural cognitive bias in every person. Let’s figure out If you really know as much as you think you do.
The Dunning-Kruger experiment was performed to figure out how accurately people assess themselves. A test group was given a question paper of arithmetic nature and asked to predict their own outcome. The predictions and results were then compared to see how they correlate. It was then found that a very specific relationship did exist between the expectation and real level of understanding.
The relationship took a ‘U’ shaped curve: the lowest scorers regarded themselves highly, the middling ones lowly, and the highest ones accurately. The lowest scorers were unaware or inexperienced in the subject, so they assumed that the little they knew was all there was to be learned and thus, predicted they knew everything. The average scorers were aware of the difficulty of the subject and assumed there was still more they did not know, therefore assuming they did badly. The highest scorers were aware of the extent of the subject and therefore accurately judged how much they knew.
Where does this put you? Think about how all we learned in elementary school was addition and subtraction. At the time, we assumed we knew all of Mathematics because we did not know there was nothing to know. So next time you want to make a judgement about your own ability, the only accurate way to do so is to consider the scope of the topic itself. It's very easy to see only our own knowledge; I do it, and it is likely that everyone does. But if everyone stopped to think about how much more they had to improve rather than how far they’ve reached we might all understand ourselves a little better, and maybe even work towards expanding into regions we didn’t know. It’s a rare case where the emptier you assume the glass is, the more you have to gain.