The "C" World
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.
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.
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.
C-World In Practice
In terms of interesting opinions I've been passing off as my own, much of this post is inspired by Daniel Markovits interview with the Institute of Art and Ideas, I haven't even read his book.
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".
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