The Intersection of Dunning Kruger and Nepotism...

It's a heavy start to 2026, but here goes...

 

I saw this news article a couple of days ago, and was really conflicted in the thoughts I had about it. The title of this post basically sums things up, yet I really need to deconstruct the ideas embedded here. I just need to get those ideas out of my head, because they've been festering. It also goes back to the earliest posts I wrote on the blog when I started it.

(Here's where it all started, but I really got to the point in the second and third posts) 

In the second post I referred to an idea that I called "Corporate Chromatography" at the time, and a lot of my thoughts at the time hold true almost 18 years later (wow, 18 years, has it really been that long). The point behind that post was the idea that those at the top of the corporate world love to say that "the cream rises to the top", however in my experience "pond scum rises to the top". Those with the lowest amount of ethics to weigh them down find that they are able to more easily put their foot down on those who are actually concerned with the people and situations around them. They have glib phrases to make themselves sound smart, using buzzwords, double-talk, or even outright lying to keep ahead of any repercussions. I knew of the nepotism angle when I wrote the post back then, I'd specifically seen it in many of the workplaces I'd been in, and had been frustrated at it by the time because I'd often seen unqualified people parachuted into roles they were neither ready nor suited for (and who only made it harder for the people around them due to their incompetence). I suspected that this was going to cause problems for the company at the time, but didn't realise that it would eventually lead to the complete bankruptcy of a company with an annual turnover in the tens-of-millions of dollars. I'd seen marks being made, and thought it was erratic scrawling, and it's only through stepping back and a perspective of time that I realise I was focusing on a tiny part of the writing on the wall. I didn't know about Dunning Kruger at the time...

In the third post I delved into the interconnected nature of an economy, and the way that one persons greed can disrupt an otherwise harmonious system. It was just a little thought experiment, and again my experiences in the meantime since writing this post haven't really changed a lot. Once one person starts to get greedy with their money, and locks up some of the freeflowing exchange of money rather than spreading it through the community, it starts to disrupt things. This idea has permeated a lot of my recent game designs, notably "Familiar" which has underlying themes about magical energy being hoarded by secretive cabals and gradually causing cracks in the reality around them (where those cracks eventually lead to the empowerment of the player characters...yeah, it's more complicated than that). 

Not long thereafter, I settled on the idea of the blog focusing on my game design and my observations of other games and other designers and the things that were happening in tabletop roleplaying games over the years. The point is that this blog started politically, based on the problems I saw in the world and all these years later, many of those problems have only gotten worse.

 

Now that I know about the Dunning-Kruger effect, a lot of other pieces of the puzzle fall into place. The CEO in the article that prompted this rant seems typical of the types of people I've now encountered in both the corporate world and the public sector. Some people get put into positions of power because of nepotism, but just as many get promoted into (or recruited into) these positions because they say the right words during an interview. It has been pointed out by folks more experience than me that in a lot of cases interviewers are given a bunch of questions to answer and if the interviewee sound confident and says that right things they get a mental checkbox ticked. I was given an example of an interview question for a teaching specialist position where the interviewee was asked to relate a story where they had instituted a program that showed beneficial results to students. The interviewee explained a teaching strategy they implemented, and showed data indicating an average of 20% improvement over previous scores. It looked suitably impressive, but a member of the panel then asked if any other teachers had similarly modified their teaching strategies, and whether it was possible that the benefits were a result of someone else's work...or if they could see a wider data selection to determine if the "innovative teaching strategy" was being misrepresented with cherry picked data, or even if the interviewee had just gotten lucky with the small batch of students they demonstrated. The interviewee didn't know, they didn't have the specialist knowledge to actually back up their claims, and most members of the interview panel didn't think to scratch the surface to see if there was any substantial depth to the answer. It would have been another situation where a person would have been promoted into a role purely based on their confidence, and those who had promoted them into the role would have based their decision on their confidence. Another incompetent person would have been put into a role due to buzzwords rather than actual skill. Yes, they might have all got lucky...but quite often this isn't the case and everyone just keeps buffing their way through, while the actual experts get frustrated because no one will listen to them due to their preference for nuanced explanation over 30-second soundbites.

I've tried to reflect this in a lot of my game designs. Confidence, social skills, and bluffing may reliably get you the basics, but they'll often make things harder when you are trying to get better at the tasks you've been cruising through. All those at the top of the corporate power structures, and those who form executive committees in the public sector are either filled with confidence at the "peak of mount stupid" or coming to terms with the fact that there is a lot more to learn in the "valley of despair". Most don't want to admit that they don't actually understand what they're being paid to control, so they surround themselves with experts who know more but who have lower confidence, and then when things go wrong, they can flitter away to the next thing with their surplus of confidence and their deficit or morality. 

A lot of this is anecdotal evidence and hearsay, but it's generally held true time and time again in my experience. I've also heard the same stories regularly from other people even if they weren't sure of the terminology to explain what they were seeing, or weren't ready to consider the underlying issues that might have been the reason for the symptoms they were recounting.

Anyway, enough of my rant...it's 1.30 in the morning and I couldn't sleep. I just needed to get this out. Back to the regularly scheduled game discussions soon...