Incompetence as a Signalling Device | Hacker News Reader

Incompetence as a Signalling Device

insidehighered.com

48 pointsbd7 comments

"An unexpected result of my research on the mafia," he writes, "was to find out that mafiosi are quite incompetent at doing anything" other than shaking down legitimate businesses and enforcing trade agreements among smaller-scale hoodlums. "Mafiosi are good at intimidation and stick to it.... They let the professionals and the entrepreneurs take care of the actual business operations."

Rather than getting involved in running a restaurant or dealing drugs, they joke about their cluelessness in such matters and simply collect payment for "protection."

I came to the US as an immigrant and applied for asylum. At one of my INS interviews I was recounting a story of government corruption and organized crime when the INS agent took issue with my story.

"That's not how the mafia operates!" He said, "They don't just collect fees, they take over the business! The protection racket is how it starts but it quickly progresses to where they wrestle control from the owner and then they own the business. That's how the mafia always operates!"

This left me quite stunned and speechless, I did not know how to respond, do I tell him that The Soprano's is not a documentary. Do I try to reason with extremely impatient person.

Low story short, I won in the green-card lottery, pure luck.

Please ignore the ignorance of American security, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. I was arrested and held captive for several days, on several occasions, for no reason at all, other than carrying tens of Arabic books, on various subjects, in my car. I couldn't convince the post-911 officer that Arabic was a legitimate language, beautiful on its own, with some passionate scholars. I was translating a mathematics text at the time and had no working scientific vocabulary of the field, so I had to buy every text on physics, engineering, chemistry, econometrics and civil engineering I could find. It takes one months to acquire the technical language for a discipline, the Right Thing for a scientific translator is to immerse himself in the field and find all the idioms, metaphors and the cultural signals of the language community. It was impossible for me to convince him that I really was using the texts on Stereochemistry for their topological vocabulary, and not for the chemistry; I told him the real danger was from someone with materials, not theories, and he jumped on me for knowing who the risk was!

What icing on the cake was when he found out I was doing this for free, HAHAHA.

This is a fascinating article. Since it's a book review, the author isn't really taking any responsibility for the information presented. I find myself wondering how much of this is actually true.

Seconded. although it examines criminology, there are interesting isomorphisms with law, management and politics which cynics might regard as simply more mannered versions of the protection racket. Reminds me of this economist article on how the political class draws upon distinctly different pools of professional talent in different cultures: http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory.cf...

To some extent, it's intuitive: if you want someone's cooperation, you want to signal that you're not a threat to them.

Now I get why academics is so frowned upon in school.

Find other people in school who enjoy learning, and you need not be frowned upon. In my experience, anyway.

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