I think one semi-standard response to a common context-based skill incentive pattern is called “strategic incompetence”. Fundamentally the pattern is “I can’t do that tedious and thankless job, because I’m just not good at it.” Low prestige office jobs are the classic example.
A google search against lesswrong turned up no mention of “strategic incompetence” which was something of a surprise to me.
One of the key issues that comes up around strategic incompetence is that it raises ethical complexities relative to egalitarian work norms where “everyone should do their part” and people with cultivated incompetence can “shirk” without it seeming like they are obviously shirking. In programming/scifi/geek contexts the contrasting virtue goes along with the slogan that specialization is for insects. This is one the reasons I like such contexts :-)
(Edited to add: Voting patterns seem tragic here from the perspective of rewarding that which causes good content. I’m saying something that people (currently) seem to think is worth “10” and the only reason I’m saying it is because katydee raised an interesting, more personal, and more general point that I could riff on, but the original article only has “3″ and I’m one of those who upvoted it. This seems like evidence that “propagating reward back through the chain of causality that leads to good content” is not how people are voting… hence, the voting seems somewhat tragic. I wish people would up their voting game, because I want this forum to get better over time, not worse.)
An unalloyed good deserves better than an alloyed good that efficient-causally allows for an unalloyed good. What if I want to reward the abstract generative principles that led to your comment without so much rewarding the efficient causal excuses for their actualization which also allowed for the actualization of principles that compete with the aforementioned ones? At this point I am primarily concerned with removing the weeds of noise, not sowing the seeds of signal.
Fundamentally the pattern is “I can’t do that tedious and thankless job, because I’m just not good at it.” Low prestige office jobs are the classic example.
Huh, I think I just realized why I’ve steadfastly avoided learning how to cook or clean.
Of course, knowing this, I should go ahead and learn and then cite the concept of strategic incompetence when explaining to any housemates / boyfriends why my skills shouldn’t obligate me to do a higher proportion of the housework. (As in, “a naive view of comparative advantage in splitting unpleasant tasks leads to all of us developing strategic incompetencies, so we shouldn’t use that view.”)
It is also a way to teach children lots and lots of kitchen physics and chemistry, engineering processes, by adding context and understanding to such mundane tasks as keeping a pot from boiling over (observe convection. bubble formation, heat regulation, vapor and its properties, condensation...).
Yes. I was wondering if I should compose a response to Metus in a way that could help point out that there could be a lot of other things going on that went into this...
For example, instead of shirking, what might be going on is that the seeming “shirker” is in fact a leader with responsibilities roughly of the sort Metus proposed, who has simply found that it helps with subordinate motivation if the leader pretends to seriously need their subordinate in a domain the subordinate understands (rather than to just have comparative advantage in something else that the subordinate doesn’t understand, and then run into inferential distance problems on things like “comparative advantage” and also the other domain).
Or maybe the person is truly world class in something and, as part of the process of leveling up, dropped other skills or let them atrophy without even realizing what was going on necessarily… I’ve heard that Erdös could be given a one serving carton of milk and seem to be genuinely incapable of figuring out how to open the glued pour spout at the top… someone would need to open it for him so all he had to do was lift and drink, otherwise he would just go without (and presumably work on math instead).
Or maybe other things are going on. Or a mixture. The night is very large, and full of wonders...
I think it might be arguably the case that every skill other than whatever is already your likely long term comparative advantage is an anti-skill?
The discussions in the first link seem to be caused—among other things—by weak leadership. A strong leader makes his subordinates work. One of the comments makes this especially clear: They think one of the necessary steps is to befriend the boss. Though a proper leader has no friends among the subordinates. They can be friendly but they can not be friends.
Ooh. I just used this “strategic incompetence” thing earlier this week. The other fixed their problem without me and hopefully learned something too. Everybody wins!
but the original article only has “3” and I’m one of those who upvoted it.
I’ve noticed that I have a considerably higher threshold for upvoting articles than for upvoting comments. I’m not sure if this is common or justified.
In discussion, articles and comments give the same amount of karma, so I would treat them almost equally. (Upvoting articles, by drawing more people in from the list of articles, can have more impact than upvoting comments does.) In Main, articles are worth 10 karma each, which would possibly justify a higher barrier.
I think one semi-standard response to a common context-based skill incentive pattern is called “strategic incompetence”. Fundamentally the pattern is “I can’t do that tedious and thankless job, because I’m just not good at it.” Low prestige office jobs are the classic example.
A google search against lesswrong turned up no mention of “strategic incompetence” which was something of a surprise to me.
One of the key issues that comes up around strategic incompetence is that it raises ethical complexities relative to egalitarian work norms where “everyone should do their part” and people with cultivated incompetence can “shirk” without it seeming like they are obviously shirking. In programming/scifi/geek contexts the contrasting virtue goes along with the slogan that specialization is for insects. This is one the reasons I like such contexts :-)
(Edited to add: Voting patterns seem tragic here from the perspective of rewarding that which causes good content. I’m saying something that people (currently) seem to think is worth “10” and the only reason I’m saying it is because katydee raised an interesting, more personal, and more general point that I could riff on, but the original article only has “3″ and I’m one of those who upvoted it. This seems like evidence that “propagating reward back through the chain of causality that leads to good content” is not how people are voting… hence, the voting seems somewhat tragic. I wish people would up their voting game, because I want this forum to get better over time, not worse.)
An unalloyed good deserves better than an alloyed good that efficient-causally allows for an unalloyed good. What if I want to reward the abstract generative principles that led to your comment without so much rewarding the efficient causal excuses for their actualization which also allowed for the actualization of principles that compete with the aforementioned ones? At this point I am primarily concerned with removing the weeds of noise, not sowing the seeds of signal.
Huh, I think I just realized why I’ve steadfastly avoided learning how to cook or clean.
Of course, knowing this, I should go ahead and learn and then cite the concept of strategic incompetence when explaining to any housemates / boyfriends why my skills shouldn’t obligate me to do a higher proportion of the housework. (As in, “a naive view of comparative advantage in splitting unpleasant tasks leads to all of us developing strategic incompetencies, so we shouldn’t use that view.”)
Cooking is high-status nowadays. If you can do it reasonably well and with flair :-)
Feeding people is also an excellent way of making them like you.
It is also a way to teach children lots and lots of kitchen physics and chemistry, engineering processes, by adding context and understanding to such mundane tasks as keeping a pot from boiling over (observe convection. bubble formation, heat regulation, vapor and its properties, condensation...).
tag: parenting
Yes. I was wondering if I should compose a response to Metus in a way that could help point out that there could be a lot of other things going on that went into this...
For example, instead of shirking, what might be going on is that the seeming “shirker” is in fact a leader with responsibilities roughly of the sort Metus proposed, who has simply found that it helps with subordinate motivation if the leader pretends to seriously need their subordinate in a domain the subordinate understands (rather than to just have comparative advantage in something else that the subordinate doesn’t understand, and then run into inferential distance problems on things like “comparative advantage” and also the other domain).
Or maybe the person is truly world class in something and, as part of the process of leveling up, dropped other skills or let them atrophy without even realizing what was going on necessarily… I’ve heard that Erdös could be given a one serving carton of milk and seem to be genuinely incapable of figuring out how to open the glued pour spout at the top… someone would need to open it for him so all he had to do was lift and drink, otherwise he would just go without (and presumably work on math instead).
Or maybe other things are going on. Or a mixture. The night is very large, and full of wonders...
I think it might be arguably the case that every skill other than whatever is already your likely long term comparative advantage is an anti-skill?
The discussions in the first link seem to be caused—among other things—by weak leadership. A strong leader makes his subordinates work. One of the comments makes this especially clear: They think one of the necessary steps is to befriend the boss. Though a proper leader has no friends among the subordinates. They can be friendly but they can not be friends.
I think the LW translation of “Strategic Incompetence” is “Precommitment to Failure.”
(no, google doesn’t turn that up either. But it should)
Ooh. I just used this “strategic incompetence” thing earlier this week. The other fixed their problem without me and hopefully learned something too. Everybody wins!
I’ve noticed that I have a considerably higher threshold for upvoting articles than for upvoting comments. I’m not sure if this is common or justified.
In discussion, articles and comments give the same amount of karma, so I would treat them almost equally. (Upvoting articles, by drawing more people in from the list of articles, can have more impact than upvoting comments does.) In Main, articles are worth 10 karma each, which would possibly justify a higher barrier.