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The attack on competence<br>Author: Iris Meredith<br>Date published: 2026-06-01<br>In happy news, my mentoring project has been having some success of late, with a few students having retained me to teach them statistics. I don't know why everyone's so keen to learn statistics and probability theory, but I've been having a lot of fun with it and have been, over time, accumulating notes on the subject. Seeing as I a) have some difficulty tutoring people outside of particular time zones and b) have a need to pay for rent, bills, and food, I've made a start on reworking the notes for a wider audience and making them available online.<br>I will eventually set up monthly billing for them, but for now, if you make a donation and send me an email via my website letting me know that you've done so, I'm happy to give people permanent access to the early stages of the resource section of my website. The statistics notes are pretty good, the engineering fundamentals ones are a lot rougher around the edges, but they will all be steadily expanded and new notes will be uploaded weekly. Of course, the option of learning from me in-person is also very much there.<br>New Zealand has recently suffered through our current government's latest budget week. There were, of course, a whole lot of awful things in the budget, but one of the most aggravating ones was what they've chosen to do to the public service: they've elected to cut 8,700 jobs in the public sector, and when asked how the shortfall in services would be managed, Nicola Willis, our finance minister, came up with the brilliant idea that "AI" would be used to fix the shortfall. This is, of course, obviously and transparently stupid and isn't going to work no matter how you spin it. New Zealand's taxation and investment policy is likewise stupid: the aggregate effect of these tax and public sector cuts will be to sharply reduce state revenue, reducing the ability of our government to do, not to put too fine a point on it, anything at all. This has been a consistent pattern with the government: they do things that, practically or legally, simply don't work, and then blame literally anything else when, despite the best efforts of the public sector whose job it is to carry out their diktats (and which they've been cutting to the bone), the whole idea turns out to be incompetent and falls apart at the seams.<br>The inevitable conclusion of witnessing the last two-and-a-half years of what's passed for governance is quite simply that the people leading our country are incompetent. And yet they were elected. And it isn't as though their incompetence was hidden: it was plain to see from the get-go. People loved it. The pattern is similar in the tech industry: whatever people might say about what they want from people, revealed preference seems to suggest that they love incompetent people and hate competent ones. It's difficult, really, to read our current moment as anything other than an attack on the very concept of competence.<br>Competence isn't quite what you think it is<br>To discuss the phenomenon of widespread attacks on competence, we need to first understand what competence is. Colloquially, the word simply means clearing some bar of being "good enough" at something to be able to do it well: a superficially rather simple concept. Thinking about this, though, there are some odd edge cases. First of all, it's quite possible to be an expert in certain fields without actually being a competent practitioner in them. You meet quite a lot of them in tech: the kind of person who knows a whole lot of technical details and knows exactly how code should be written, and yet somehow everything that they produce turns out to be shit. Secondly, in a lot of fields you see people who, for one reason or another we know are good enough not producing competent work: they're burnt out, exhausted, checked out and just doing the bare minimum to get along. Competence, then, is clearly more complex than that.<br>A large part of the complexity in our edge cases seems to come down to desire or motivation. The main difference between the two edge cases we've described elucidates this: neither the incompetent expert nor the competent-but-checked-out person are currently producing competent work. We know that both of them know enough to produce competent work were they so inclined to, and that they have the practical skills to do so (though this might sometimes come into question in the first instance). And yet we can usually tell that one of these people is capable of doing competent work while the other isn't. The difference, in practice, comes down to why they aren't producing competent work. The incompetent expert has little care for what they produce: they don't give a shit about whether what they make creates good outcomes, bad outcomes or, in...