I was reading Adam Grant’s book called “Think Again” and he talks about the Doning-Kruger effect. I could just summarize it saying that people who have less information ofter labor under the illusion that they know more than they do. In other words, if you know very little about something, you may actually think you know more about it. On the other hand, the more you know about something, you feel like the less you know. Got it?
He advises leaderships to be aware of this effect and not instinctively take decisions because they are operating under the Doning-Kruger effect. At times, chat gpt comes across like that. You may laugh at me and think this is an obvious case of Doning Kruger effect by me, as it was trained with more than billion parameters and has passed law school exams, medical school exams and also can author nice presentations for the marketing and sales guys, right?
Well, not quite so. We fed a lot of information to chatgpt, so much so that it can accurately predict what the next word in a sentence could be and so on and so forth. And in most of the cases, it happens to be right. But, there are also cases where it can be wrong. Like in the earlier version, a lot of people would ask some simple math questions and chatgpt would flunk them.
“So, whats the point, Einstein?”, you ask! People make far more mistakes, right?
Yes. But, in case of people, we won’t blindly trust them at face value for everything. You will not listen to the financial advice from your doctor and you wouldn’t listen to your financial advisor for medical advice. You actually go to the right experts. The experts who have spent years studying at universities and then several more years and possibly decades working and improving every single day.
ChatGpt is great as a beginner. It helps you quickly get some things done quickly. And it's a life saver for many of us, who want to get things done quickly and don’t want to spend hours painstakingly going through the internet and figuring out. But, thats it. You cannot avoid hard work and focussed reading if you need to become an expert or even mid-level effective in that field. Or else, we fall into the Doning Kruger effect. We will quickly get some information from chatgpt and then directly jump into taking decisions without bothering to know more. Intellectual curiosity and information gathering cannot stop because of chatgpt. Instead, it should stir the curiosity more.
Here’s to chatgpt for leading to a revolution in helping people become more curious, more aware and possibly more inclusive.
