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For nearly 50 years, Minnesota Public Radio featured a weekly variety show called A Prairie Home Companion, which itself featured a recurring segment called News from Lake Wobegon — a fictional small town in Minnesota, in which “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
From this, we get the so-called “Lake Wobegon effect,” a phrase that captures the natural human tendency to overestimate our capabilities and achievements relative to others. (Based on more than a decade of teaching graduate-level courses in quantifying security-related risks, I can attest that students are notoriously overconfident in their ability to estimate — a perfect example of this pervasive phenomenon.)
We can see the Lake Wobegon effect play out in Aberdeen’s recent study on The State of AI in 2023, in which respondents were asked to self-rate several aspects of their IT infrastructure capabilities using the following maturity class framework:
- Basic: Manual processes, commonly spreadsheet-based that do not fully meet business needs
- Functional: Processes that meet simple business needs but with…
