Unskilled and unaware of it
I love this nuanced interview of my CASBS at Stanford cohort fellow David Dunning. David became famous thanks to (or because of) a 1999 paper he wrote with Justin Kruger: "Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments"*. Their research was more subtle than the meme that it generated, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which is often paraphrased as "stupid people don't know how stupid they are", or worse. The methods and conclusions have been called into question, but the original article did contain all the necessary caveats and limitations, only to be stripped of its scientific depth in its journey to pop culture. As David points out in the interview, there has been a lot of work in this area in the intervening, some of it undoubtedly stimulated by the paper, leading a much more complex and nuanced picture that he embraces. I find this interview fascinating not because of the topic itself but because we can see the profile of a great scientist, one who is not just doing good science but is also willing to re-assess his assumptions continually. I just wish I had been able to spend more time with him at CASBS.
*Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(6), 1121-1134. link