shawn wang y.x.

“Men give me credit for some genius. All the genius I have lies in this; when I have a subject in hand, I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort that I have made is what people are pleased to call the fruit of genius. It is the fruit of labor and thought.” – Alexander Hamilton

One of the most dangerous fictions in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is the notion that competence exists (or is transferable) independently of a person’s main/preferred field of expertise. We see Dagny Taggart revitalizing her temporary abode with greenery and feats of engineering. We see Francisco D’Anconia claiming that it was not difficult to figure out which industries would outperform, explaining his success in the stockmarket. And of course many of the people in Valhalla Galt’s Gulch wear more than one hat in his otherwise nonfunctional pseudoeconomy.

While Atlas is allowed this due to artistic license, we do not have the luxury of this naivete in the real world. Yet, instances appear everywhere. In Singapore, as in many British-style executive governments, Cabinet ministers (and their permanent secretaries)  are regarded as general managerial talent and can be switched in and out of whatever portfolios (with some exceptions) as convenient without regard to the minister’s prior knowledge or experience with the subject. The private sector is not exempt from this fantasy: management consultancies live or die by their image of universal competence, and even in finance, my own field, portfolio managers and traders like myself have a psychological and institutional tendency to stretch our confidence beyond the boundaries of our own experience and knowledge.

The reality is that the full array of human abilities defies comprehensive mastery, and indeed in some cases trade-offs between them are involved, although I will not go so far as to assert mutual exclusivity. Newton famously said, of the stock market, that he would never comprehend the madness of men – and this is perhaps an outgrowth of his tendency to look at things as deterministic (or even probabilistic) physical systems, as opposed to reflexive social systems. Polymaths exist, but the polymath is often mistaken for an omnimath, a compliment by which s/he is almost certainly undeserving. While we in the Gifted programme were selected essentially for our score in IQ and English language tests, there exist a whole range of intelligences by which my classmates ran the gamut from prodigious to hopeless (I place myself firmly in the latter category in the kinesthetic intelligence department). The more we choose to ignore this reality of limited competence, the greater the eventual consequences for ourselves and for those impacted by our decisions and creations.

Yet, as with many myths, there exists a kernel of truth at the core of this fallacious notion. While there may not be Universal Competence, I am quite fond of the idea that there may be a common causal factor underlying competence in various disparate fields. Such a common causal factor may or may not be innate, and may or may not be learned/developed, but it is necessary that 1) it exists in high quantities in competent individuals in disparate fields and 2) it allows individuals to quickly develop competence in essentially unrelated fields. I have two favorite candidates for these common factors: tenacity (as discussed last week) and an extremely sound, generalized philosophical approach (including, among other things, an epistemology and an understanding of human nature).

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This brief essay was prompted by the occasion of my first annual performance review, at which I was expected to be competent in an area I was not competent in.