The Death of Virtuosity

The “can do” attitude is on life support

Introduction

Normally, we talk about healthcare and health insurance, but today is a little different.  Today we are going to talk about the death of the “can do” attitude, and the mastery of almost all technical expertise that seemingly has been replaced by “business” and marketing and of course the hype of AI.

Usually, we talk about things in a problem/solution formation, and that is what we are going to do today. We will present our conclusions after the “Solutions” section.

The Problem

The denizens of the United States have always been an upwardly mobile society.  You get an education, or training, and you go to work and almost automatically do better than your parents.  That is just not the case anymore for the last two generations..  We have identified and will discuss a couple of contributing factors, below.

Idolizing Success

We in the US, idolize the successful.  Years ago that was someone that could do something amazing, test pilots, astronauts, your weird uncle that could rebuild a carburetor blindfolded, people who could play the guitar, or speak multiple languages.  We idolized people that could do things we couldn't do; things that it seemed impossible for us to accomplish.  We attempted to emulate these heroes.  

We as a society have replaced these über-competent people with the simply successful.  If you have a lot of money, regardless of how you made it, you are glorified.  Here we have a class of people with no particular talent, who happened to be standing at the right place at the right time, basically getting lucky.  Maybe it was an accident of birth, your parents were rich.  Maybe you were a minor software investor when someone pitched a new picture sharing or payment widget.  Maybe Bezos a tech leader purchased too much hardware for his company, and the only way to avoid bankruptcy was to start renting out bandwidth to the world at large.  Accidents.  Anyone in that place at that time would have made the same decision.  

What are the consequences of this ‘success envy?’  The people who don’t or can’t think emulate the successful.  These guys don’t have the first clue what they are doing, but we are going to follow right down the same path and do everything they do, exactly the way they do it.  This doesn’t, cannot and will not cause us to get the same results they have, because we aren’t standing in that right place at the right time.

What is wrong with idolizing the successful?  Who are we going to emulate if not them?  We don’t strive to be able to do anything but be successful.  Here is the big disconnect:

The only way to be successful is to be successful.

If you aren’t successful the only way to get successful is virtuosity.  You can’t count on luck, you have to be (at least among) the absolute best at your chosen profession to get successful.  Yes, the children idolize music stars and sports figures.  Yes, this is a form of virtuosity.  You aren’t going to be a music star or sports figure.  You certainly aren’t going to be an influencer.  You need to find that thing that you can be best at and just do it to death.

The price of your lack of thinking and virtuosity: failure caused by blindly following success.

The New Caste System

In the past 30-40 or so years, it isn’t that we have become lazy, we just want life to be easy.  Sweeping floors and hammering nails is too hard, we want to sit in an office and make decisions. The people who actually do the work, perform the service, are looked down on.  If you work in a factory, hammer nails, sweep floors, simply know how to do things, you are automatically inferior.  The successful have their lawn mown, their cars fixed, their bathrooms scrubbed, ad nauseum.  The impressionable see this and they emulate it.  They have to have a 5000 square foot house, they have to have a $100,000 car, they need a housekeeper and a landscaper, and they need to emulate the successful regardless of the cost.  

The natural consequences of this are that first, we have a generation (now two) of people who can’t do anything.  They want to sit in an office and sign papers all day.  Great, but that sounds like business.  There is no such thing as business.  There is producing a product or service, but there is no business.  There is accounting.  That is just counting the beans and honestly, is a lot like plumbing or roofing.  Just a skill applied to a problem.  That isn’t business.  If you can’t personally provide the product or service your company provides, you can’t run that company.  More on this later.  If you can’t personally, at least at a high level, produce this product or service, you have to excel at two things, being the cog in the larger machine (virtuosity), and convincing your supervisor why you are the best and why he needs to keep signing your paycheck.

This is the cost of your need for easy: nothing ever gets done

Can’t Run a Company if You Personally Can’t Produce Its Product

We said there is no such thing as business.  As alluded to earlier, you have to have either the ability to produce the company's product or service yourself, or at least an understanding of where to go and what to do to get the job done. When Elon Musk started Tesla, he found out that he was woefully inadequate to the task of running a car company.  I gleefully watched him flounder and flop around and make bad decisions and finally just hire a guy with the requisite experience to run it for him.  See “New Caste System” above.  

Further, the entire company is predicated on several false assumptions.  We aren’t ready for battery cars and we may never be.  You can debate that one in the comments if you like, that is beyond the scope of this article.  Charge times, charging infrastructure, battery degradation, dependency on weather, rare earth metals, and the throwaway nature of battery cars prevent them from being viable.  None of these things were addressed; they just bulled ahead with “business” and losing other people’s money.  With your money if you were uninformed and unthinking enough to invest in or buy a Tesla.  

This is the price of lack of knowledge and virtuosity in your own industry: stagnation and eventual failure.

Reliance on Technological Innovation

All that said, there is a feeling of “the future is now,” just like in the 50s.  Warning: it isn’t.  We have been two years away from flying cars for 60 years.  We have been six months away from self driving cars for a decade.  The only real innovation out of the promise of the information superhighway has been a better way to trade dirty pictures and promote conspiracy theories.  Bringing us back to virtuosity, the average wandering whomever now has the ability to know all the things that were too difficult to research, but does not have the analytical capacity to judge the veracity of any statement.  Without these critical thinking skills we get the great anti-vaxx movement, the flerfs, and the modern populist movement, but I digress.  Here are two examples of reliance on technological innovation that haven’t and probably won’t solidify. 

Batteries Will Get Good Enough to Replace Fossil Fuels

No, no they won’t.  They are heavy and they are not energy dense enough.  So you are left with needing TWO cars each, one you can take to California (or New York if you live in California) and one to putt around town.  My neighbors use golf carts to cruise around the neighborhood.  This completely defeats the purpose of the battery electric vehicle and makes your personal carbon footprint, with two cars, huge.  

AI will get General

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is not coming.  Nobody is even working on it.  They can’t. They don't know how humans do it.  This is exactly why nobody is working on Antigravity.  We don’t know how gravity works, so nobody is working on antigravity.  

Conclusion to False Technological Innovation

These two huge potentially world economy crashing examples of falsely promised technological innovation could literally kill billions of people.  First, battery cars flop, then AI flops and suddenly we remove trillions of dollars of investment in the global economy, and businesses and even governments start to fail, like they did in 2008, and people start dying.  The services they rely on from those businesses and governments suddenly aren’t available, and are necessary, for people to live.  So they don’t live. They will die because someone, somewhere, almost everyone did NOT have the critical analytical capacity, the ability to think, the virtuosity, to put together that battery cars and AI and all the other hype on the planet has no substance.

This is the price of your lack of understanding about technological innovation: crashed economies, and death.

Fear of Attack

Let’s face it, you don’t know what you don’t know.  You are running scared thinking that all your work is going to come crashing down around your ears.  You're scared.  Because of the New Caste system, you can’t point to anything that Bezos, Musk, or anyone else is doing right, but you don’t know what to do either, so you just follow along behind them.  As an example, you have a Human Resources (HR) department.  Your attorney told you needed one so you have something to point to when someone sues you for harassment. You don’t like getting sued, so you hired an HR department.  

Now, HR is running your company.  They provide no profit, they are a cost center. It would be cheaper to get sued.  They screen out the best candidates because those candidates don’t have the right buzzwords on a resume.  They ‘automate’ the process with Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) that don’t work and are a barrier to entry for the candidate.  They choose your health insurance provider without adequately researching costs, and just sign with the same provider every year at a double digit increase in cost..  This is almost always a brother-in-law deal, not what is best for the employees and the company.  Yes, health insurance is complicated, but this is a huge part of their responsibilities, and a huge part of employee compensation.  

Finally, they enforce the “be nice” rule.  This is work.  We don’t need to be nice, we have a job to do.  “Nice” is oil for the frictionless machine.  Do you need to be nice to your computer?  Then why do you need to be nice to the tester that is ‘ahem’ing in front of your desk when you are working on something mission critical?  The short answer is that you don’t.  The correct answer is to tell him to leave, firmly.  If he does not, you have every right to not be nice.

This is the price of your fear: the HR tail wagging the dog that is your company.

Packaged Software

Nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.  Maybe that is not as true as it used to be, but there are the same patterns in business now that there were when it was.  The death of virtuosity means that you don’t understand what your company does, so you do what everyone else does: you email spreadsheets and pray that nobody made a mistake in a formula and you install Salesforce and ServiceNow, and Workday and SAP, just like everyone else.  Maybe you installed a different ATS and ERP, but it is the same thing.  You spend millions buying software.  You spend millions more finishing it and making it do what the salesman told you it would in the first place.  You spend millions on networking, support, hosting or hardware, and then when it goes down you are paralyzed.   Meanwhile, you are doing business just like Jacob Marley did in 1843: you are filling and schlepping spreadsheets.  You don’t have ink stained employees, but you spend millions on infrastructure just to avoid that ink, and it works exactly the same.  Your lack of knowledge keeps you from figuring out a better way, so you waste large percentages of your company’s resources on things you don’t need that simply add complication to the  process.

This is the price of your lack of virtuosity and vision: wasted time, effort and money and increasing monkey motion.

All Opinions are Valid and Equal

If nobody has any specific knowledge of anything, no virtuosity, then all opinions are equal.  We then follow either  the loudest advice or the advice of the salesman.  The former has no particular merit, the latter has a built in conflict of interest and both are equally invalid on their own.  Your YouTube PhD is not as valid as a real PhD.  Your need to feel smart and ‘prove’ others wrong does not make your opinion fact.  Not that having a PhD automatically makes you the font of knowledge on everything, but it does mean your knowledge is supreme in your area, and at least worth listening to on everything else.  

The point is that without your own virtuosity, your own work to learn as much as is humanly possible about what you do and how you do it, you can’t judge the veracity of what a loud salesman tells you.  You create your own PhD in your area of expertise.  

The price of your lack of virtuosity and critical thinking: you can’t separate fact from fiction.

The Solution

The good news is that this is all reversible.  While there isn't two cents worth of difference in any of us, there have been people with vision and drive throughout history that have pushed us to this point, and a good point it is.  Sir Isaac Newton et al., said in 1676 “...we all stand on the shoulders of giants,” meaning that nobody exists in a vacuum, and we only extend the work of those who have gone before.  It was true then and it is true now.  While it is frustrating that the greatest invention of all time, the internet, is mostly used for trading risqué images and promoting conspiracy theories, at least we have it.

Now, let’s introduce a few steps that will bring us back, personally, to a place of virtuosity and critical thinking, that are easy to implement and make this society worth saving.

A Good Argument is no Match for a Stone Cold Fact

Can you detect a stone cold fact when presented with it?  We aren’t talking about ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” That depends on the area of the head of the pin and the size of the angels.  Know those things and it is just math.  No, we are talking about the claims of someone attempting to influence your opinion.  Everyone installs Some ATS as discussed previously.  What are the benefits?  What are the costs?  What are the risks?  Are the benefits only to the useless HR department?  Is your ATS disqualifying candidates because they don't have the right buzzwords on their resume?  Is your ATS disqualifying candidates because they don’t have five years of ServiceNow development, when we all know that ServiceNow is an indication of a lack of virtuosity on the part of leadership?  Are you just doing your business wrong?

Learn to think critically and ask the tough questions about who benefits and real costs and risks and display the virtuosity of critical thinking, instead of just following the flock.

Learn and Use Mathematics

If you don’t have a firm grasp of mathematics, at least up to calculus, then you are disqualified from anything but sweeping floors.  Even construction guys can tell you how to calculate the area of a roof, or how long to cut rafters for a 5-in-12 roof pitch, even if it is built into their tools.  If you don’t understand math, you can’t function in the modern world.  Since this is part of the solution, go learn everything you need to know to get to at least calculus.  I use algebra and trigonometry every day, because it was drummed into me as a child.  Go learn it.  Ignorance is never an excuse.  This is part of your virtuosity.  If you think you don’t need it, you are wrong.  It is a way of thinking that you don’t possess and need to.

Have and Display Respect for the Science and the Scientific Method

The scientific method works.  Notice the period at the end of that sentence.  It doesn't require belief or even knowledge of the fact, it just works.  If you belong to one of the groups above, the anti-vaxxers, the flerfs, the populists, fine.  Just keep your opinion to yourself.  The rest of us might think you are a perfectly reasonable person, with perfectly reasonable values and not prone to believing an unsubstantiated story because you don’t have the capacity to disprove it.  If you don’t have the capacity to disprove it just shut up.  This is your religion, and everyone has a different religion and nobody has any interest in hearing yours.

So study science.  Find out why the smart people say what they say.  Don’t argue.  If you don’t understand, ask.  By the way, you can study quantum mechanics and the standard model all you like, nobody understands that.  I would posit that quantum effects cause the fluctuations that the great unwashed use to denigrate science.  There is more on heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.  Science works, everything else is religion.  Don’t talk about religion.  Embrace what works, not a made up story designed to explain something not understood.  

Study Philosophy

Speaking of philosophy, Horatio, go learn a little about it.  I am not some eggheaded liberal arts major, but there is good stuff out there about the human condition that you need to know.  You don't even have to read most or even any of it.  Go do a Youtube search for “the great thinkers.”  You should probably avoid anything about Steve Jobs or the Pope, however.  Personally, I prefer Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Friedrich Nietzsche and and from a completely functional perspective, Niccolò Machiavelli.  Understand what they said and why they said it.  Take what you like and leave the rest.  Be warned though, saying that they are wrong is a slippery slope.  They could very well be wrong, but who are you to say so?  Will anyone be reading anything you wrote in 500 years? Go educate yourself.  

Go see Art

Find a museum.   Spend a lot of time there.  Read everything they present. Talk to the docents.  Think critically about how a piece was made, how you, personally, would go about making it, think about the motivation of the artist in making the piece.  At least mentally sketch out the process.  Art is as much about the production process at the finished work.  Maybe you can’t produce similar work, that is fine.  You can and should understand why the artist made a particular decision in the production of his or her work.  You can’t produce a television either, but you should absolutely know how it works and the underlying principles behind it.  You also spend a lot of time staring at a screen.  Instead of watching cat videos, or Housewives of the Seventh Circle of Hell, improve yourself.  I like to watch an art adjacent program on YouTube called Baumgartner Restoration.

Conclusion

You have been done a great disservice.  After reconstruction in the U.S., W. E. B. DuBois advocated higher education for African-Americans.  Booker T. Washington advocated vocational training, like plumbing and the trades.  Mr. Washington was wrong.  In fact, we were, and still are, all wrong.  Maybe Nietzsche has nothing to do with installing a toilet, but he has everything to do with understanding why the world is the way it is and getting along in it.  As such, it is critical knowledge to combat the kind of conspiracy thinking we hear so much about these days.  Use your knowledge of philosophy to follow the ones who benefit.  It may be that the only person who benefits is the progenitor of the conspiracy theory and then only because they get  attention and following from the great unwashed.

This is a big old complicated world we live in and you are given a pass for not knowing everything about it.  After all, nobody does.  Ignorance, however, is no excuse for doing dumb things and making dumb decisions like the ones listed above.  I saw a post online the other day about a no-start situation on the poster’s car.  My advice?  The short version is to “take it apart and test the parts.”  You can’t know what you don’t know so go find out.  

I bring this up because troubleshooting is a basic skill anyone should possess.  It is literally ‘take it apart and test the parts.’  This appears to be a lost art however.  This appears to be the reason we are layering solution after solution on top of the processes we already support for our businesses.  We aren’t thinking critically and we aren’t troubleshooting.  What is the exact problem we need to solve?

What is the proposed solution and how does it solve the problem?  Finally, who benefits? If you and yours aren’t the biggest benefitors of a solution, why are you implementing it?  Is it Fear? Is it success worship?  Do you really understand the consequences of your actions?  I can tell you that every action will have unintended consequences and you are not ready for those.

The good news is that with a little virtuosity, a little retraining, a little critical thinking you can make an end run around all the monkey motion we see today. You don’t need HR, you don’t need prepackaged point solutions.  You do need software and you do need software that makes things easier and automates processes.  

As an example, we at Sentia looked at the health insurance industry.  Insurance needs three inputs: a practitioner, a procedure and a covered patient.  Nothing else.  Insurance has a single output: a payment to the practice or practitioner for procedures performed.  That is it.  

If Sentia can automate the entire health insurance process by critically thinking about inputs and outputs and automating everything in between, you can automate your business in the same way.  This is not an advertisement for Sentia, this is an example designed to make you think.  You will be forgiven, though, if you did think critically and ask yourself “why did he tell us that?” or  “who benefits from that story?”  

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