Ego is poison

The tangled relationship between certainty, competence, and ego.

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The relationship between certainty and competence is fascinating. I’ve noticed that certainty tends to increase with both competence and incompetence. And this gives rise to a dangerous form of Batesian mimicry: certainty posturing.

This is basically Dunning-Kruger, but certainty instead of perceived ability — the difference of note is that certainty is a trait on which others evaluate a person, so a bit more subject to duplicity.

On the one hand, certainty often does come from intelligence, knowledge, competence — it’s 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.

I’m convinced some of these people are reading the CIA sabotage field manual.

Ego is at fault

I’ve been trying to figure out where this all comes from. I’ve historically been quite confused as to how people can be so certain, in general, and I imagine there’s some level of cultural and genetic variability that begets over-leveraged certainty. But I’ve 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 there’s a deep-seated intrinsic motivation to improve yourself. And if you can keep your ego low forever, you can learn forever.

It’s in your best interest to keep ego low, so you stay below the ego-competence diagonal (I’m inclined to call this the Elon diagonal, because he seems to straddle this line quite well).

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:

1. Gaslight yourself even more, letting your ego run even more wild (and making it harder to correct next time).

2. Accepting that you’re 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 — you’re 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 you’ve created for yourself — it’s 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 you’re forever unable to pass a certain level of competency — I call this the narcissism asymptote.

So there you go — it’s pathological narcissism, and it’s 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, it’s easy to see that you’re lying to yourself about a thing, and that’s often enough negative feedback to break the pattern.

But then there’s the perhaps more practical question: how do you inoculate yourself against other people doing this? (Especially important if you’re trying to hire people into your organization/team) On this end, I’m growing more and more convinced this is an important auxiliary benefit of why a person’s intellectual honesty is critical to gauge — 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.

1. I’m sorry if this is a little harsh, but it’s also by design — if you’re stuck in this region, only a real shock could motivate you to change.

2. Another point here: I’m 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.