Running, social media and the Dunning-Kruger effect

One of the few things I will take credit for as a runner is never believing that I was any better than I was despite a fair number of other people attempting to enable such a fantasy. Avoiding self-delusion really shouldn't be a source of pride for anyone, but considering the shape the world has taken since the advent of the Internet and the ascendancy of social media in particular, it's actually worth remarking on.

I created a personal Web site in 1998, using a MediaOne (later bought by AT & T and then Comcast) account. In the spring of 2001, I bought the domain kemibe.com, with the idea coming from what was already on my license plate (kevinbeck.com was already taken by an artist in North Carolina -- he does good work) and moved my stuff there. In the three years between those events, I became a Lab owner, a contributing editor and then a senior writer for Running Times, and ran what would turn out to be my fastest lifetime marathon. Most of what I posted to my site -- which also included a message board starting in, I believe, 2000 thanks to the good people at Network 54 -- was, predictably, about running, writing, and my dog. (and no, Jim, you don't need to plumb the port-a-johns of the Wayback Machine and produce evidence of the sad pages I'm mentioning. I know it's out there.)

Very few runners had personal pages at the time, even including those ugly Geocities and Angelfire creations, and no elite runners I know of besides Joe LeMay and Suzy Favor Hamilton did. So as a guy who'd run a 2:24 marathon and had a credible goal of running under the 2:22 and making the Olympic Trials, I was something of a rarity. In fact, I could have let myself believe I was an elite runner if not for, you know, reality. I often had people refer to me as elite, and -- unlike the wiser, far more contained me of today -- would respond with a mixture of bemusement and scorn.

In 2004, I killed the message board (which was older than Letsrun's, and unlike that gaping, pinworm-infested anus masquerading as a collective mouth, required people to register if they wanted to participate) and started a blog, called "The Pungent Aftertaste of Cognitive Emesis." Once again, I was a novelty among somewhat-fast runners in maintaining one of these.

Also recognize that 10 to 15 years ago, it was a much bigger deal to be published in a running magazine then it is now, which is not to say it was ever anything to really celebrate. I am certain that the fact that my name was on the RT masthead every month for a dozen years lent weight to the perception that my performances on the road were better than they were, at least in the minds of those who erroneously perceived my work as either novel or high-quality. (This isn't to say that I'm not proud of at least some of my stories or that I think I contributed nothing to the running-literature canon.)

Skip forward to the present. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter have laid waste to the notion of blogging for a lot of people (myself included, despite, you know, this shit) but at the same time, it sometimes seems as if almost everyone has a running blog. Most of these are little more than public training logs, bolstered by the universality of GPS watches and Internet portals for the data they collect. Because running is not plagued with the variety and excitement of real sports, it is very difficult to write about it in an interesting way. Nate Jenkins is one of the very few elite runners with a blog I find worth looking at. I can think of a few everyday runners whose prose I have found interesting enough to bookmark, but it's certainly not the norm.

When I started blogging, of course I liked knowing that people were reading the stuff and interacted with some of them in the comments. But the whole notion of attracting followers was still years off, and to this day is not even a tertiary or quaternary goal for me. I recognize that a small handful of loyal readers lap up the dolorous nonsense I puke up here a couple of times a week. I relish the fact that people appreciate that my fatalism and cynicism is at most only 95 percent sincere. Really, the last thing I want is for thousands of people to read this blog, or my Twitter explosions, or whatever. I am not trying to "establish a brand" here. These are and always have been brain farts that a few dozen devoted people eagerly lean forward to breathe deep of and, sometimes, remark on the persistent sulfuric stench they radiate.

I'm getting to my thesis here, which is that people given the ability to quantitate the number of other people who read their online output with a high degree of precision has led a lot of bloggers and Instagrammers to overestimate the value of what they do and express as runners. That is, someone with thousands of Instagram followers thanks to sheer determination and a lot of semi-nude poses is likely to start thinking that she -- a 3:30 marathoner who has no idea what speedwork is supposed to look like and has a less-than-stellar command of English -- should start advising other runners and charging for it.

I know that if I had 10,000 followers, with a lot of them mindlessly upvoting everything I wrote, I too would be susceptible to overvaluing the stuff I say. And were I someone whose running and writing career didn't predate social media, I would be even more susceptible, because I wouldn't have a prior context. I would think -- maybe -- that achieving a high follower number was a worthwhile goal in itself, although the sanguine side of me believes otherwise.

This guy is the best example of a noisy, semiliterate, nowhere-close-to-elite runner who achieved a decent following through a heavy-handed combination of gimmickry (52 marathons in a calendar year, as I recall), narcissism (you can safely bet your life that he started his own Wikipedia page and curates it daily) and lying about things. For a hot-off-the-electronic-presses review of one aspect of his malfeasance, see this post by Lize Brittin.

That this hammerhead has spoken at marathon expos and apparently still receives VIP accommodations at marathons is a major reason I have abandoned running to the fullest extent I can manage while still advising others and admiring what world-class runners throw down. The concept of people actually getting gear or product from gear or energy-bar companies for barely running under 7:00 pace for 26 miles or thrusting their asses at cameras fails to compute with me even though I am well aware of the marketing forces that drive it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect refers to the tendency of incompetent people to vastly overestimate their expertise or skill in a given area. It does not refer simply to stupidity, as a lot of Internet windbags suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect believe. Studies have shown that very incompetent people possess a great deal of unjustified confidence in themselves when it comes to a given area. (It's important to realize that people can be very accomplished in one area but completely worthless in another, and can thus suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect despite being intelligent on the whole.) As people's competence levels creep from very low to low-average, their confidence in themselves drops, but remains unjustly high. Then, at about an average level of competence, confidence scales appropriately with competence and so on up both scales.

Runners like Dane are constitutively prone to believing inaccurate things about themselves, because they are probably entirely in control of their faculties. Regardless, he is an archetypal example of someone who never ran fast or said anything unique about training, and is demonstrably full of shit in various ways, who nevertheless believes he is a serious player in the running world. The Instagram ass-wagglers are a related but distinct species. In any event, the morphing of running's corner of the Internet has mimicked the transformation of the Web in general: more good stuff overall, but a lot more crap. The signal-to-noise ratio has plummeted and will probably continue to do so until every one of us is literally staring at screens with our mouths open, simultaneously looking at live feeds of a dozen other mouth-breathers yammering away in real time about shit that doesn't, or shouldn't, concern anyone at all.