Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders? (2013)

for hundreds of thousands of years having your tribe represented by a confident male (selected from the majority of the tribe) was beneficial (at least we can conclude that now based on the survivor bias principle) We still have those cave man instincts with us to a high degree. The point of civilization development is to reign in cave man instincts inside and among us. Seems that it takes time.

When you have a dominant group of people that share an attribute, I think anchoring and other cognitive biases will always play an influential role.

> Seen it many times.

Not sure if being intentionally humorous here, but I think it's funny regardless!

My counter to that is Theranos.

Secondly, are you only talking about the US because you're American? Because there are plenty of other countries in this world, and it's true in all of them.

I'd say people use confidence as evidence for competence. Yet, that only make them adjust their priors, and biased people have some extreme priors.

Look-ism is the huge issue that is almost never talked about. In most companies you could probably better judge how successful new hires will be just by how they look in a video of them talking vs a sample of their work or credentials.

"Oh you want to make the entire process asynchronous? Awesome I've been wanting to do that myself ... Are you thinking of using a queue to do it or were you going to rely on node.js callbacks?"

"Also, how are we going to make that fault tolerant, so that if the async process goes down we'll know? I found its usually pretty tedious to set it up and test it to make sure it works in a recoverable manner, but I bet with your experience you probably have a better way to do it. What do you suggest?"

Just ask a lot of questions. Cheerfully :D

Usually, they'll try and avoid answering things or bs their way through it, but if you take them into enough deep water, it might become apparent to people they don't know what the fuck they're doing, which is what you want.

But I think it's analogous - and possibly related to - the difference between individual decisions made by instinctive, narrative logic and emotions, and decisions made after formal, extended, peer-reviewed reality-based research.

It took a long time for humans to invent science and logic, partly because science and logic use a lot of time, energy, and resources. So you need a certain level of physical security before you can even consider them.

If you research the history of science, many of the post-enlightenment heavy hitters were independently wealthy. They certainly weren't worried about food or having a roof over their heads.

Moving beyond animal alpha politics requires the same leap in collective intelligence - which may require everyone to be independently wealthy.

Democracy isn't enough, because when you have a majority making political choices instinctively, and a resource-rich minority manipulating them for personal greed, there's no room left for rational post-animal post-alpha politics.

Put simply, Trump and Clinton are both inevitable products of a scarcity economy.

The horror. /s

I feel you found a good explanation for the incompetence/confidence paradox. You really can get far if you just talk about things you think you can do with confidence and conviction. I actually think everyone who's successful has experienced this. Sometimes you just have to bullshit, but do it confidently.

However, the reason many people fail in regulating this disparity is that they don't know they're incompetent (Dunning-Kruger effect). They can't actually do; only speak. Truly successful people have enough self-efficacy to know when they're not good at something. They have just the right amount of self-doubt. But that's not enough. They must also have the drive and humility to correct their shortcomings.

This goes along with your thinking, because the obvious response (in a workplace) by someone who doesn't know how to do something is to find someone else who can do it. That being said, delegating isn't the key. Recognition of your own incompetence is. Delegating, and edifying yourself, is the proper response though.

Early on in my career, I wanted to do everything myself. And I did. I would do stellar work on a few projects, then eventually I'd take on too much and things would fall on the floor. Some superiors saw this as incompetence.

Now I confidently accept too much work, but I'm not afraid to say "I need help with this." At my current company I've gone from doing solitary projects to having 3 other developers work on my projects under my direction. I'm not a manager, or even a lead. Hell, I don't know half the things I'll need on a particular project I accept, but I know the other developers have that knowledge.

  "managers rise to the level of their incompetence."

Is there any evidence this is true?

Your final point is the most important. Ultimately the process should be about solving the problem in the best manner possible, not how person X thinks it should be solved.

I have often been praised for my charisma and my confidence, but therein lies the problem: because I cannot allow dysfunction to perpetuate, I sometimes butt into situations where it is not my business, or I act impulsively because something must be done. But this problem can also be compounded because the people around me who cede leadership for the sake of ensuring action can sometimes get absorbed into my confidence and charisma, believing my conviction to be equivalent to the validity of my decisions, and thus enabling poor decisions that may as well turn out to be worse than no decisions.

I see where these problems with incompetent leaders arise even when they are not intentional. At best, one can hope that these leaders are capable of recognizing and humbly accepting their own limitations.

Disclaimer: pure speculation ;)

The diversity of cured meats around the world makes this statement suspect. I don't see an agrarian society taking time to discover how to cure meat... why would they, grain stores easier.

Yet every culture has various kinds of preserved meat; Pemmican, European sausages, Kiviak, Hongeohoe, etc.

Most primitive life is harsh enough that you don't need to compete too much over mates. People with injury or chronic illnesses get knocked out just from going about their daily existence.

The same reason they tend to be whiter, a little better looking, more athletic.

Interesting paradox: for Men, girth is actually good. Carry a few extra pounds, and it's good.

For women - inverse. Skinny women earn more.

Think of this: every single social interaction you have - with the guy at the watercooler, to meetings, to presentations - everyone is 'sizing each other up' subconciously. They are determining where they belong in the pecking order. Usually only from observable traits.

I was once at the opening of a Picasso exhibition where most of the people present were CEOs, and at the same place, I also attended the opening of a exhibition of Yousuf Karsh photos, where he was appeared. I'm tall, but I was nearly the shortest person in that large room both times. The only two times that's ever happened to me.

As for causation, it's been experimentally tested and confirmed, with small groups picking leaders. There's a great old book retailing many remarkable such studies called "The Height of Your Life" by Ralph Keyes. It also discussed research showing that a substantial chunk of sex discrimination was actually height discrimination (see Sheryl Sandberg's remarkably high heels - she knows the score.)

You said I should dig deeper - I've given you my bibliography, could you now favor me with yours?

This reminds me of the argument that women's under-representation in STEM fields begins during childhood when we condition them with toys that don't encourage spatial reasoning. This claim leaves a gigantic dangling question of "Why are toy companies and parents so damn bad at understanding what little girls want to play with?" The literature supports the intuitive truth of the matter: girls and boys find their toy affinities on their own without much input from society.

Incidentally, I think most people are morally taking the wrong tack when it comes to this kind of stuff. If you make a value judgment that having an affinity for leadership or spatial reasoning is Good, then you are no longer free to interpret the actual world without worrying that the data will show men are Better (or Worse). Why can't we accept men and women as they are, and stop pre-supposing equality of all measurements that we might consider desirable? If it turns out that men are naturally suited to taking leadership roles, who cares? It takes all kinds to make a functional society, and in the scheme of things, leaders are a tiny thread in that tapestry. I find the role of leader or mathematician to be equally valuable to artist, baker, carpenter, fashion designer, grocer, mother or father. Each of them is a valuable member of society that should earn a fundamental human dignity. In my view, admonishing women to pursue engineering is equally repugnant to demanding they avoid it! Let's encourage all of the women who find engineering or mathematics irresistible, but avoid fretting about the many who don't!

Representative Democracy: Do you understand by that a contract between people where those who never paid a cent in tax but receive free benefits have the right to vote ? Maybe that will answer the question about how incompetent managers raise to the top.

Business Have you not heard about how the leader of Mozilla? or some other company has been voted out because he expressed his ideas about sexuality ? Or are you not familiar with how a company traded by shares is GOVERNED by a board of directors ? Cisco founder has been fired, thats an example of how elections work in a business.

Maybe you should watch The Office movies to understand how and why incompetent people are given manager positions. Its a comedy and the main actor plays very well the incompetent manager. There are also some serials where voting is involved but the manager does all he can do go his own way.