Subjective Incompetence in Motion

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.