This means that highly competent people in positions of power often have less accurate beliefs than much less competent people who are not in positions of power.
Not sure how strong you intend this statement to be (due to ambiguity of “often”), but I would think that all-else-equal, a randomly selected competent person with some measure of power has more accurate beliefs than a less competent person w/o power, even after controlling for e.g. IQ.
Would you disagree with that?
I’d grant that the people with the very most accurate beliefs are probably not the same as the people who are the very most competent, but that’s mostly just because the tails come apart.
I’d also grant that having power subjects one to new biases. But being competent and successful is a strong filter for your beliefs matching reality (at least in some domains, and to the extent that your behavior is determined by your beliefs), while incompetence often seems to go hand-in-hand with various kinds of self-deception (making excuses, blaming others, having unrealistic expectations of what will work or not).
So overall I’d expect the competent person’s beliefs to be more accurate.
I do expect there to be more going on here than just the tails coming apart, but I agree that on average people with some amount of power will probably have more accurate beliefs than people without power.
I also expect this to come apart earlier than what we would expect just from unbiased statistics and tails coming apart due to distortionary forces on power.
But being in a position of power filters for competence, and competence filters for accurate beliefs.
If the quoted bit had instead said:
This means that highly competent people in positions of power often have less accurate beliefs than highly competent people who are not in positions of power.
I wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed. But as is I’m pretty skeptical of the claim (again depending on what is meant by “often”).
Made a related change to the OP (changed it from “much less competent” to just “competent”).
I think the original phrasing is still fine, because it depends on the cutoff you are looking at. I think if you condition on the kind of people I tend to spend most of my time with, then the original phrasing holds, but it doesn’t really hold if you just look at the general population.
Not sure how strong you intend this statement to be (due to ambiguity of “often”), but I would think that all-else-equal, a randomly selected competent person with some measure of power has more accurate beliefs than a less competent person w/o power, even after controlling for e.g. IQ.
Would you disagree with that?
I’d grant that the people with the very most accurate beliefs are probably not the same as the people who are the very most competent, but that’s mostly just because the tails come apart.
I’d also grant that having power subjects one to new biases. But being competent and successful is a strong filter for your beliefs matching reality (at least in some domains, and to the extent that your behavior is determined by your beliefs), while incompetence often seems to go hand-in-hand with various kinds of self-deception (making excuses, blaming others, having unrealistic expectations of what will work or not).
So overall I’d expect the competent person’s beliefs to be more accurate.
I do expect there to be more going on here than just the tails coming apart, but I agree that on average people with some amount of power will probably have more accurate beliefs than people without power.
I also expect this to come apart earlier than what we would expect just from unbiased statistics and tails coming apart due to distortionary forces on power.
Got it, that makes sense.
I think you’re focusing on the “competence” here when the active ingredient was more the “position of power” thing.
But being in a position of power filters for competence, and competence filters for accurate beliefs.
If the quoted bit had instead said:
I wouldn’t necessarily have disagreed. But as is I’m pretty skeptical of the claim (again depending on what is meant by “often”).
Made a related change to the OP (changed it from “much less competent” to just “competent”).
I think the original phrasing is still fine, because it depends on the cutoff you are looking at. I think if you condition on the kind of people I tend to spend most of my time with, then the original phrasing holds, but it doesn’t really hold if you just look at the general population.