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Comment by pfarnsworth | Hacker News Reader

Because talking with confidence will go 90% of the way to convincing people that you know what you're talking about. So often I've worked with assholes who talk with such confidence that most people won't bother filtering the garbage coming from their mouths. They just believe it.

It's almost eerie how effectively talking with confidence works. It's so effective that when you complain about these charlatans, YOU look like an asshole, even when you are completely factual. It's sad but fascinating at the same time.

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This behavior is reinforced by current child-rearing and educational practices as well. Think about how much emphasis is placed on blind confidence, self-esteem, extroversion, etc. (at least in the U.S.). So it makes sense that confidence would be rewarded later in life when society defines it as a key metric before then.

I recall reading a book which posited that this shift to confidence over other "interior" characteristics (e.g. virtues) was due to the post-war consumerism boom when salesmanship became a lucrative career. What makes a good salesman? Confidence.

I think that child raising practice is direct consequence: parents own expense is that humble productive people got lower salaries and were less promoted then confident less productive people. Thus they don't want their children to be harmed by that later on.

If you're able to could to find out the title of this book? It sounds interesting.

I'm not the author of the original comment, but I recall reading a similar argument in the book:

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain

https://www.amazon.com/Quiet-Power-Introverts-World-Talking/...

I wonder if this is all of it though. When we're talking about incompetence, what I think of is people who are incapable of doing something. For people who can't do things, they need to ask others to help them. Initially, when they are not leaders, they become good at asking for help. This becomes a form of training someone to be good at delegation.

Something I see a lot in IC's is that they are very good at doing, but they don't like or know how to delegate. I think this comes from a sense of pride in their own work, and a desire to do it themselves. There are also cases where they aren't good teachers, so prefer to do it rather than take the time to train someone else. I know for me it's always been hard to delegate to others; for various reasons I always want to do it myself.

So I guess the question I ask is, "does incompetence help teach delegation techniques?" That being said, the best managers I've worked with have been great engineers before, and don't BS their way through work, but have learned how to help their employees by passing on good advice based on experience and understanding the strengths of individuals on their team for accomplishing a particular task.

I find that the incompetent managers only really survive in middle-management, where it is easier for them to cover up their lack of knowledge.

"As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do." - Andrew Carnegie

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.

At the risk of being divisive, this will generally only work if you're white, if you're a minority or a woman, there's way more pushback on all those things, even when you're right. Seen it many times.

I don't think its a race issue so much as a physical appearance issue. Height, attractiveness, facial structure, body size. Certain people look "presidential" and they command a lot of automatic respect just based on appearance. There are plenty of minority people that have this quality. There are plenty of white males lacking this quality.

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.

I think you're right. Minority, female, etc., are often just noisy proxies for what you call look-ism and I would also add normal-ism.

What you call normalism is regression to the mean. Lotta guys in tech? Hire a woman. Lotta white folks in the movies? Hire an 'ethnic' looking actor. The pendulum swings to and fro, and all the while we snip the ends off of the bell curve to make everyone feel like they fit in.

Fitting in is not a way to create progress. Adaptability and inclusiveness is. That was the point of diversity training in the first place, not normalization. Cultures function much more efficiently when diversity is introduced into the medium.

The real reason for the stagnation in social order is the fear of being pushed outside the herd if you are too near to the edge. We must become more inclusive, and fight the laziness that manifests itself in regressing to the mean.

"Look-ism" this is huge.

The more 'interaction' and 'first impressions' need to be made, the more 'look-ism' is essential.

Lawyers, bankers, execs etc..

Tech is even getting a little bit like this, with some shops getting a little to 'beardy' and 'tuquey' and 'hoody' for me :)

> Certain people look "presidential"

I agree, I know a guy who is head of sales of a company and he has that "Presidential look" and my brain automatically thinks that he is a leader every time I see him.

Let's also not forget ageism, heightism, voice-ism (positive affect of rich voices).

And ableism and...

There probably needs to be a general purpose word for this...

I gather kyriarchy was coined to serve this purpose, but I don't think it's widely used.

Fascism is the general term.

Judging anyone by anything other than what is called for when doing the actual work is inherently superficial and therefore fascist (fascia, on the face). Fairly synergistic connection there regarding the popularity of a certain face-themed webpage.

We can make up labels all day to make it fresh or more precise, but the logos/pathos/ethos of the term 'fascist' is sound in every instance of excluding or including someone based on anything but propensity. It is interesting that we can't acknowledge it, like we are all so wrapped up in finding our niche that when we do, anything that would jeopardize that is immediately regarded as false.

Like, who would you be if you aren't actually as talented as you think you are?

But I digress.

It's hard to say "looking presidential" isn't related to race or gender when ~98% of presidents have been white men (assuming you're talking about the United States president!)

First off, this is false. I've seen plenty of races and women succeed unworthily because they talk with extreme confidence.

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.

You say this so confidently, I almost believe it.

> Secondly, are you only talking about the US because you're American?

yep.

If I hadn't seen this comment I would have posted something similar. I can't see why it should be downvoted.

>if you're a minority or a woman

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.

Anthropologists have studied hunter gatherer tribes for a long time and it is not as simple as those with the most confidence becomes leaders. For example, among the San people tribe leadership is shared by the elders. And anyone can become an elder by surviving til old age. In day to day tasks, such as during hunting, who leads the hunt is determined on a rotating schedule so that all men get to lead it from time to time.

Designated leaders probably didn't become the norm until about 4000 bc when early civilizations arose.

Another interesting tidbit noted by many anthropologists is that boasting is strictly forbidden. E.g if a tribesman catches a big prey, he must be humble and can not brag about how good of a hunter he is. It is different from the Western World, in which bragging is expected and necessary for leaders (case in point: Trump).

>Another interesting tidbit noted by many anthropologists is that boasting is strictly forbidden.

Are you saying that this applies to every tribe in the world? Because if so, I don't buy it. It's too far fetched that every tribe in the world except everyone who advanced past the hunter gatherer stage would share this cultural trait. Aside from it being unreasonable that all tribes would share this trait, it would also seem to imply that modest people cannot advance to the modern age, which is also difficult to swallow.

No, I should have clarified that my comment was only about the San people, aka Bushmen. Those people are the closest to how humans lived for thousands of years before they wandered out of Africa.

I don't think other primitive peoples have designated leadership roles either, like we do, but I'm not sure.

Ok. I don't have any trouble believing that could be a cultural trait of those peoples. Thanks for clarifying.

The principle of sexual inequality (and male superiority) appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon--arising only around the time of agriculture. Even subsequent to the development of agricultures, plenty of civilizations have practiced matrilineal succession, with no apparent cost to their dealings with neighboring societies (indeed, some even flourished at the expense of others--consider the Iroquois, for example).

I'm sorry but this is pure myth. There has never been a human society where primary political/executive power was vested in women, except some developed and recent examples.

The idea of tribes controlled by women just never happened; not once. It's wishful revisionism motivated by modern politics.

Pinker discusses this a bit in this speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n691pLhQBkw

And of course other have noted the male dominance in pretty much all the similar primate species. Human are brute animals, nothing more.

And no, just because (pre)historically it was this way doesn't mean I'm saying it ought to be this way everywhere and forever. Natural != ideal.

What about the picts?

Women in Pictish society were regarded as the equal of men and succession in leadership (later kingship) was matrilineal (through the mother's side), with the reigning chief succeeded by either his brother or perhaps a nephew but not through patrilineal succession of father to son. [0]

[0]http://www.ancient.eu/picts/

You have a small farm community of four houses, a few hundred/thousands years ago. One of the families has a animal die and is in dire need for help. Who do they ask for help?

Some warrior, sitting on a iron throne and passing down judgment from high in one the houses, or is it the old women of the village who carries the memories of who did whom a favor and is responsible for the community threads that binds the families together. Who has the power to make the decision?

>Some warrior, sitting on a iron throne and passing down judgment from high in one the houses, or is it the old women of the village who carries the memories of who did whom a favor and is responsible for the community threads that binds the families together. Who has the power to make the decision?

if recent thousand of years of history is any guidance - the warrior on the throne will be asked to punish the witch[es] (some of those old women) for the curse that caused the animal to die, and the property of those witches would be shared between the warrior and the family of the reporter.

While the waves of witch trial came and decline, that is mostly a 15th and early 16th centuries concept done by the church and not by small farm communities. There is no "thousand of years of history" where farm communities regularly killed the elder women, and its common theme in non-European/Christian history.

Its kind of telling if current view of history is that all elder women was hunted down and killed as witches under a single religion.

>The principle of sexual inequality (and male superiority) appears to be a relatively recent phenomenon

Recent? Even gorilla have males bigger (and thus leading the pack) than females and so far prehistoric humans are known to have been that way too.

It is exactly the rise of civilization(agriculture, technology, complex social structure, etc) which allowed for situations with female leadership.

Gorilla males are about 50% larger compared to human males being about 20% larger. There is much in our anatomy that implies humans behaved more as polyamorous tribes than solitary male harems.

If you're really interested, look up "Sex at Dawn"

Perhaps a more accurate characterization instead of specifically being white, having an <attribute> of the dominant category of people in a culture (I'm using the word culture broadly, there are cases in which I do not think white males are the dominant nor revered category).

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!

Oh great, a race and gender discussion based on an internet user's personal opinion. That's going to be fascinating!

I can't wait for the exciting source-based debate (with citations!) that is sure to happen.

if you're a minority or a woman, there's way more pushback on all those things

My counter to that is Theranos.

Trustfund wasn't citing a study or anything, but still I don't think an appropriate counter to a perceived trend is one cherry picked point of data.

That is fair, but the burden of proof is on trustfund, so it doesn't really matter how rigorous GP is.

Except that alot of her image was modeled on Steve Jobs, who was a confident male figure, though not the same image as a more traditional CEO.

you should meet Holmes the Father, Kissinger, Mattis, Schultz, Draper - and see who among them is a minority or a woman :)

Getting a ride about the Bayesian vs. frequentist discussion also on the front page...

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.

Dunno. Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina seem to be quite good counterexamples to your thesis.

If that's true, it's a good argument for hiring minorities and women, since you would not be burdened by incompetent leaders.

I have noticed the same phenomenon. Since humans are social creatures I think there is an evolutionary bias to avoid decision paralysis and just follow whoever seems to be the most confident. We are better off in general if we just cooperate and take action instead of deliberating every decision so people seem to be wired to just accept the first thing that appears to be reasonable.

We pretty much still do instinctive, animal politics when it comes to respecting leaders. Style trumps substance.

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.

Since the alternative would often be a "deer in headlights" situation, I bet that's even the right thing to do. Reacting in group beats reacting by yourself, even if the resulting reactions are less intelligent.

> Because talking with confidence will go 90% of the way to convincing people that you know what you're talking about.

This combines with the fact that the vast majority of people do not want to get into a confrontation. Consequently, everybody thinks that everybody else agrees.

> It's so effective that when you complain about these charlatans, YOU look like an asshole, even when you are completely factual.

You have to get good at zapping these charlatans with humor and sarcasm. You zap them when they say something obviously wrong and make people snicker at them so that when you genuinely need to oppose them you've already laid the groundwork.

You just explained meeting confidence with confidence. Perhaps the best strategy, but now you're one of 'them'!

The horror. /s

I recall an actual study where researchers had participants listen to people who were (a) very confident but turned out to be incorrect or (b) neutral but correct. Then they rated these people on their competence. The confident people were rated as more competent even though they were incorrect more often.

It's depressing as hell.

It raises the question of whether such credulity is/was always maladaptive or whether there are current/past reasons for it to be so widespread.

On a tangential note, there's another quality that struck me as (paradoxically) expected and surprising.

In my prior role, I worked as an analyst on a sales desk at a large investment bank -- a group in which "talking with confidence" really was 90% of the job.

The head of the desk had been one of the best salesman in the industry, and had (fairly) received compensation to reward that. However, that didn't quite translate into leadership skills (in my opinion), and I felt our team suffered heavily for that.

It's a split take on "one ends up at the job one is least qualified for", but a result I presume must happen when the culture at an organization such as a large bank promotes a top individual producer to management solely on the basis of his/her individual production.

Absolutely. This is why it's essential for an organization to offer career advancement along both management and individual contributor tracks. Moving a highly effective contributor to a management role exacts two costs: the loss of a high performer and the addition of a bad manager (with the knock-on effects that that has on the people that person manages). Yet most companies only have one tool for recognizing achievement: jobs in management.

"This is consistent with the finding that leaderless groups have a natural tendency to elect self-centered, overconfident and narcissistic individuals as leaders"

"It's almost eerie how effectively talking with confidence works."

It may very well be that all other things being equal, a little bit of over confidence is quite a positive indicator of actual success, as opposed to having 'less confidence'.

'Confidence' usually comes along with a bunch of other attributes. If you 'believe you can succeed' - you may be likely to try harder.

A differentiating trait of 'successful people' is that they 'believe they shape the outcomes of their lives' - whereas others don't believe it is so. (Obviously there's a lot just to that).

When you 'believe in yourself' - it's easier to 'have faith' in your own vision - and others take that as a strong signal of authenticity, which is helpful.

Nothing would ever happen were it not for at least a little bit of irrational exuberance.

Not that this justifies blow-hardism.

I mean, I already know this is true but I'm dealing with exactly one of these people right now and this is so reassuring to read. Especially the bit about just how scarily effective and utterly impossible to criticise this behaviour is.

yep ... the funny thing about this is that to actually expose them, the best way is to force them to work through what they're proposing publicly like you want to actually help out (this part is key). If it looks like you're trying to torpedo the idea, it can backfire and people will sympathize with them, especially if you're not proposing something better.

"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.

I agree & sympathies with you all. I also think technology plays a vital role in helping us better understand the content of ones character. A little bit of self promotion but platforms like www.peertal.com can maybe help us better understand people & their relationships with the world. Our next UI release in March should make it more user friendly. Ping me if you're interested in helping or collaboration. We need all the help we can get....

>Because talking with confidence will go 90% of the way to convincing people that you know what you're talking about. So often I've worked with assholes who talk with such confidence that most people won't bother filtering the garbage coming from their mouths. They just believe it.

Yeah, sometimes I wonder if I do as well as I do in my career because I talk like this, not because I really know what I'm doing...

Inverse relationship: critical thinking skills of the populace being led, and the presence of incompetent "bullshit artists" leading them.

Reminds me of the lawyers defending OJ Simpson

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