Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competence Crisis

9 Anon84 5 5/22/2025, 10:18:07 AM palladiummag.com ↗

Comments (5)

Rochus · 1h ago
The article argues that America is experiencing cascading systems failures across multiple domains because of a systematic prioritization of diversity over competence in institutional hiring and promotion practices. Though it does so without establishing a clear causal relationship. While presenting temporal correlation, it fails to demonstrate that diversity policies indeed are the primary cause of these failures, rather than numerous other factors like budget constraints, management decisions, or technological changes.

Even without bringing diversity into the equation, the Peter principle already well explains why hierarchies tend to converge toward incompetence, and thanks to the Dilbert principle, we know that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the management ;-)

ringeryless · 2h ago
what a load of bs. i anticipated a reasonable article at the outset, i even agreed with the thesis statement that changing political mores are resulting in a decline in meritocracy, and i was directly considering Hegseth and Gabbard and RFK as ideological appointments with no competence.

instead, the article purports that diversity iniciatives are to blame, not rash MAGA ideological purges or Trumps random economic policies.

this article is garbage. gtfo

AnimalMuppet · 1h ago
All right, but there's a real point: Competency actually matters. You can say it's threatened by hiring based on DEI rather than competence. You can say that it's threatened by hiring for political alignment rather than competence. In fact, it can be threatened by several things, including nepotism.

But to the degree the article is correct in showing that this is already happening, it probably can't be due to Trump and his band of merry fellow-travelers. He's only had four months. The problems set in before that.

You can argue about the cause. (Others have said that the article didn't do enough to establish the cause.) But even if you don't accept their cause, the article still has a point: Competence really matters, and we seem to be failing at getting it in the people who run a number of our important systems.

fluidcruft · 1h ago
Basic causality argues strongly that MAGA, Trump, Gabbard, Hegseth, RFK Jr, etc are symptoms and not causes of a decline in meritocracy.
weard_beard · 3h ago
Don’t bother reading this garbage.

TL;DR “We are all doomed to become gibbering monkey men because black people are bad at the SAT.”

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