The Competence Myth

I recently attended a conference called Gartner Marketing Forum, from the research firm Gartner, which does $3B in year in revenue. The most prominent VP there, who gave multiple keynotes, said “everyone thinks they’re in the most messed up organization in the world - and they’re right, because we’re all human!”

Personally, I’ve thought recently that the following question is not in fact a rhetorical one: given how incompetent and unmotivated so many people are, how do we even keep the lights on in this society?

I think that’s not a rhetorical question. A manager or leader has to figure out how to work with the team they’ve got. And millions of people in that role have figured out how to do it well enough. At least we’ll enough to grow the status quo, which of course is not good enough and is in aggregate a huge threat to the sustainability of the human race. But individual organizations function consistently with dysfunction that’s shocking when looked at in isolation.

Maybe the incompetence level change.
Yes there are incompetence in the Navy SEAL, but for some one not in the Navy SEAL the incompetence will look like high quality job.

If you are John von Neumann then everyone else seem a little incompetent.

This post really strikes me as being a (rather pessimistic) perspective on life rather than a factual description of the competence level among humans.

Consider these two statement, which are both true:

• Aerospace engineers do a lot of mistakes.
• Aerospace engineers have been able to send rockets to space.

Everyone is free to hold the perspective that, since aerospace engineers are messing things up on a daily basis, they're incompetent; or that despite the fact that aerospace engineers do a lot of mistakes, they've been able to send rockets to the moon, which is quite an achievement.

It's important to look for mistakes but it shouldn't take over our perspective on things.

Make sure you're not dividing people into the camps of "competent" and "incompetent" too strongly. Yes, competence varies between individuals. But it also varies between areas for a given individual. And it varies day-to-day.

Today I was getting ready to go for a bike ride. I filled a bottle of water, got the bike out, discovered that it had a flat tire and I couldn't fix it, and put the bike away. After I couldn't find the bottle of water. I looked everywhere, twice. An hour later I realized I had put it in the bike's bottle holder while I had the bike out.

This is normal. Everyone makes mistakes all the time. I'm a programmer, and one of the things you notice is that no matter how skilled the person, and no matter how trivial the program, they'll write buggy code. Usually a mistake every few lines.

One of the points of the sequence is to try to notice your own mistakes and your own biases, so that you can triage against them. As opposed to digging your heels in and refusing to admit you've done anything wrong, which is a common alternate strategy. (I've also found meditation to help with some of this.)

This seems to be a counterpoint to Eliezer's old post Competent Elites [LW · GW], which posits that as you get to higher and higher levels, people do indeed get more and more competent.

This seems potentially related to the more general idea of civilizational inadequacy/Moloch.

Great writeup - I've felt this way nearly my whole life. I have a different take on this - not sure if it was intended and no one else has brought it up: imposter syndrome is almost universal among intelligent and high-performing people who are not sociopaths or narcissists. Perhaps this internal drive helps these people continue improving and avoid becoming complacent.

That incompetent people who present well inevitably manage to find their way into organizations (and sometimes advance to a high level) is also common - I know doctors I wouldn't trust with a stuffed animal and airline pilots who shouldn't be allowed to drive - I'm sure everyone can give similar examples - but I think these are the minority outside of professions where mediocrity is the baseline.

Sounds like the margins of life are ruled by the Peter Principle.

Incompetent compared to what? Let's say that a lot of people are incompetent at their jobs. You can solve that by making jobs easier, so that anyone can do them but that isn't a nett benefit because now the difficult jobs aren't being done at all. Even though some people could do them. Meaning their talents would be wasted.

So maybe the system compromises between doing difficult things and doing things competently. Maybe that's an overall optimisation.

This seems related to that experiment where iterative testing-and-tweaking results in high performance, without the people involved actually understanding how the system works at all.

(slightly tangential) I think people are doing a terrible bucket error with competency, and that is that people overestimate how are others competent across all dimensions. I.e. it's often enough for a person to show great competency in providing vision, and we assume that person also needs to be great in leadership or management, and people are shocked it's not the case. Other examples:

1. scientist being great in research, therefore they need to be great teachers or college management
2. doctors are great in diagnosing, therefore they need to be great surgeons
3. programmer being great in programming, therefore they need to be great in leading the rest of team or mentoring ...

I have met wonderfully competent people. They usually work for averagely incompetent organisations, and what they do is, I think, satisfy the requirements of their managers and bring value to the world - they are just very good at compartmentilizing.