Kompetenzkrise durch Dummenkult
Wo wir es heute doch sowieso von Krisen und Krisenabgaben haben:
Das Palladium-Magazin für Futurismus hat einen schönen Artikel über die Unvereinbarkeit von komplexen Systemen und zeitgeistiger Inkompetenz: Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis
Schon das Aufmacherbild ist gut, sieht so danach aus, dass irgendein Kongress der Feuerwehrfrauen irgendwo neulich einen größeren Waldbrand verursacht hat, weil sie einen Brandübung durchgeführt und sich dabei dusselig angestellt hatten, und die Männer mussten das dann löschen. Das Bild ist aber von 2020 und der Vorfall mit den brandstiftenden Feuerwehrfrauen wohl erst neulich passiert.
Sie listen eine Reihe von Katastrophen auf, die durch Inkompetenz verursacht wurden, und die als Katastrophe oft in die Schlagzeilen kommen, weil sowas immer gut geht, man aber immer den Zusammenhang verschweigt, nämlich der Durchseuchung durch Inkompetente.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
Kurz gesagt: Amerika besteht aus dicht verwobenen komplexen Systemen, und wenn erst genug Unfähige drin sind, fällt alles zusammen.
Und sie beschreiben das, was ich im Blog schon seit Jahren beschreibe: Den sozialistischen Dummenkult, das Quereinsteigertum, die Quotenpolitik:
The core issue is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems. At its inception, it represented a break from the trend of the 1920s to the 1960s, when the direct meritocratic evaluation of competence became the norm across vast swaths of American society.
Oder in Gender-Sprech: „Quality is a myth“.
Überall hat man Quotenfrauen, Quotenmigranten, Quotensonstwas reingedrückt, weil die Hohepriester des Dummheitskults, Marxisten und Soziologen, und ihre Lobbyisten SPD und Grüne predigten, dass das ja alles nur sozialisiert sei und man sich einfach nur an die Leute gewöhnen müsse, und jede Qualitätsanforderung nur ein Konstrukt zum Ausgrenzen von Minderheiten sei, und jetzt fährt man das Ergebnis ein. Geliefert wie bestellt. Man wollte es dumm haben.
Hat hier irgendwer „Tauchboot Titan“ gesagt? Blubb, blubb,…
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the idea that individuals should be systematically evaluated and selected based on their ability rather than wealth, class, or political connections, led to significant changes in selection techniques at all levels of American society. The Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) revolutionized college admissions by allowing elite universities to find and recruit talented students from beyond the boarding schools of New England.
Heißt: Die moderne, hochkomplexe, verwobene Industriegesellschaft funktioniert nur auf Grundlage dessen, was man immer dem weißen Mann anlastet, was dessen Leistung und Merkmal ist: Der optimierenden Meritokratie.
Spurred on by the demands of two world wars, this system of institutional management electrified the Tennessee Valley, created the first atom bomb, invented the transistor, and put a man on the moon.
Mit anderen Worten: Der Weiße Mann.
Und die haben die Marxisten zerstört:
By the 1960s, the systematic selection for competence came into direct conflict with the political imperatives of the civil rights movement. During the period from 1961 to 1972, a series of Supreme Court rulings, executive orders, and laws—most critically, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—put meritocracy and the new political imperative of protected-group diversity on a collision course. Administrative law judges have accepted statistically observable disparities in outcomes between groups as prima facie evidence of illegal discrimination. The result has been clear: any time meritocracy and diversity come into direct conflict, diversity must take priority.
The resulting norms have steadily eroded institutional competency, causing America’s complex systems to fail with increasing regularity. In the language of a systems theorist, by decreasing the competency of the actors within the system, formerly stable systems have begun to experience normal accidents at a rate that is faster than the system can adapt. The prognosis is harsh but clear: either selection for competence will return or America will experience devolution to more primitive forms of civilization and loss of geopolitical power.
Eine Bestenauslese werden wir aber nicht mehr hinbekommen, weil wir längst so verblödet sind, dass wir gar keine Besten mehr haben. Und die Letzten, die noch was in der Birne haben, haben die Schnauze voll und gehen in Rente.
From Meritocracy to Diversity
The first domino to fall as Civil Rights-era policies took effect was the quantitative evaluation of competency by employers using straightforward cognitive batteries. While some tests are still legally used in hiring today, several high-profile enforcement actions against employers caused a wholesale change in the tools customarily usable by employers to screen for ability.
Vor dem Fachkräftemangel kam nämlich das Fachkräfteverbot, das Dummengebot. Und dann lohnte es sich nicht mehr, Fachkraft zu werden.
Aus der Sackgasse kommt man vor Eintreten des Gesellschaftstodes nicht mehr raus.
After the early 1970s, employers responded by shifting from directly testing for ability to using the next best thing: a degree from a highly-selective university. By pushing the selection challenge to the college admissions offices, selective employers did two things: they reduced their risk of lawsuits and they turned the U.S. college application process into a high-stakes war of all against all. Admission to Harvard would be a golden ticket to join the professional managerial class, while mere admission to a state school could mean a struggle to remain in the middle class.
This outsourcing did not stave off the ideological change for long. Within the system of political imperatives now dominant in all major U.S. organizations, diversity must be prioritized even if there is a price in competency. The definition of diversity varies by industry and geography. In elite universities, diversity means black, indigenous, or Hispanic. In California, Indian women are diverse but Indian men are not. When selecting corporate board members, diversity means “anyone who is not a straight white man.” The legally protected and politically enforced nature of this imperative renders an open dialogue nearly impossible.
Ja. Marxismus und Soziologenideologie. Hat noch nie funktioniert, und es geht einfach jeder daran zugrunde.
In Simbabwe hat man auch die weißen Farmer verjagt, weil man der Meinung war, die Farmen müssten Schwarzen gehören, obwohl die nie ausgebildet worden waren. Ruckzuck ging die Lebensmittelversorgung den Bach runter, und sie versuchten, immerhin sahen sie den Fehler ein, die Weißen zurückzuholen. Die hatten aber keinen Bock mehr.
Die Inkompetenten können sich Kompetenz und Sachkunde nicht vorstellen. Hunger merken sie dann aber schon.
However diversity itself is defined, most policy on the matter is based on a simple premise: since all groups are identical in talent, any unbiased process must produce the same group proportions as the general population, and therefore, processes that produce disproportionate outcomes must be biased. Prestigious journals like Harvard Business Review are the first to summarize and parrot these views, which then flow down to reporting by mass media organizations like Bloomberg Businessweek. Soon, it joins McKinsey’s “best practices” list and becomes instantiated in corporate policies.
Dummheit, teuer eingekauft beim Dummheits-Dealer McKinsey. Und das ist nicht überraschend. Mein Vater hatte während seiner Berufszeit mal die Aufgabe, die Umorganisation des Konzerns, in dem er arbeitete, durch McKinsey management-mäßig von Seite der Firma zu begleiten. Über eine Schneise der Vernichtung schimpfte er, nichts funktioniere danach mehr, aber viel Geld hätten sie dafür bekommen.
Und die Universitäten haben jeden Qualitätsanspruch fahren lassen:
When this was not enough, MIT increased its gender diversity by simply offering jobs to previously rejected female candidates. While no university will admit to letting standards slip for the sake of diversity, no one has offered a serious argument why the new processes produce higher or even equivalent quality faculty as opposed to simply more diverse faculty. The extreme preference for diversity in academia today explains much of the phenomenon of professors identifying with a minor fraction of their ancestry or even making it up entirely.
[…]
During COVID-19, the difficulty of in-person testing and online proctoring created a new mechanism to push diversity at the expense of competency: the gradual but systematic elimination of standardized tests as a barrier to admission to universities and graduate schools. Today, the majority of U.S. colleges have either stopped requiring SAT/ACT scores, no longer require them for students in the top 10 percent of their class, or will no longer consider them. Several elite law schools, including Harvard Law School, no longer require the LSAT as of 2023. With thousands of unqualified law students headed to a bar exam that they are unlikely to pass, the National Conference of Bar Examiners is already planning to dilute the bar exam under the “NextGen” plan. Specifically, “eliminat[ing] any aspects of our exams that could contribute to performance disparities” will almost definitionally reduce the degree to which the exam tests for competency.
Das kann man nicht mehr einfangen, weil wir kaum noch Schlaue haben. Der Aufwand, schlau zu werden, lohnt sich nicht mehr, und man begibt sich damit in Gefahr.
Similarly, standards used to select doctors have also been weakened to promote diversity. Programs such as the City College of New York’s BS/MD program have eliminated the MCAT requirement. With the SAT now optional, new candidates can go straight from high school to the United States Medical Licensing Examination Step 1 exam in medical school without having gone through any rigorous standardized test whose score can be compared across schools.
Ärzte ohne Qualitätsanforderungen. Was kann da schon schief gehen?
A handful of doctors are speaking out about the dangers of picking doctors based on factors other than competency but most either explicitly prefer diversity or else stay silent, concerned about the career-ending repercussions of pointing out the obvious.
Wehe dem, der noch etwas sagt.
The American System Is Cracking
Promoting diversity over competency does not simply affect new hires and promotion decisions. It also affects the people already working inside of America’s systems. Morale and competency inside U.S. organizations are declining. Those who understand that the new system makes it hard or impossible for them to advance are demoralized, affecting their performance. Even individuals poised to benefit from diversity preferences notice that better people are being passed over and the average quality of their team is declining. High performers want to be on a high-performing team. When the priorities of their organizations shift away from performance, high performers respond negatively.
This effect was likely seen in a recent paper by McDonald, Keeves, and Westphal. The paper points out that white male senior leaders reduce their engagement following the appointment of a minority CEO.
Habe ich selbst miterlebt. Auf einmal steht ganz oben eine farbige Chefin, die zu Versammlungen einen von Black Lives Matter erzählt. Und dann kann man den Laden eigentlich dicht machen. Weil die Leute sich dann verkackeiert vorkommen und auch nicht mehr anstrengen. Das ist Gift für jede Zusammenarbeit.
Some demoralized employees—like James Damore in his now-famous essay, “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber”—will directly push back against pro-diversity arguments. Like James, they will be fired. Older, demoralized workers, especially those who are mere years from retirement, are unlikely to point out the decline in competency and risk it costing them their jobs. […]
As older men with tacit knowledge either retire or are pushed out, the burden of maintaining America’s complex systems will fall on the young. Lower-performing young men angry at the toxic mix of affirmative action (hurting their chances of admission to a “good school”) and credentialism (limiting the “good jobs” to graduates of “good schools”) are turning their backs on college and white-collar work altogether.
This is the continuation of a trend that began over a decade ago. High-performing young men will either collaborate, coast, or downshift by leaving high-status employment altogether. Collaborators will embrace “allyship” to attempt to bolster their chances of getting promoted. Coasters realize that they need to work just slightly harder than the worst individual on their team. Their shirking is likely to go unnoticed and they are unlikely to feel enough emotional connection to the organization to raise alarm when critical mistakes are being made. The combination of new employees hired for diversity, not competence, and the declining engagement of the highly competent sets the stage for failures of increasing frequency and magnitude.
Unsere Gesellschaft kollabiert.
Wir sterben an Dummheit. An größerer Dummheit, als man sie von Natur aus haben kann. Wir mussten vorher noch teure Dummheit zukaufen, um genug davon zu haben, um daran sterben zu können.