On Competency Porn

The pleasure in competency porn is seeing a group of highly-skilled and in-control people collectively pull off something that would otherwise seem impossible. They’re not super-human in any way, so we can dream that we too could act and win as they do.

There's this great study (I think by Kahneman?) about how experts are only actually better than laypeople in fields with fast, reliable feedback loops - chess, weather forecasting, that kind of thing—but terrible in fields like political punditry where you can be confidently wrong forever without ever updating. Competency porn always takes place in Kahneman's first world: Ocean's Eleven robs the casino exactly as planned, House diagnoses the lupus (okay, it's never lupus), and nobody's plan gets derailed because a vendor changed their API without warning or because Carol from Accounting has a different interpretation of the reimbursement policy. Maybe what we're actually enjoying is watching people live in a high-trust equilibrium where other competent people do their parts and systems work as documented? Which, now that I think about it, might explain why these stories aged so badly during the pandemic.