Poster boy or Whipping boy- 8 min read
8 min reading. Summary: Do we know the boundaries of our competence and incompetence? How does that weigh in when we come into various interactions in the society? And add to it the growing cult of smart.
Feedbacks and how we take it?
Through our various inner actions (intra-actions) and interactions in the day, there is this dominant filter for competence or mastery or excellence. The feeling of accomplishment or becoming better at something gives one a sense of confidence boost or relevance or “i matter”. Such feeling could come differently to different humans at different times. But the absence of this through our self-assessment or someone pointing to us our mistakes, has the potential to rattle us bigtime. However, we all have different ways in which we take in or soak in the various feedbacks we get throughout the day. Imagine the enormity: 7 bn humans receiving 7 bn feedbacks (from self and or others) on the #DailyTinyActs they keep performing…smallest of chore to the complex of co-ordinations.
Let me be abrupt.
What is Dunning-Kruger effect?
“Incompetent people are not in a position to know they are incompetent” in a nutshell is what is called Dunning-Kruger Effect, according to David Dunning, one of the researchers who coined the term.
Are we competent at everything we do? Are we incompetent at some? Are we incompetent earlier and later through practice are able to develop some competence in some areas? What can we locate within an individual and outside (in rules-norms-incentives) to see what is enabling or constraining one’s competence? How is this form of incompetence different from denial or self-deception?
Well! This is a project that has been going on for thousands of years and is still a work in progress.
So, how do our competence or incompetence get ignored or modified or adjusted in society?
Hayek’s Essay on Knowledge and Rationality
Let me share something from Hayek. The 1974 Nobel Prize winner for Economics, wrote a very famous essay in 1940s. In it, he makes the case that (below is my interpretation of his essay)
no single person has all the integrated and dense knowledge. However, each of us use a derivative (smaller or nutshell versions) of the larger societal distributed knowledge base. In the essay, he highlights that the “price” of any product is actually a densely packed information, good enough to chose and act on (or one has to make it good enough given limitations of knowledge acquisition).
Having taken Law and Psychology aside from Economics in his academic training, he became an avid student of human nature and rationality. He goes on to say that our rationality is pretty fragile. However, as we move from interaction to interaction, there are possibilities of exchanging, checking and correcting for the shortfalls or the overloads of one’s knowledge and reason.
So, how does the Dunning Kruger effect and Hayek’s spontaneous order pan out?
We can say that indeed our interactions are correcting mechanisms and an ongoing process. However the word correction has tons of nuance to it.
Sometimes people dig themselves deeper into incompetence. It could be the case that when one points out the incompetence of the other, the other becomes defensive or aggressive or changes tack or group or can adapt different strategies. Sometimes we could be reflecting on it, trying to correct but failing on it. Sometimes we could be attempting to correct and not succeeding, but not knowing that we haven’t succeeded in correcting yet. And so on…
A good place to know that there is Dunning Kruger effect in all of us in some of the area is to see how many of us (either in our private spaces or in smaller groups) believe that we sang a particular song ok or close to the original at some of the notes. Sometimes we publicly downplay our abilities but privately upplay.
But are we really in position of truly seeing our competencies and incompetencies and then share them authentically with our ingroup and or the outgroups?
Cult of Smart
Fredrik deBoer has a recent essay on “cult of smart” (or may i say outsmart). Through our choices and actions, we subscribe and strengthen certain features of our ingroup. And these features contest in the larger society with various outgroups and interest groups.
One such feature that is getting oversubscribed each day is “outsmarting each other”. However, it may not be working in the same manner for all. We know from our interactions with a large number of people, that a good many of them are wanting out of this treadmill or modify it further.
So, what’s the point?
The point is that our triad of “incompetence to know our own incompetence”, “limits of knowledge and reason”, and “necessity to outsmart”, could be generating unintended consequences for our civilization.
We have randomly picked just three factors here. There could be overlaps or feedback loops in them. There could be other more significant factors.
The core idea is to use this space to explore the complex ways of our civilization and muster towards what can be done.
What can be done?
In #Reimagining #PoliticalEconomicSocialSelf spectrum through #SearchDialogueAction, we shall be endeavoring to see what are the key features that bring about degeneration of human lives, and what factors bring about degeneration of a system (that affects many lives), and how over a period of time a dynamic balance can be pursued. Could there be a case for adaptive competence, maladaptive competence as much as adaptive incompetence and maladaptive incompetence? … to be continued
