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The relationship between certainty and competence is fascinating. Iβve noticed that certainty tends to increase with both competence and incompetence. And this gives rise to a dangerous form of Batesian mimicry: certainty posturing.
On the one hand, certainty often does come from intelligence, knowledge, competence β itβs justified assuredness from having the truth on your side. But sometimes, less competent individuals (especially those who have some level of undeserved external validation) will wear a cloak of certainty to fool others (whether consciously or not) into thinking they are competent.
This is a huge problem, because the actual intentions and actions of these people will never align transparently with the objectives of any project, and nearly everything they do will be, at best, pointless, and at worst, actively against the primary objective. Their goal is to win discussions, not to get to the truth.
Ego is at fault
Iβve been trying to figure out where this all comes from. Iβve historically been quite confused as to how people can be so certain, in general, and I imagine thereβs some level of cultural and genetic variability that begets over-leveraged certainty. But Iβve also noticed there are other predictable mechanisms that trap you in a world where unjustified certainty becomes your only path of recourse.
I suspect the most common of these is one where your ego outpaces competence.
When ego is low, you are motivated. You need to be better, so thereβs a deep-seated intrinsic motivation to improve yourself. And if you can keep your ego low forever, you can learn forever.
Conversely, when your ego is high, you run the risk of entering a limit cycle in the ego-competence dynamical system. I.e. you get stuck on the wrong side of the diagonal forever. When your ego outpaces your competence, you have two options:
Gaslight yourself even more, letting your ego run even more wild (and making it harder to correct next time).
Accepting that youβre incompetent, thus decreasing your ego and propelling you into a stance of learning.
But once you take path 1 once, you are more likely to perpetuate the lie forever β youβre in too deep, and honesty only gets harder with more lies. So, with statistical inevitability, let your ego go unchecked, forever. You may learn some random things to try to catch up, but your fundamental misalignment is incorrigible.
And eventually you learn that learning is not what feeds the value system youβve created for yourself β itβs your own self-delusion. And so you only ever learn just enough to sustain that delusion. The depths of your incompetency become nested deeper and deeper in your psyche, until youβre forever unable to pass a certain level of competency β I call this the narcissism asymptote.
So there you go β itβs pathological narcissism, and itβs just looming over the horizon for us all.12
A solution?
Individually, I think the remedy comes down to mindfulness. With just a little meta-cognition, itβs easy to see that youβre lying to yourself about a thing, and thatβs often enough negative feedback to break the pattern.
But then thereβs the perhaps more practical question: how do you inoculate yourself against other people doing this? (Especially important if youβre trying to hire people into your organization/team) On this end, Iβm growing more and more convinced this is an important auxiliary benefit of why a personβs intellectual honesty is critical to gauge β if someone is intellectually honest (or just generally, honest), the competence-certainty relationship is linear, and so you can just rely on certainty as a gauge.
Iβm sorry if this is a little harsh, but itβs also by design β if youβre stuck in this region, only a real shock could motivate you to change.
Another point here: Iβm starting to think that having some strong external validation early in life (where, to be frank, competence along almost all axes is going to be nil) is dangerous for this very reason. IMO this is why getting into a great college can be the worst thing to happen to some people.
Love the diagrams!
Ego is an interesting one. I think that ego is really just a protective barrier around the sense of self. If the self feels weak, the ego comes in to compensate. I think this conflicts with your definition a little bit, as you seem to correlate the ego to the actual self. I think it's the projection of the self. So those people who project certainty with nothing to back it up are projecting from ego, not from the true self. There is always a part of them that knows the truth, even if they don't acknowledge it to themselves or others. In fact, I think denial of that truth is what makes them compensate so hard. It's hard to keep up a front.
So, if you feel less competent than you think you should be...that can be motivating, but it can also lead to self-delusion. Better to just be honest, as you say, about where your actual skills lie. Living outside of honesty β or in the gray area between where you think you are and where other people think you are β is anxiety inducing and quite painful.
And yet, the ego leads us on these trips all the time, trying to get us into places that we "should" be.
I think we should be more supportive and encouraging of people who are climbing their own competence curves. Positive reinforcement! Face-saving acknowledgement. Otherwise, we risk feeding their egos even more. A fed ego is a stinky thing, a damaged ego is dangerous. Best to try to bypass it completely. Vulnerability seems to be a good approach, there. It means we have to keep our own egos in check.
Incompetency is actually a really interesting topic here. You might consider that being both highly skilled and incompetent is an unnatural state. Imagining simpler times when the world didn't change so fast and societies were less complicated, I think it was less likely for skilled people to rise to a position of incompetence. Its only with more complex societies and a certain level of abstraction between performance and outcomes that allows for incompetence to persist.
We should also consider that continuous learning is not cheap. It consumes resources and takes away from current productivity. Consider an athlete who is training hard to go to the next level. Over time, if they train correctly, they will get stronger and more capable. But in the mean time, their performance might suffer as their body and mind endures greater strain