I might be in the minority here but I have a hard time understanding why the Dunning-Kruger effect is interesting in the first place. The only real value I can see is to give bloggers a bit of pop psychology to throw into their articles.
I stumbled across this in my data from a survey of study habits vs performance in medical school. I didn't know it had a name at the time. Think of this from an employer's point of view, or a client's. Your employees (or contractors) think they're awesome, and thanks to the fundamental attribution error, you assume their confidence reflects competence. But, oh, how wrong you are.
But it's not even that exciting. Your lousy employees think they're pretty good and your great employees think they're a bit better, but not awesome.
I suppose the main lesson you can draw from this is that you need to assess your employees performance independently, but I'm not sure that's a surprising conclusion.
I find it interesting but not to the extent its permeated conversation outside of psychology. I remember cognitive dissonance had a similar standing in pop psychology a while back.
