When Sounding Right Outranks Being Right
The colleague who speaks with absolute certainty about projects he joined yesterday gets promoted while I question every decision despite having years of relevant experience. His confidence radiates competence to managers who don’t have time to distinguish between actual knowledge and performed authority.
We live in a world where sounding right matters more than being right.
The more I learn about my field, the more aware I become of what I don’t know. Every project reveals new complexity. Every problem solved exposes three more beneath it. Every year of experience teaches me how much remains beyond my understanding. But he operates with the blessed ignorance of someone who hasn’t discovered the depth of his own limitations. His certainty impresses people who mistake volume for validity.
Real expertise breeds humility; fake expertise breeds confidence.
This isn’t just about him being lucky or me being insecure. It’s structural. The Dunning-Kruger effect—where the least competent people are most confident about their abilities—creates a systematic advantage for ignorance. Those who don’t know enough to doubt themselves speak with conviction. Those who know enough to understand complexity speak with qualification. And in meetings where time is limited and attention is scarce, conviction wins.
Imposter syndrome affects competent people precisely because they understand competence well enough to doubt their own. I’ve seen enough experts at work to know what mastery looks like, which makes me acutely aware of the gap between their capability and mine. I know the questions I can’t answer, the problems I’d struggle to solve, the knowledge I’m still missing. This awareness makes me hesitant, careful, conditional in my pronouncements.
He has no such awareness. He’s never seen true expertise up close or, if he has, he lacked the discernment to recognize it. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know, which makes him sound authoritative about everything. The audience can’t tell the difference between thoughtful uncertainty and ignorant confidence.
Why does our culture reward confident ignorance over competent humility? Partly because evaluating actual competence requires time and expertise that most evaluators don’t have. It’s easier to assess confidence than capability, conviction than correctness. In a fifteen-minute meeting, the person who speaks decisively will always seem more competent than the person who carefully qualifies their statements.
Confidence is a signal—a shortcut that allows busy decision-makers to avoid the hard work of evaluating substance. And like all shortcuts, it’s easily gamed. You don’t need to be right if you can sound certain. You don’t need expertise if you can project authority. The performance of competence becomes more valuable than competence itself.
This creates perverse incentives. The faster you learn, the more you realize you don’t know, which makes you sound less authoritative. The more expertise you gain, the more nuance you perceive, which makes you hedge your claims. Meanwhile, the person who’s learned just enough to be dangerous but not enough to be cautious speaks with absolute conviction, and the system rewards them for it.
I watch him in meetings, offering solutions to problems he doesn’t fully understand, speaking over people with relevant expertise, asserting certainty where careful analysis would counsel caution. And it works. People nod. Managers take notes. Decisions get made based on his confidence rather than my careful considerations. The system selects for the wrong thing.
What happens to quality when we promote people based on how they sound rather than what they know? We get organizations led by the confidently incompetent, where decisions are made quickly and badly, where complexity is ignored because the people making choices don’t perceive it. We get systems that value speed over accuracy, conviction over consideration, the appearance of leadership over actual capability.
The tragedy is that this doesn’t just harm the organization—it harms the confident incompetent too. He’s being promoted into positions he’s not ready for, given responsibilities that exceed his actual capability, set up to fail in ways he won’t understand because he lacks the self-awareness to recognize his own limitations. His confidence that got him promoted will eventually become the source of his downfall, but by then he’ll have damaged whatever he was given to lead.
Meanwhile, the competent people who doubt themselves appropriately get passed over, their careful thinking dismissed as indecisiveness, their qualified expertise mistaken for lack of conviction. The system loses access to the very people most capable of navigating complexity, preferring instead those who reduce everything to simple certainty regardless of whether that certainty is warranted.
Perhaps the answer isn’t for competent people to perform more confidence—that just means everyone’s faking it, which makes the signal completely meaningless. Perhaps it’s for evaluators to do the harder work of assessing actual capability rather than relying on confidence as a proxy. Perhaps it’s creating cultures that value thoughtful uncertainty over hasty conviction, that recognize qualification as sign of expertise rather than weakness.
But until then, the Dunning-Kruger effect continues its work—systematically rewarding ignorance while punishing self-awareness, promoting the certain over the competent, selecting for the very trait that most undermines quality. And I’ll continue watching colleagues who know less speak with more authority, wondering how we built a world where sounding right became more valuable than being right, where performed confidence trumps actual expertise, where ignorance of one’s limitations becomes competitive advantage.
The certainty premium remains in effect: confidence, regardless of whether it’s justified, commands a price that thoughtful competence can’t match. And we all pay the cost when decisions are made by the certain rather than the capable, when leadership goes to those who sound right rather than those who might actually be right, when the system selects for performance over substance until eventually no one can tell the difference anymore.