Competence, Knowledge, and Intellectual Cosplay

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

Gods, I miss competence and knowledge. Yeah, this is going to be a rant, but know what? I earned it.

I really miss competence and knowing things as an ideal. The idea of setting a goal, taking measurable steps, and getting there. The competence that did big things like get us to the moon or electrify America. The everyday knowledge that lets doctors save lives and mechanics turn a pile of junk back to a working car. I feel America (and perhaps other cultures) don’t appreciate knowing stuff and doing things.

There’s a joke I’ve seen going around that today’s scientists don’t have time to invent robots or clone sheep because they’re too busy explaining the earth isn’t flat. A nice metaphor, but it’s more like they’re not only explaining the earth isn’t flat, but a Senator wants NASA investigated for concealing the flat earth. Oh, and people are selling Flat Earth Crystals that will protect you from COVID and 5G.

What’s worse is I’m trying to be sarcastic and I feel I haven’t been sarcastic enough.

I don’t get it. I grew up with science and education, in white-collar family from a hard-working and self-educated blue collar family. I knew people who worked their way up with a high school degree – who also had a huge personal library or ended up so knowledgeable they taught college. I grew up with educators and mechanics, people who knew how to get stuff done and were respected for it.

I grew up with people who got their damn vaccinations so they and their kids didn’t die. Yeah, sometimes there was smoking, drinking, and foods that were 50% lard, but that was sort of different – at least that’s what I tell myself. Also a lot of stuff was brown and green, that style where mid-century modern gets depressed, but that’s another story. Anyway we used science despite the lard and bad color scheme.

Of course America has always had an anti-intellectual streak, running through parts of its culture. Despite being very much an intellectual myself, I don’t like intellectualism, I don’t like pretentious putting on of airs and putting on a show of knowledge – because that often becomes a show only. I think that has been an issue in American – and other – history where people use the annoying pretension of some faux-intellectuals as a reason to hate knowing things in general.

It’s Ok to hate pretentious posturing, but people end up hating being intelligent period.

Most anti-intellectual activity I see appears to be resentful. How dare someone tell me what to do! How dare someone be smarter than me. How dare someone hurt my feelings by noting I may be wrong! There’s a weird entitlement in a lot of American anti-intellectual attitudes where people want to be treated as equals to people know something they don’t.

(Of course it seems said anti-intellectuals also hate any idea of treating OTHERS as equal. Bigotry goes hand-in-hand with being anti-intellectual).

What’s funny is that people who are anti-intellectual in America miss the value of hard work – which they usually want to praise otherwise (at lest for others). Being knowledgeable, skilled, and informative takes work. That doctor, that car mechanic, that person that knows something you don’t probably put in the work, so show some respect.

Ultimately I find the American anti-intellectual attitude is lazy and emotionally insecure. It’s an incompetent form of oppositional defiant disorder. It’s “you can’t tell me what to do” mixed with “I don’t wanna do the work.”

Which is why it’s easy to grift people. It’s easy to manipulate people with anti-intellectualism. Hell many anti-intellectual grifters – which are a huge amount of our political and media and Influencer class – are lazy in their own way. They don’t want to do work, they just want to lie and get their way. They’ll work very hard at not actually understanding stuff.

But know what’s weird? Watching anti-intellectuals dress themselves up as intellectual. Dare I say they’re a form of intellectualism, the posturing know-it-all attitude that they supposedly decry. The anti-intellectuals seem pretty damn intellectual sounding.

It’s the pretentious faux-Federalist papers rants by supposed Constitutional experts who read a meme. It’s the “just asking question” anti-vaxxers who throw terms around to sound smart while showing they don’t know anything. It’s the people who try to tweak science to justify flat Earth or whatever. All these people who supposedly hate “the intellectuals” are cosplaying as intellectuals, meaning they’re the intellectualism that supposedly annoy people.

It’s like those conspiracy theorists who decry the mainstream media while quoting from it extensively to justify their stories. Ultimately these kinds of people, the grifter anti-intellectual types, can’t avoid wanting validation. This makes them into what they supposedly hate and they still don’t know anything or if they do they don’t use it.

I’m ultimately an uncomplicated person. I like real learning, real results, and people who get stuff done. I like competence. The modern parade of anti-intellectuals putting on cosplay and decrying what they’re pretending to be is dangerous, exhausting, and unsustainable. I know it’s for political power, but these days I think a lot isn’t going to last.

You can’t outrun the changing climate, disease, and decaying systems. Real intellectuals know this.

Steven Savage

Let’s Talk Cutting Stuff

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

OK, so this is sort of a political post. Yes it’s about the US Government, DOGE, and cutting stuff for “efficiency.” It’s also a post on general efficiency and issues, but because this kind of subject is a mine field let me address it with my usual delicacy and decorum.

DOGE is a dumb, corrupt mix of stunt and coup that also feels like the worst of Silicon Valley Management fads combined with people that don’t know how things work. This may sound embellished, but I also speak as a guy with 30 years of IT experience, way too many certifications, and a skill at cataloging every dumb thing I’ve seen in my career. I come at this from hard, painful experience.

Now with that said, the next statements my seem surprisingly, well, unbiased. Because really good sense and good process sense isn’t hard. We just make it hard.

I’d like to zero in on an idea I’ve seen for way too long, that anything – government, business, charity, your bowling league – has too much bureaucracy. That all you have to do is cut bureaucracy and everything gets more efficient in a kind of Darwninian market magic. This of course is usually wrong, but often in ways that aren’t as obvious and that take time to find out.

Simply put, no, not all bureaucracy, process, etc. is inefficient in that it doesn’t get the job done with appropriate expenses. Shockingly, an amazing amount of things actually work. They may not be perfect, perhaps they can be better, but the amount of “good enough” you’ll see in the world is often higher than you’d think. Things can be better, but let’s put a pin in that for later.

The problem is effective work is not easy to notice unless you’re really good at awareness and have an organization that has good internal awareness. In fact as I’ve stated before some jobs become invisible when done well – like my own, Project and Program Management. Am I saying that sometimes organizations need more reports – and the attendant bureaucracy – to know they’re doing OK?

Honestly, yeah. This is a great example – if you don’t have the right reports (bureaucracy) you might make changes to fix things that are OK.

Anyway, we’ve got the idea that somehow everything is inefficient (for political, social, and economic reasons I may analyze another time). So we believe people who say “well, we’ve got to cut that,” and those people usually have an agenda. I’m not just talking political, a lot of consulting groups make bank telling people how to cut bureaucracy in a kind of oroborous of management hypocrisy.

So people don’t see good work and because of our culture, we go a-cutting and thinking we can make things efficient by getting rid of stuff.

Which, as you may guess, doesn’t really work. We’ve probably all been at a place that was going to cut itself into efficiency, and we probably don’t work there anymore. If we’re so fortunate not to have experienced it, there’s a good chance someone we know has, and will tell us about it at profanity-filled length.

So you don’t just charge into a place and start magically cutting your way to efficiency. You have to analyze goals, workflows, and so on. You have to actually do things and know research. If you don’t do these things you will -intentionally or not – create disaster. If you’ve ever been through cuts and been the Lone Employee Left Over In An Area, you know what I mean.

Now let’s pull the pin out on improving government, business, etc. Let’s talk the thing that doesn’t often get talked about – sometimes you have to do more, hire more, and spend more money to be efficient.

This of course is blasphemy in pop business world because the idea of efficiency is spending less, right? Well much as you sometimes have to spend money to make money, you also need to spend money to have the people, resources, and processes to be efficient. It can cost more to eventually cost left.

It sounds like a paradox, but it’s not. If say a government office isn’t doing great handling things, then it’s wasting money. But you don’t cut if, you may have to spend more to make it work effectively. If you can’t do the job, maybe you have to make sure the department does its job with more money. Sometimes saving isn’t the goal of something.

Yet, surprisingly, shocking to others, things operate better at scale. If spending $1 on a department or business unit saves $2, but spending $5 saves $15, what’s the best choice? I once advised someone on process improvement and found they were in a situation where hiring five more people would save work across hundreds of other employees.

Or it all goes back to goals, research, and understanding. Not cutting. Cutting costs, etc. does not magically make things better, especially when you rush it.

If you want to understand that, we can often look at the business world once you get beyond survivorship bias. But maybe now where I’m seeing angry town halls and protesting park employees (words I didn’t expect to type) you can see random cutting doesn’t work.

Which in some ways is a great irony of the DOGE era. Actions that are arguably governmental are going to be studied by business schools as well. Just not in the way some would have expected.

Hey I got this done without mentioning The Unaccountability Machine. Whoops . . .

Steven Savage

I Will Not Give Up My Mistakes For Robots

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(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, Steve’s Tumblr, and Pillowfort.  Find out more at my newsletter, and all my social media at my linktr.ee)

I often discuss the impact of AI on creativity with Serdar. We’re both authors and in technical areas, so it’s something both personal and intimate for us. You can probably guess neither of us is happy about it – and being authors we like to discuss that often at length.

Serdar recently did a blog post on LLMs and intelligence, and it is quite worth reading like all of his work. But one thing he discusses in the post, and in our own discussions, is how LLMs use treats writing as a product. That fascinates me, because there are people who want to do creative work but don’t want to be creative – they want to push a button and get a product.

I could go on about the psychology of this – and indeed I probably will in time – but these are people who want results without making mistakes of their own. You can’t decouple creativity from mistakes, false starts, false ends, and sometimes just producing utter crap. Those aren’t problems, that’s part of creativity.

Creativity is not a linear, mechanical process, as much as we sometimes want it to be. Creativity snags on edges, creativity takes strange detours that somehow get you to the destination more effectively. I’m sure you’ve seen human made creative works that were created just a bit too mechanically, and there’s something wrong when you partake of them, a kind of metallic mental taste in your mind.

Part of this creative work is screwing up sometimes in epic ways. Actually, I’m sure if you’re any kind of creative, you’ve made some awful stuff, and trust me so have I.

Anyone who writes, draws, cosplays, and acts has a mental list of things they regret. They went out there, did the thing, published the book, went to the audition and completely and utterly whiffed it. Creativity in its unpredictable glory gives us infinite things to make and infinite ways to humiliate ourselves.

Creativity requires mistakes, and sometimes you don’t know if you’re making one until you’re done with a work. To complete a work even if it turns out to be lousy is to fully explore your ideas. So often we have to get something out if only, upon completion, to finally understand why it was a stupid idea. That’s fine, that’s what creativity is all about.

Even the journey is necessary. To wrestle with a concept. To implement it. To get it out. Every terrible novel or lousy cosplay or mediocre piece of art is a testimony that someone could get it done and learned on the way. They might not be thrilled with the result of the journey, but at least they made it.

I think this is why some trashy works and B or Z grade films fascinate me. The flawed nature reveals the author’s dreams, ambitions, and efforts. Bad as they are, there’s also a drive there you feel and relate to.

The creativity-as-product takes away all these passionate, painful, wonderful mistakes. It takes away the informative disasters and the joy of hardheaded persistence against your own good senses. It is just pushing a button and at best you become a better button-pusher, but you don’t become more creative.

To make creative work, even if you make something awful, you need to create. You need to be that author or artist. You need to grow from the experience, even if it’s painful. It is to be, i na way, a better person for what you did – even if the better person might be the one who admits “my writing is crap” and move on to something else.

Just pushing a button and pummeling the resulting writing product into a marketing-shaped form isn’t creative. No matter how well the work sells, you run the terrible chance you won’t screw up as much as you need to.

Steven Savage