Dunning-Kruger Phase - is it real and should we care?

I'm not in any way a statistician, musician, artist or philosopher. Heck, I'm not even a particularly smart person. But I am passionate about the natural world that surrounds me. I harbour within me a very genuine desire to see plants, to see animals, to lie on my back and simply stare at the stars. I want to climb mountains, to play in rockpools, to get lost in the woods and, just occasionally, I even want to fall into fetid swamps. Luckily for me, I am still fit and healthy (and daft) enough to be able do all of these things. Yep, my life could definitely be a whole lot worse. Yet I have this niggle that is growing and it won't go away.

Many years ago I had an idea; I would tot up all of the animals, plants and fungi I had ever seen and I would create a mighty Organism List for myself. And so I did. Luckily for me, I did this during an early stage of my pursuit of all things natural, hence the list essentially comprised my British bird list plus a few extra bits and bobs such as easy plants, mammals and unmistakeable insects. I distinctly recall adding Bluebottle and Greenbottle to the insect section of my original Organism List. Get me, I'd even broken into the supposedly scary world of flies and it was a cinch! 

And then I started to delve a little deeper into these groups of which I knew so very little. I soon learned that 'greenbottle' is about as useful a term as 'seagull' (i.e. utterly unacceptable) followed by the slow realisation that the books I owned were sorely inadequate to the task at hand, none being in the slightest bit comprehensive in their coverage. Obviously this was all pre-internet days. Buying more books only helped prove to myself that there is always more to learn, yes always!

There's a thing called the Dunning-Kruger Phase and I feel it can be applied better to the current PSL movement than to almost anything else I can think of. Here's a very sassy comment written by one of the authors:

Not knowing the scope of your own ignorance is part of the human condition. The problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don't see it in ourselves. The first rule of the Dunning–Kruger club is you don't know you're a member of the Dunning–Kruger club.

We definitely need to talk about this. 

Pan-species Listing, PSL for short, is a steadily evolving phenomenon that has gained a huge amount of publicity of late. Rather awkwardly, it has also gained a degree of notoriety from both outsiders and peers. Regardless of the direction it now seems to be heading (the wrong one, in my opinion...) one of my main worries regards the whole movement is that many folks are not being rigorous enough with their IDs. This could be because they lack the identification resources or equipment, or are perhaps unwilling to collect and kill a specimen. It could simply be because their knowledge base is inadequate, or perhaps they are, let's call it 'stretching their IDs' just to keep up. I'm going to dig into this in greater detail in a few moments.

Things like Common Pondskater (claimed by 150 listers) and Common Eyebright (122 listers) may well be common in their own right, yet it's been over thirty years since I compiled that original Organism List and I still haven't seen either - and I don't think it's through being remiss or stupid on my part. Yet both are way up there on my list of Targets on the PSL website. I have to wonder how many listers have thought to themselves "oh, chances are it's just the common one" or "that looks exactly like the drawing in my (entry-level) book"  ***tick*** 

The PSL community is expanding faster than the average naturalist’s access to skills, equipment, or taxonomic depth, which creates a very real gap between what people want to record and what they can reliably identify. Pan-species listing attracts people who are enthusiastic, curious, and motivated but not necessarily trained in the art of microscopy, gen dets, hymenopteran morphology or even the ability to use a dichotomous key. The result is predictable - people want to list more species than they can confidently identify.

Some species groups have brilliant, fully accessible resources - butterflies, dragonflies, flowering plants and birds being good examples. Other groups are decidedly beginner unfriendly - fungi, lichens, springtails, staphylinids, ichneumonids and most diptera beyond the big families. So people often over-reach because the resources are either largely unavailable or do not exist.

Next we come to the equipment. I have a stereo microscope, a compound microscope, specimen storage boxes, a veritable library of keys and guides, a decent camera and then there's the plethora of field kit I own. Going back to those enthusiastic, curious and motivated folks I mentioned earlier; they have a phone camera, a hand lens and a desire to learn. This mismatch will inevitably lead to overconfident photo‑based IDs in groups where photos are simply insufficient. Equipment barriers are very real.

Then there's the ethical discomfort with killing inverts, and this is a big one. Many newcomers to PSL come from a birding background, or are general wildlife enthusiasts. They are not accustomed to the idea that some taxa cannot be identified without a specimen. So they attempt to identify inverts or fungi from a photo, entirely possible in some instances but entirely impossible for the majority of inverts. Relying on photographic images rather than microscopic examination of a specimen leads to systematic misidentification, even with good intentions.

OK, so that's all good and well. Or not, as the case may be. So far we've only discussed identification issues. But what of PSL social pressure and the numbers game?

Even if you are not by nature a competitive person, there's a psychological effect to being part of the PSL community. You see other listers adding new species on a near-daily basis. You see people hitting three thousand species, five thousand, ten thousand..! You feel left behind, you want to keep up but you just don't have the spare time, equipment, resources or expertise. So you start stretching IDs further than you should. This is not deliberate cheating, this is not a moral failing, this is simply human nature. And the current PSL climate is very much about big numbers and hence high social pressure. Intensely high, I would say.

The Dunning–Kruger phase is especially strong in PSL. Because PSL encourages breadth, people often get good at one group, assume that skill transfers, and start making confident IDs in groups they barely know. This is not malicious, it's just progression. The current PSL climate rewards breadth, not rigour. It celebrates big totals, rapid progress, personal firsts and new species for Britain. What it doesn't celebrate is leaving things at genus level, saying "I don't know", killing a specimen for certainty, spending three evenings struggling with the same wasp or rejecting an ID because it's only a 'probable'. Biological recording is only as good as its accuracy and PSL lists are only meaningful if they are honest. Some species require dissection, some cannot be identified from a photograph. Some species can't be done at all without DNA barcoding. 

So how do you keep the joy and openness of PSL while preventing it from drifting into a swamp of shaky IDs produced by a bunch of well-meaning  but ultimately Clueless Charlies? If PSL is to stay meaningful, it has to evolve in ways that protect rigour but without turning into a gatekeeping bureaucracy. 

Right now, PSL culture implicitly rewards species-level ticks and this is the root of the problem. A healthier culture would normalise and celebrate genus-level IDs or family-level IDs. If pan-species listers saw restraint as a mark of skill, not failure, the whole system would stabilise. This is the single biggest cultural shift PSL needs. Key phrases such as "I don't know" "I left it at genus" "I need to learn this group" or, importantly, "I'm not confident enough to record this" would see the whole community become more rigorous overnight. Sadly, the most vocal advocate of PSL, the PSL champion as some would say, does not see things in the same way that I do. So I continue to do things differently and, from time to time, I'll post a blog like this just to offload some pent up frustration.  

The weekend is about to begin so I will not have an awful lot of free time available for blogging. But I will try to write up a post detailing my exploits from earlier in the week. I saw an awful lot of stuff, found two plants that I've never seen before, discovered there's a genus of sawflies with excessively spiny larvae and found out why a thicket of Giant Hogweed is being kept inside an electrified enclosure. I also have red hot gen for Beavers, and permission to bunk a fence after dark to view them. Hopefully that'll be happening at some point over the next few weeks!

Sensitive Fern was very definitely not on my radar!

A very small hopper on Cock's-foot grass. I'll go as far as Cicadellidae for this...