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One application I don't see discussed much is how this is useful for personal learning. Knowing the effect exists is useful when learning about a totally new to

One application I don't see discussed much is how this is useful for personal learning. Knowing the effect exists is useful when learning about a totally new topic: you know you need to hit that first peak, so to speak, to figure out (roughly) the scope of what there is to know. This helps avoid actually having that false confidence early on. One of the most memorable examples of this for me was early on doing calculus in high school. There was a time where I was like "ok, yeah, I understand all the maths stuff now," then I hit that first peak and suddenly realized "oh wow, I know only a tiny, tiny fraction of what there is to know!" When I later learned about Dunning-Kruger it resonated because it described what I had experienced years earlier and had being thinking about since.

colomon 6y ago
For me the big eye-opener was learning to play traditional Irish dance music on whistle. About two years into the process, I thought I was great. I could read sheet music, I could play fast, I could play rolls, I knew a couple hundred tunes! Clearly I had to just keep it up at the same rate a few more years and I'd be a master. And then, about two years after that, it gradually sunk in that I'd been missing everything about what the music was really about. I hadn't been able to pick out what made good playing good, so I couldn't tell that my playing wasn't. I had been focusing on a bunch of superficial stuff and missing the heart of the thing. And now 20+ years on, I am vastly better at it than I was when I thought I was great. But I know there are loads of people much better. And I'm constantly worried there's some other epiphany waiting to happen when I will realize I'm still missing something absolutely key...