{"id":23091,"date":"2013-11-26T08:38:01","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T13:38:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=23091"},"modified":"2022-02-06T22:00:15","modified_gmt":"2022-02-07T03:00:15","slug":"the-illusion-of-omnicompetence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/26\/the-illusion-of-omnicompetence\/","title":{"rendered":"The illusion of omnicompetence"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve expressed this as variations on “the deeper the specialization, the more those specialists feel they’re experts on much wider subjects”. Megan McArdle<\/a>‘s formulation is rather neater than that:<\/p>\n

Amid the chaos, I got a call from the secretary of a very senior executive at the firm. His new voice-recognition software wasn\u2019t working, and he needed me to come up right away.<\/p>\n

I had servers that weren\u2019t working right and a bunch of workstations that couldn\u2019t access the network. \u201cHe should call the help desk,\u201d I told her.<\/p>\n

Her tone was arctic.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe doesn\u2019t deal with help desk personnel,\u201d she said. \u201cPlease come up here right away.\u201d<\/p>\n

So I went to the office of Mr. Senior Executive. He was not at his desk. I played with his new software, which seemed to be working fine — a bit slow, but in 1998, voice-recognition software took a while to become acclimated to your voice. I told the secretary it seemed to be working, and I left my pager number. It went off as I got to the elevator bank. I trekked wearily back to the office, where Mr. Senior Executive gestured at his computer. \u201cIt still doesn\u2019t work right,\u201d he said, and started to leave the office again.<\/p>\n

\u201cHold on, please,\u201d I said. \u201cCan you show me exactly what\u2019s not working?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not doing what I want,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you want?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want it to be,\u201d he replied, \u201clike the computer on Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cSir, that\u2019s an actor,\u201d I replied evenly, despite being on the sleepless verge of hysteria. With even more heroic self-restraint, I did not add \u201cWe can get you an actor to sit under your desk. But we\u2019d have to pay SAG rates.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now, when I used to tell this story to tech people, the moral was that executives are idiots. No, make that \u201cusers are idiots.\u201d Tech people tend to regard their end-users as a sort of intermediate form of life between chimps and information-technology staffers: They\u2019ve stopped throwing around their feces, but they can\u2019t really be said to know how to use tools.<\/p>\n

And, of course, users can do some idiotic things. But this particular executive was not an idiot. He was, in fact, a very smart man who had led financial institutions on two continents. None of the IT staffers laughing at his elementary mistake would have lasted for a week in his job.<\/p>\n

Call it \u201cthe illusion of omnicompetence.\u201d When you know a lot about one thing, you spend a lot of time watching the less knowledgeable make elementary errors. You can easily infer from this that you are very smart, and they are very stupid. Presumably, our bank executive knew that the phasers and replicators on Star Trek<\/em> are fake; why did he think that the talking computer would be any more real?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve expressed this as variations on “the deeper the specialization, the more those specialists feel they’re experts on much wider subjects”. Megan McArdle‘s formulation is rather neater than that: Amid the chaos, I got a call from the secretary of a very senior executive at the firm. His new voice-recognition software wasn\u2019t working, and he […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,57,15],"tags":[1456,109,261,139,223],"class_list":["post-23091","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-humour","category-technology","tag-competence","tag-computers","tag-management","tag-psychology","tag-startrek"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-60r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23091","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23091"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23091\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":71606,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23091\/revisions\/71606"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23091"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23091"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23091"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}