I'm hoping to bang out a quick post here, including embedding some videos I'm sure I've shared before. So let's get to it.
Many years ago, Stephen Fry was hosting BBC program "QI" whose tweely named "elves" had caught up to the quite interesting subject of the Dunning Kruger effect and it culminated in Fry asking the panel "how do you know if you are incompetent?"
Now the answer is, that you can't, and this isn't what this post is about. It is about what it feels like to be incompetent, and for that I turn to Japanese motion picture tradition of portraying martial arts onscreen. Starting with the climactic battle of Sanjuro, Akira Kurosawa's follow up to Yojimbo which Sergio Leone used unapologetically for the basis of "A Fistful of Dollars.":
Now I can't speak for you, but speaking for myself, I've watched this scene at least a dozen times and each time I experience it as not being able to perceive what happened. How does Sanjuro, the one with the long sideburns played by Toshiro Mifune, manage to draw his sword and kill the opponent?
If you watch it on youtube, you can slow down playback speed in settings to see that it comes down to an economy of movement on the victors part, hence he can appear to draw late/second but win the duel. This however, it should be kept in mind, is still illusion. Choreography, plus an effect that actually was a mechanical failure causing the blood to spray rather than trickle, that Kurosawa decided to keep in the final cut and has subsequently become a trope of Japanese animated films and even video games.
But don't get too absorbed in that trivia, I want to move us along to what I keep coming back to in terms of masterfully capturing, what I at least, feel like when incompetent. I'm talking Mugen vs Kariya in Samurai Champloo:
Now, if you need the context this is one of the ultimate match-ups in the whole series of Samurai Champloo, and the guy who comes across as a completely outclassed rank-amateur in the above clip has previously been established as one of the strongest martial artists in the entire fictitious universe. Almost a scene using the trope of the Worf effect.
But if it is, and it certainly is a candidate because Kariya kind of comes out of knowhere, a literal ringer adversary for the plot, it is done masterfully.
What I love is that Kariya is one of the visually least-interesting character designs in the whole animated series. Compared to Mugen with his unusual clothes and hair, pirate cutlass style sword and reinforced wooden sandles, Kariya wears drab browns, looks like he's in his autumn years and has no impressive physique and all of the visual interest comes from what he does.
Or rather...how the animators convey his character through visuals.
What I keep thinking about are the slo-mo sequences where Kariya's prowess is presented from Mugen's perspective, as supernatural powers. Mugen loses track of Kariya's sword movements first, but we experience this as the sword vanishing, then reappearing at an impossibly different angle in our peripheral vision. A magic sword? Or does Mugen simply not understand what is happening?
Then I love the nice touch of the switched perspective, where Mugen conceales himself behind the sacks of what I assume to be beans, and starts tossing them at Kariya. We get Kariyas perspective and nothing supernatural is happening at all. In fact we just impassively watch Mugen reappear through a smoke screen of beans to be easily dodges and sent sprawling.
Then it is back to Mugen's experience, and you can see it but we get some strange sequence where the opponents trade places, and at first we get some ambiguous visual effects that allude to Mugen finding something strange about Kariya's movements, then the most supernatural effect where Kariya seemingly turns into a ghost, like those white guys with dreadlocks in the Matrix: Reloaded, and passes bodily through Mugen before ending the fight dismissively.
This to me, is what I would point to if asked "what does it feel like to be incompetent?"
It feels spooky, confusing, unsettling. It feels to me, like what Mugen is seeing fighting Kariya. Unlike with the live action Sanjuro, slowing it down will yield no insight, though we can imagine getting a third parties perspective on the conflict and I would assume - we do not see Kariya teleport his sword out of his hands, and we do not see Kariya turn into a ghost and pass through Mugen.
Indeed, once Jin starts fighting Kariya, these effects disappear, or at least become much more subtle. Kariya just seems to kind of teleport around the animation frames from where Jin attacks to where Jin isn't attacking.
Bringing me to Shane. Shane being a film where Alan Ladd plays the titular role, and Jack Palance plays the black hat muscle of the main antagonist. He is essentially brought in to town by the big rancher to kill off the collective of small-holders or "sodbusters" by goading them into drawing.
Shane's iconic quick draw scene between Palance's character and Stonewall, captures for me the scary reality of being incompetent - which is that incompetence can terrifyingly not feel like anything at all until it is too late, where we might get a couple of seconds at most to feel confusion and remorse, certainly not in any intelligible capacity:
Mugen is clearly just dumb-lucky to get to walk away from his fight with Kariya alive. And let's face it, outside of interacting with lethal amounts of momentum - ie. vehicles and heavy equipment, most of our incompetence in the modern era doesn't manifest in life-or-death situations. (At least not for us directly.)
I experience it in things like personal interractions, where I am left with a vague uneasiness that something I said was the wrong thing to say.
Perhaps an easy context to explore it through is the job interview. Until recently, there were questions asked in job interviews, that I just don't understand why they are asked like "What are your salary expectations?" I had received the advice initially that the correct answer is "market rates." Which maywell work in a context like Australia, where we have government websites that allow us to find the award rate for various job categories.
I have since learned more about this question that frankly perplexed me, as in my experience I was typically interviewed for jobs that had advertised a salary. So why the fuck are you asking me? A question that confused me like Kariya's disappearing sword - I thought the ad said $55k? Am I supposed to ask for more? Am I supposed to say something less? I've heard some recruiters ask "what is the minimum salary you would accept?" That's even more confusing, because aren't I think tacitly agreeing already to accept the minimum?
I do not possess the competence now to give advice on how to answer the salary question. I think what most resonates with me is the general advice of - most job interviews are ultimately testing for preparation, so prepare by researching salaries like the aforementioned government website, the other general piece of advice is that if you are asked a direct question you should give a direct answer. People hate politicians.
Beyond that though, I am still incompetent. I would like to spend more time on the other side of the interview table to understand how this question is useful, why it cannot instead, for example, be a statement of salary expectations by the party that will be paying the salary.
It only makes sense in an executive capacity, where for example, Starbucks needs to figure out how to lure away the CEO of Chipotle to magically make them successful again like Chipotle. That situation it's like yeah - what would it take for you to come leave your job with a successful company to come work for a company that is going down the toilet?
But entry level positions at a bank? I don't get it. There's a bunch of clerks they already pay pretty much the same thing, and you are hiring another one onto the team. So you pretty much know what you are willing to pay, so why get me to guess what you pay from the outside? I am going to guess what you said in your ad. Is this a bait and switch? I can't tell because I am doing an interview with a video?
And this is probably what distinguishes the video clip from Shane, from the video clip from Yojimbo. In both cases, someone appears to draw first, but somehow too slowly. In Shane, it's even more brutal because there's this drawn out pause between losing the drawing contest, and getting shot.
But as a 3rd party, we get these clues as to how the duel is going to go. Jack Palance is standing on an elevated wooden walkway, the sodbuster Stonewall is standing and sometimes slipping in mud, at a clear disadvantage. Jack is insulting him, for some reason he can't just murder Stonewall, he needs Stonewall to draw, but he signals his intentions to murder Stonewall by putting on his shooting glove when they are both already in the position with feet planted ready for the duel. Stonewall could presumably still awkwardly walk away, all he has to do is not draw.
There's some kind of verbal dance going on and Jack Palance is in control of all of it. Stonewall conforms to his plan, likely because he just doesn't understand what is happening. It's kind of like when Charity muggers first started appearing in downtowns around the world, walking up and sticking out their hands to strangers asking in an inevitably British accent if we had a couple of minutes to chat about the environment.
The unfortunate thing about charity muggers, is that they were asking for $30 a month in direct debit payments to some ostensibly worthwhile cause presumptively addressed by a particular organization, instead of killing people with the cold psychopathy of Jack Palance's character. That could have continued for years, but instead people learned to turn cold and ignore their impulse to treat strangers with the benefit of the doubt, charity muggers successfully corroding the all important system of manners that holds society together.
Anyway, I've crapped on long enough and hopefully between job interviews and charity muggers, I've related the motion picture depictions of incompetence to real life experiences, and you will either share or not share, my subjective experience of being incompetent.
I've been thinking, as long time, or even one time, readers might assume I do, constantly, rendering this comma-laden opening sentence un-newsworthy; but let me get back to the follow on from that first ',': a lot about "C-students" recently.
But first I need to address an important point, people may assume this title to be a reference to the so-called "C-word" which is cunt, and I am a serious adult that may have grown up a short walk from numerous private schools, catholic schools and parklands and wetlands in Ballarat, but I got out enough to learn how to have "cunt" roll off my tongue without self-scandalizing at the appropriate age of however old kids are by grade-4 and I'm fucken proud of my Balifornian heritage and as such, need to make it clear that if you think I am alluding to cunts, you are mistaken, because if I'm alluding to a/some cunt(s), you will cunten-well know it.
And of course, my mid-90s heritage has no doubt turned off, via-ad-hominems some of the psychographic markets that would most benefit from hearing what I have to say from here out. But c'est-la-vie-cunts I guess. I am of course referring to the very common grading system in some primary schools and most prominently secondary schools the anglosphere over. "C" usually means a score of 50.
Now, a very safe way I could theoretically have introduced this concept is via the truistic heuristic:
"On average, people are average."
Which is to say, I may be above average in terms of something not very important like vocabulary, being someone who will eventually get the joke "eschew obscurantism" once it has been pointed out to me that it is meant to be a joke. And I'm probably now above average as-far as second language speakers of Japanese and Spanish are, but once you start adding "subjects" or fields of expertise, with the simple example of more languages like Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, French, Greek, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Indonesian, Arabic, Pashtu, Finnish, Gaelic and Welsh etc. I conform to the global average - which is no ability at all to speak most languages.
The significance of C-students, is based on two qualities:
It is the minimum grade with which one can pass, to be deemed "sufficiently knowledgeable" or "competent" to require no further investment in that student.
It is the grade at which the ambiguity of what a student actually knows is maximised, because they know roughly half of the subject.
I wish to now expand upon this second point. If you know someone is a D-student in a given subject, then we know that they mostly don't understand the subject. Likewise, with a B-student, we know that they mostly know the subject. More extreme, with F and A students, we can be even more confident that they don't and do know most of the subject respectively. With a C-student though, for any given aspect of that subject they may or may not know what they are talking about with roughly the same odds as flipping a coin.
There is no doubt, some logic to our education systems setting the threshold of competence at 50%. This logic may however, go all the way back to the industrial revolution.
Furthermore, we should consider that in the context of education, there's a steady escalation of difficulty as kids progress K-12. Such that, a grade one student getting a C in maths (Australia, the commonwealth, cunts) may leave us guessing as to whether they can handle adding or subtracting, but a year 10 student getting a C in Math's methods leaves us guessing as to whether they struggle with locating asymptotes in quadratic equations or solving simultaneous equations (the latter, in my case, because of the bullshit 4 decimal answers that were supposedly "correct") but we can now safely assume that any and all students who've made it to year 10 maths methods, can handle adding, subtracting, multiplication and division by now, though they could still be fucking up BOMDAS/BODMAS (which if you are wondering, doing the division before the multiplication or vice versa is not the fuckup, forgetting either acronym is where they fuck up).
So it is now time to leave grade school as I did oh so long ago, in a place far away where the sensitive just had to flinch and cling to their "tuck shop" money when an exciting girl wearing Kappa pants on a bmx with poorly applied mascara and bleached hair with red-black regrowth asked if you were "a rich cunt" despite them having the $10 to spend on a pack of cigarettes from Poonie's milk-bar and $2.50 to spend on a 600ml bottle of coke that you wondered if they backwashed and wondered if they might abandon the last flat, luke-warm, saliva infused 50ml languishing in the 4 bevelled plastic nubs of the PET-adapted iconic rocket-ship bottle shape down by the tracks where a young man blushing uncontrollably as his limbic and endocrine system worked hard to confuse terror and arousal could somewhat one-sidedly experience the hygiene equivalent of kissing the terrifying and exciting girls from the other side of the tracks, because they were indeed "a rich cunt" and would never risk drinking the discarded dregs of coke because it most likely was discarded by a 50 year old man with a substance control problem where the substance was clearly not caffeine or sugar but some kind of amphetamine because they didn't finish their cokes.
Yes time to leave behind the good-old-days where girls didn't need tumblr memes or tik-tok influencers to convince them that doing their own "stick-and-poke" DIY underage tattoos were a good idea, and out into the real world. The fucken C-world.
The C-world
By which I mean it is simple. There are these shows I don't watch but have certainly heard about called "Dragon's Den" and "Shark Tank" where people present their ideas to wealthy investors hoping that some or all of the various sharks and dragons will invest in their idea to get their business off the ground or to the next level.
I propose a simple hypothetical exercise - have one of those arcade prize machine claws come down from the heavens, pick up the net worth of the sharks/dragons and have them deposit it on the Joe-nobodies that are pitching their business ideas of variable quality.
I predict two things will happen - the first is that more-than-zero of the contestants in suddenly becoming high-net-worth will discover they would not invest in their own ideas, and instead feel a sudden desire to talk to a financial planner about a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds and real assets with a view to minimizing taxes.
The second thing will be that the Sharks and Dragons, suddenly devoid of any capital to invest in a startup will have to pitch investment ideas to random millionaires and their ideas are likely to be as rejectable as the average contestant.
Put simply, the pitching and catching relationship goes in the direction of people with no money to people with lots of money. The starting positions are unlikely to be based on meritocracy.
For the simplest example, just watch enough of Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares. Not necessarily ubiquitous, but a very common thread through abysmally failing restaurants is that the people who own the restaurant try to run the restaurant.
There is a management adage you will almost certainly hear if you spend at least 90 days learning about management:
"I hire smart people and get out of their way". Lee Iacocca.
You may remember Lee from Ford vs. Ferrari, the guy that interferes with the race finish for publicity so Christian Bale does not officially win Le Mans, the talented person Lee Iacocca helped hire.
This is the point of living in C-world. It is the reality we live in. Many people will be shocked to discover how untalented and downright mediocre many of the best compensated and most influential people in our society are.
This phenomena that I challange ordinary working class people to go out and debunk, is largely due to the lack of social mobility - (for example, and the methodology may be somewhat dubious) we get headlines like "The Wealthy in Florence Today Are the Same Families as 600 Years Ago" and just think about it...
If you got rich, and had some kids, and some of them were complete pendejos or coños but you find yourself strangely attached to them despite your generational wealth, you might set them up with some bullshit business to ostensibly run as a hobby while consulting with an A-student of Accounting and Financial Planning to lock up ASSETS in a trust that can support them despite a COMPLETE ABSENCE OF BUSINESS ACCUMEN without them ever being able to sell off the very assets that generate the income that will support them and their stupid children and stupid grandchildren and finance their many divorces and unwillingness to pay child support for generations to come.
You'd do it. They have done it, for centuries.
The C-Curse Gets Worse: Nested Mediocrity and Subculture-Conformity
Something that I was slow on the uptake with, and hopefully it's not news to you, dear reader, was that our schooling system is I infer designed to test for conscientiousness and particularly industriousness, not intelligence.
So I implore you not to get bogged down in C-student being limited to school grades I choose it because of the ambiguity of mediocrity. I'm going to invoke tertiary study now but I am not talking about grades and not just because RMIT continues to use A+ to DNS grades while Melbourne University uses an overwrought esoteric H1A, H2B grading system.
I'm now talking about IQ, because by tertiary education specialization has begun in earnest. People do humanities, social sciences, hard sciences, technical disciplines and pure wank by University, and tend to further specialize by 2nd year after spending a year doing broad disciplinary subjects like Econ101, Acct101, Mktg101 etc.
IQ or "G" becomes more meaningful as a kind of predicter at how well a Law student might do understanding medicine vs a Medical student understanding law. It will likely be less predicted by their academic grades but by their relative IQs at that point.
I remember hearing roughly contemporary to my first time through University, some stat like the average Australian IQ was 107, but the average University students IQ was 127 or something, a whole standard deviation higher or there abouts (I am a C-student at probability).
This I think in practice, is one of life's cruelties. Because tertiary education brings together a bunch of people who likely were king dick of their academic pool and puts them into a smaller pool where they are likely merely average or below.
Indeed, because our tertiary selection process favors superiority over excellence - superiority being relative and excellence being a threshold. It is very likely that for some people in some disciplines, they are merely mediocre in intelligence, but on campus, the dumbest people there.
Adding to the cruelty is what keeps me up at night, the Dunning-Kruger effect, which roughly states that if you are the dumbest person on campus, you are also less likely to notice you are the dumbest person on campus.
Now it is time, finally, for this post to reject the null-hypothesis of Hitler's Law, a Law I coined which states:
"The longer one of tohm's blog-posts runs for, the probability he will invoke Lebron James approaches 1."
Lebron James is likely an NBA all-time great. I will concede that much. He is a fascinating case, because while he has tallied some impressive stat totals over his now 21 year professional career, including being by far the NBAs all time leader in turnovers with 5,459, he is among the all-time greats what I would call aggressively mediocre.
He is the athletic embodiment of Billy Conneley's joke:
"You know, I've been thinking about you a lot lately and you're a cunt. You've always been a cunt and in all likelihood you always will be a cunt. As a matter of fact, if they were giving a prize for World's Biggest Cunt, you'd probably come second."
"Second? Why wouldn't I come first?"
"Because you're a cunt."
Truly, Lebron James is the Ford of NBA greats. His ability, in theory to play all 5 positions, means he isn't in any discussions like "who's the greatest point guard?" "who's the greatest shooter?" "who's the greatest center?" "who's the greatest rim-protector?" "who's the greatest shot-blocker?" etc.
He is theoretically in the GOAT debate, artificially restricted by a heavily invested NBA and NBA media, as though there is a contest between Lebron and Michael Jordan, an Orwellian position where 2+2=7 somehow. Yet Lebron has never been the best player in the NBA at any point of his long occassionally somewhat lustrous career. Early he was dominated by Kobe Bryant and Tim Duncan. His super team routed by Dirk Nowitzki's Also-ran all-stars of the previous generation, then eclipsed by the GSW dynasty of Steff Curry for his prime-late-prime years, before his deadweight stat-padding years on the Lakers saw Giannis then Jokic overtake him as greatest player in the world on their antithesis super-team no-help small market teams as Anthony Davis carried him on ice-skates uphill while killing coaches and smearing HOFer teammates Russel Westbrook, and the aforementioned AD, soon to be Luca Doncic.
I think there's likely a real debate as to whether Lebron is better than Hakeem "the Dream" Olajuwon. Of which, Lebron probably loses, once you factor in the misfortune that Hakeem's career overlapped Michael Jordan's, and Hakeem is most likely the center I would compare to current best-in-the-world Nikola Jokic.
But this is the thing, by the time you are debating NBA players, let alone all-time-great NBA players, you are dealing with a level of nested mediocrity akin to the Guinness World Record holding most nesting of Babushka Dolls.
The "White Mamba" Brian Scalabrine who averaged 3 points per game over his career famously said:
"I am closer to Lebron, than you are to me." ~ The White Mamba, producing a greater philosophical legacy than Lebron James in one sentence.
Which is to say, statistically speaking it is likely that the greatest athlete you ever personally know, was nowhere near good enough to go pro in any sport of sufficient popularity.
(Again as a Balifornian, I have to make this qualifier, as I, the HS cross country captain of my small school was not in the top ten runners in my age group at the interschool competition. BHS by contrast had so many strong runners, that they did not even take the interschool comp seriously, playing on the playgrounds adjacent to the courses during the event and still beat me to a man. Their third strongest runner would go onto win an Olympic Gold Medal, because he realized he couldn't compete in long-distance running even at a state level and switched to walking. That school's prodigy, a freaky skeletal kid as far as I am aware, never made it to representing Australia nationally.)
Another cruelty of life then, is that the field keeps getting spread as you pursue superiority such that all but the tiniest few, will forever be C-students, as Lebron James is, always has been, and ever will be, in the NBA hall of fame. He spends millions allegedly on his body every year, so that at age 40 he can stand blowing on his hands, or complaining to a ref as his team rushes back to play 4-on-5 defense. I cannot imagine what he spends per year to keep himself artificially in, and losing, the GOAT debate.
I believe this Nested mediocrity is called the Peter Principle and it's kind of a crueller form of natural selection, because at least with natural selection - you get put out of your misery. Whereas with nested mediocrity you live out your misery, and likely reproduce your children into that misery.
At which point, I need to then switch contexts from nested mediocrity to the adjacent concept that I'm sure works on the same fundamental mechanics - Subculture conformity.
So you work in hospitality or a call center or maybe you now hang out with other Ubereats/Door Dash/Deliveroo gig workers in front of a local McDonalds and shoot the shit as you await the opportunity to deliver takeaway to a C-student full time office worker, time poor and lazy because their only career strategy is based entirely on presenteeism.
One of them, you find yourself respecting and admiring because of their unique self-expression. They don't dress like the rest of you, look at the same shit on their phones in downtime as the rest of you, they maybe even read an actual book. They are the most remarkable and unique person you know, and you feel somewhat privileged to have a friend like them, you consider it a perk of your shitty job.
Months pass and you both survive the natural attrition rates of your shitty jobs, and your unique colleague invites you somewhat sheepishly to their first-year art show. You go along, feeling self conscious wearing your seasonally-approved cut of jeans, cool conventional sneakers and clean graphic tee stepping onto an arts campus at night and walking into a show where...you discover everyone dresses, talks and acts like your friend.
No longer a unicorn literal they are just like all the other horses with the shift of context. Even the output of their distinct and unconventional mind is completely indistinguishable from the art exhibits of their peers.
Depending on where the art-scenes are in terms of the minimalist-maximalist cycle, they likely all look like this or this. Both examples taken from Exactitudes:
Started in 1994 in the streets of Rotterdam, this overarching and on-going project portrays individuals that share a set of defining visual characteristics that identifies them with specific social types. Be it Gabbers, Glamboths, Mohawks, Rockers or The Girls from Ipanema, Versluis and Uyttenbroek’s extremely acute eye allows them to discern specific dress codes, behaviours or attitudes that belong and characterise particular urban tribes or sub-cultures. Once they recognise an individual that fits the characteristics of a given group, they invite such person to be photographed at the studio with the only requirement of wearing the very exact same clothes s/he was wearing at the time they first encountered. ~ Taken from Exactitudes "About" page.
Exactitudes really use a methodology that isn't necessarily water-tight, to replicate the phenomena articulated in Monty Python's "Life of Brian"
Brian: "You're all individuals!"
Crowd (together): "Yes we are all individuals"
Individual: "I'm not..."
Crowd (together): "Shhhhh..."
While I don't have the direct experience myself, I imagine that this same manifestation of C-studentism, nested mediocrity, nested-normalization, is the constant bane of advertising firms. "We want to stand out so we came to you creatives. We want something like the gorilla-playing drums Cadbury ad." "Okay, well, you sell mostly goulash, how about we have two old hungarian ladies wrestling in goulash, weird, engaging, memorable." "Yeah wow! You guys really are creative, but we were thinking something more like a drummer in a gorilla suit playing the drums, like the Cadbury ad."
In which sense, subculture conformity mechanically is a movement away from the norm, but not too far from the norm. Hence the mediocrity drift of things like sleeve tattoos and neck tattoos. Whereas a unique individual wouldn't seek to move away from the norm, but from the population or sample.
It is also likely to be a manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in terms of self expression. If you want to be unique, it is very easy to not know how much there is to know about precedents of self expression. So people wind up not being unique, but conforming to a "unique" aesthetic, that changes constantly but has in the past two decades involved tramp stamps, fedoras, ugly sweaters, bicycle-frame glasses, bum-bags/fanny packs, 8 seasons of involuntarily writing material for Portlandia, griege attire, cultural appropriation from Japan, Korea and now Mexico.
It's hard to describe comprehensively, being fundamentally dynamic yet perennially tedious, in my own intellectual shorthand, I call it the "adolescent impulse" which is to say, adolescence was, for much of the 20th century post invention of the transistor radio, a period in which children migrated away from identifying with their family to awkwardly figuring out an individual identity. It likely manifested as going from adult-oriented to peer-oriented, hence kids start doing things like dressing, ostensibly, by their parents to dressing themselves.
If however they succeed at adolescence, they become adults, and here we get a perpetual push-pull, because the next class of adolescents need to differentiate themselves from adults like their parents and adults like you. Hence, the migration away from the norm becomes the new norm.
The cachet of going to Japan loses its cachet and hence you have to find somewhere else to go to be interesting by looking to your peers, so you switch from Osaka to Oaxaca. Until that inevitably collapses.
Because the sad fact is, there will always be more people who want to be interesting, than are interesting. Most people, indeed the vast majority of people seem to be fundamentally unqualified to be interesting. Hell I don't know if I have the qualifications to be interesting, and the fact that you have read this far most likely means a person who is not very interesting is reading the writing of someone who is not very interesting.
Monkey-see-Monkey-do
This is my best guess at the fundamental principle underlying C-ciety. Blessedly but annoyingly, I've already written it up. But you don't have to go read a whole other blog post on my badly outdated html script. I'll do a brief recap.
It's basically this: I think about how easy it is for me a human of most likely average intelligence to trap a dog with intelligence comparable to a 3-6 year old child, in an inescapable situation. It's not just that unlike the velociraptor most dogs can't operate a door knob, it is the ease with which I can repeatadly trick a dog into entering the same inescapable room until I see fit to let them in or out.
Granted, Usma, my mexican terrier could easily get me up off my feet to slide open the metal mesh door onto our courtyard at will with the deployment of a simple scratch, often times I suspect, just to enjoy her power over me, to get me up and out of my chair, but hopefully you get my point.
Why then, don't the smartest people just obliterate people everyone not quite as smart and down, out of the gene pool. Why isn't the flynn effect more pronounced?
Likely there's multiple explanations, the ones at the limits of my limited imagination being -
the smartest people often foil eachother, rather than cooperate. cancelling out their mutual advantage.
the smartest people are randomly distributed more-or-less throughout the population, whereas opportunity (power and influence) is hoarded by the wealthy. (we don't live in a meritocricy)
survival of the kindest supersedes in social mammals, the selective benefits of intelligence, such that most intelligent people don't have any drive to destroy competitors for resources.
The world is just too complicated for IQ or g to be a sustainable competitive advantage anyway because it only accounts for 20% of outcome.
But one I suspect is the big-one is "monkey-see-monkey-do" which is to say, when anyone figures anything out, most of the time, the solution is easily duplicated.
C-students everywhere, in every context just copy what the smart people are doing, so the half-life of advantage is incredibly small. Granted this can backfire:
And in terms of nested mediocrity, I myself mostly pass off other's opinions as my own, I just go further than the smartest person I know, to like books and public intellectuals like Chomsky and Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Kobe Bryant and Bill Russell.
In many ways, that's what learning is, hence most high school Physics graduates know more about physics than Isaac Newton did.
This is where I'm taking monkey-see-monkey-do and applying the very useful dichotomy of "excellence" vs. "superiority" he elaborates on in the interview.
We live in a world based on superiority. This is in many ways the allegory of the bear, which may be an actual biblical allegory but I'm referring to the guy who hearing the bear's roar, puts his running shoes on and his companion asks him "you think you can outrun a bear?" and the guy says "I don't have to outrun a bear, I just have to outrun you."
Superiority is relative, and as such it means you and I for example, cannot both be superior. Excellence is a threshold, it is absolute, furthermore it is dependent on producing a social good. One cannot be excellent at something that is bad.
What has me thinking about C-students lately, is business advice. See, I'm still processing the trauma of changing from casual employment to full-time. You might think that this revolves around having to get out of bed in the AM and commute during rush hour. My metabolic cycles adjusted relatively quickly.
No the skunked-trauma I am referring to, is that of going from underemployment to overemployment, both align only in the sense that one struggles to keep up good work. But when you are casual, you work hard, where in full time, often you have to work hard to get any work done at all, or work hard at finding enough work to do. So far I am succeeding, and a big part of the motivation is that my memory is fresh of what hard work feels like.
But when you take a lunch break knowing nobody is watching a clock to chase you down if you go more than two minutes over the collectively bargained break time allowance, you can feel kind of sad. A kind of ongoing survivors guilt that you have seen behind the curtain and know that a bunch of remarkably unproductive C-students (not singling out anyone in particular, and not necessarily excluding myself) collectively and systematically apply pressure to another group of C-students to be unreasonably productive, until they burn out, to be replaced.
This though, is just one aspect, the other prominent aspect of life behind the curtain that somewhat evokes trauma, is the almost random way in which one student can be receiving quite a large distribution of resources whereas others are stuck on the bread line. A lot of this, if not most of this, is the endurance of feudalism, why, while I suspect I'd find a bunch of problems with methodology, I would never be surprised to find generational wealth can persist for 600 years,
Most of the rags-to-riches-to-rags stories we might hear as we progress through life, are likely largely noise. Some social mobility is luck, some is crime, but most is economic growth. Unsustainable economic growth.
As such, most of our economy is C-students transacting with other C-students, and this is WAY unappreciated. I need to write about overemployment, that I am thus far successfully avoiding, by mostly sheer luck, but yes, I need to for my own sanity.
The thing is, in practice, holding down a job is finding a context in which you are a B-student, and then creating value for C-students. I suspect this will be the defining trait of consulting firms that sell Lean Manufacturing, 6 Thinking Hats, Matrix management, The Paperless Office, E-commerce, Internet Advertising, Online recruitment ... Agile management, AR, VR, the Metaverse, Blockchain and now "AI" will boil down to. In the kingdom of the blind - the one eyed man is king etc.
I need to stress however, the pertinance of C-students, versus average IQ. IQ is context independent (largely it still has linguistic vs geometric components or whatever) A C-grade is context dependent. Such that, industries that tend to attract broad-context A students like Law and Medicine, will still be populated largely by C students when you come to the ever evolving consultancy products for sale - from Snake Oil panaceas to AI.
AI is interesting, because it's big theoretical selling point is productivity. Something easy to sell to C-students it appears. Why? because while at a C grade, what is known and unknown is at max ambiguity, reliably C-businesspeople in particular, are in a form of upbeat denial as to how great a problem overemployment already is.
I may as well commit here, that I think AI is a bubble. It tickles all my marketing senses as being a load of hot air. I would wager, if I knew how and had sufficient assets to go short, that the hype cycle will collapse not into reality but oblivion.
The whole thing seems like a super expensive way to reinvent Clippy. So you know unambiguously where I tentatively stand.
My suspicion is that most of the sales, such as they are, are as Ed Zitrow points out, made by people who fill their days writing and reading emails, and now there's a thing that can somewhat accurately summarize emails.
The thing is, that those emails most likely function as a solution to the wicked problem of OVEREMPLOYMENT. Which is to say, exactly what was predicted by Keynes in his essay "On the Economic Opportunities of Our Grandchildren" minus the opportunities being realized, and the actual outcome as described by David Graeber in his essay "On Bullshit Jobs" which build's on Keynes' essay.
Namely, anyone in say Australia, presently holding down a full-time job, likely has a very expensive housing arrangement eating up most of their disposable income. They have big financial obligations that will eventually force them to lose their generational wealth, as housing and schooling become ever more expensive and late-in-life care will be financed by what wealth they do manage to accumulate.
Furthermore, the increase in asset prices like housing has been driven in Australia by increased private sector debt, not economic growth despite economies world-wide becoming enormously more productive, because that hasn't translated into real-wage growth.
Those opinions, based in sanguine fact, are taken from Gary Stevenson and Yanis Varoufakis. As such, every full time employee has a really strong incentive to merely survive, by never letting on that they are overemployed and as a result tremendously unproductive.
Most offices, long before surveillance software, adapted means by which to use "activity" as a proxy for "productivity" you write emails so that when the boss walks passed, it looks like you are doing something, you have meetings because they kill time and people assume you are meeting to discuss something of import and consequence. This opinion I take from Cal Newport.
So what I'm describing as the wicked problem endemic to C-world or C-ciety, is that wages are linked to hours, not value (especially not value in terms of social goods) vestigia from the industrial revolution. Full time employees cannot drop their hours, without dropping their wages, something they literally cannot do because they have financial obligations based on their full-time wage.
The real shit-kicker though, is that C-ciety spend so much time and effort - fucking eachother up. It's hard to be productive as a B-A-student, because C-students send you emails and schedule meetings. C-students are also trying to escape their terrible overemployment situation by aspiring to higher wages, and most of them resort to competing for those higher wages by increasing their activity over even more hours. Something that can seem justified because all their activity makes it so hard to get work done.
Then you wind up with all these C-managers, not to be confused with C-suite as in the "Chief something Officer" roles. I mean middle-managers, those too useful to fire, too useless to trust with real responsibility.
These are professional disruptors that make overemployment work. The people who make it almost impossible in many organizations to get any work done during 9-5. I am taking this opinion from a TED talk I can't be bothered to track down, but I believe it is backed up by some data, even if it is survey data.
Japan has famously, excelled since the 1980s at voluntary overtime. They also famously, have one of the world's least productive workforces, with going on 3+ decades of stagnation. Virtually untouchable stock index by value investors.
Peter Drucker admired much about Japanese business practices, but he ultimately could not recommend them, and though he did not put it in these terms, it's more-or-less because Japan puts all the C-students onto busy work, and render them wholly irrelevant. Even in the heydays of the Economic Miracle and the Bubble Years.
So why the fuck would you try to build autonomous software to increase the productivity of a mostly overemployed workforce? The problem isn't productivity, its pricing and has been for a long time.
Conclusion
The C-World is the antithesis of the conspiracy theory. It basically bets against intelligent design, it may well be the foundation of Hanlon's razor. It is the very distressing and uncomfortable idea that people like Australians can be incredibly wealthy, with some of the largest houses on earth and best quality of life, and largely have no idea what they are doing.
It is the uncomfortable reality, that just because somebody pulls up to your office in a BMW, tailored suit, hair transplants and enamelled teeth, they may be completely insolvent and about to drag you with them into a financial black hole.
It is the disturbing notion that the internet set up an ant-mill particularly apt if you like me, stole opinions from Julia Galef, but stupidly, forget to pass them off as your own, where Soldiers incurously defend their territory, including intellectual ones, and now the blind simply follow the blind, because all the C-student monkeys use google to find C-student monkeys to teach them what they already think they know.
Like maybe you, who stumbled across my C-student worldview because you searched for Julia Galef, James Maynard Keynes, Gary Stevenson, Yanis Varoufakis, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Noam Chomsky, Billy Connelly or "cunts".
