Last night, several of us at YOW were discussing professional secrets, inaccuracies and omissions that are corrected via apprenticeship but rarely in writing. We were arguing over whether these secrets were the result of conspiracy or laziness. Do people deliberately conceal information to keep the uninitiated from really knowing what’s going on, or do they wave their hands because being precise takes too much energy?

I argued for the latter, a sort of variation on Hanlon’s razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. In this case, I didn’t want to attribute to conspiracy what could adequately be explained by laziness. Sins of omission are more common than sins of commission.

Brian Beckman’s comment on Hanlon’s razor was that there is a sort of quantum superposition of malice and stupidity. That is, you have some indeterminate mixture of malice and stupidity (or in the context of our conversation, conspiracy and laziness) that leads to the same results. This closely resembles Grey’s law that any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. Being a physicist, Brian used a physical metaphor. He commented later that it may be possible in retrospect to determine whether some action was malicious or stupid, collapsing a sort of wave function.

Related post: Hanlon’s razor and corporations

In a comment to yesterday’s post on leadership, Dave Tate introduced me to the phrase “self-licking ice cream cone.” According to Wikipedia,

In political jargon, a self-licking ice cream cone is a self-perpetuating system that has no purpose other than to sustain itself. The phrase appears to have been first used in 1992, in On Self-Licking Ice Cream Cones, a paper by Pete Worden about NASA’s bureaucracy.

I touched on this in Maybe you only need it because you have it. Now that I know a vivid description for such things, I’ll have to use it more often.

Update: Maybe there should be a term for something that isn’t quite a self-licking ice cream cone, a system that serves some purpose other than sustaining itself but is still primarily about self perpetuation. Or maybe there should be a scale, say from 0 to 100, for the extent to which an organization is useless and self-perpetuating.

I’m reminded of the Blue Bell Ice Cream advertising slogan: We eat all we can, and we sell the rest. A self-licking ice cream cone would correspond to the employees eating all the ice cream, a sort of ice cream co-op. An organization that isn’t entirely about self-preservation might be one in which the employees manage to sell 20% of the ice cream.

Related post: Parkinson’s law

The phrase “downward nobility” is a pun on “upward mobility.” It usually refers to taking a less lucrative but more admired position. For example, it might be used to describe a stock broker who becomes a teacher in a poor school. (I don’t believe that being a teacher is necessarily more noble than being a stock broker, but many people would think so.)

Daniel Lemire looks at a variation on downward nobility in his blog post Why you may not like your job, even though everyone envies you. He comments on Matt Welsh’s decision to leave a position as a tenured professor at Harvard to develop software for Google. Welsh may not have taken a pay cut — he may well have gotten a raise — but he took a cut in prestige in order to do work that he found more fulfilling.

The Peter Principle describes people how people take more prestigious positions as they become less competent. The kind of downward nobility Daniel describes is a sort of anti-Peter Principle, taking a step down in prestige to move deeper into your area of competence.

Paul Graham touches on this disregard for prestige in his essay How to do what you love.

If you admire two kinds of work equally, but one is more prestigious, you should probably choose the other. Your opinions about what’s admirable are always going to be slightly influenced by prestige, so if the two seem equal to you, you probably have more genuine admiration for the less prestigious one.

Matt Welsh now has a less prestigious position in the assessment of the general public. But in a sense he didn’t give up prestige for competence. Instead, he chose a new environment in which his area competence carries more prestige.

Related posts

• Super-competence
• How do you know when someone’s great?
• The dark side of linchpins

Here’s another gem from The Peter Principle. The book coins the term “hierarchical exfoliation” to describe how organizations rid themselves of both the least competent and the most competent people.

… in most hierarchies, super-competence is more objectionable than incompetence.

Ordinary incompetence, as we have seen, is no cause for dismissal: it is simply a bar to promotion. Super-competence often leads to dismissal, because it disrupts the hierarchy …

Emphasis in the original.

Related post: Intellectual traffic jam

According to The Peter Principle, people in hierarchical organizations tend to be promoted until they reach a position at which they are incompetent. The way managers manage depends on whether they have achieved incompetence or are still on the path to it.

The competence of an employee is determined not by outsiders but by his superior in the hierarchy. If the superior is still at a level of competence, he may evaluate his subordinates in terms of the performance of useful work. … This is to say, he evaluates output.

But if the superior has reached his level of incompetence, he will probably rate his subordinates in terms of institutional values: he will see competence as the behavior that supports the rules, rituals and forms of the status quo. Promptness, neatness, courtesy to superiors, internal paperwork, will be highly regarded. In short, such an official evaluates input.

Emphases in the original.

Much of The Peter Principle is humorous and exaggerated, but the excerpt above is neither. It is simply a description of how organizations work.

Related posts

• How do you know when someone is great?
• Evaluate people at their best or their worst?

In their new book, Ed Burger and Mike Starbird relate the following incident from a symposium in honor of Albert Einstein.

One of the speakers told a story about being a young assistant to Einstein. He said that during the job interview with Einstein, he admitted that he didn’t know much about relativity, to which Einstein replied, “That’s OK. I already know about relativity.”

Many of the things I once thought were trivial I now think are important. That is, I used to think they were trivial in the modern sense of being unimportant. Now I think they’re trivial in the classical sense of being foundational (from trivium, the first stage of a classical education).

In business, “trivial” means “vitally important if you’re actually doing the work, but not important if you’re just watching.”

Related link: Very applied math