Self-honesty, humility, and competence empathy

The people I know who excel at what they do are typically both self-honest and humble.

By self-honest, I mean they tend to make fairly accurate judgments about their own competence.

By humble, I mean they avoid unwarranted assumptions of superior competence.

I'm starting to think humility and self-honesty correlate to competence, meaning it's very hard to be humble and self-honest without competence and vice versa.

After exploring this in more detail, I want to talk a bit about the connection between self-honesty, humility, and competence empathy.

Self-honesty and competence

For whatever reason, life generally lacks quick feedback mechanisms for most competencies.

Take driving, for example. It's commonly cited that "most people believe they have above-average driving skills." Most people also drive a lot. So why do they go through life driving so much while oblivious to their driving skills?

The problem is that no accurate mechanism for evaluating driving skills is plugged into our day-to-day driving. Sometimes other people honk at us, or we make a mistake and realize it, but for the most part we're oblivious about how well we're driving.

And typically, we assume we're doing good given this lack of feedback.

If there were a score from 0 to 10 on "driving skill," whatever that means, we would not only not know where we stand with any degree of accuracy on the scale, but we wouldn't even know the difference between a 5 and an 8.

A higher level of competence typically helps us understand the skill at a more intricate level, which helps us evaluate ourselves against it. While a typical driver sees driving as a blob of skills, a professional pilot can break down driving into several nuances, allowing them to more accurately and precisely evaluate their skills against them without feedback.

Another example might be playing the guitar. If you're just learning to play, it's hard to distinguish what makes it sound good or bad. You're playing, and sound comes out—and that's pretty much it.

But even without external feedback, advanced guitarists can evaluate and refine their technique. If you're working on your string skipping, you can immediately notice inconsistencies in your picking accuracy, tone, or dynamics.

In a way, self-honesty and competence are connected: the more competence you have, the more likely you are to know what and how to evaluate, and the better you know what and how to evaluate, the more competence you'll develop.

Let's continue exploring how competence shapes our beliefs by examining its connection to a concept closely tied to self-honesty: humility.

Humility and competence

There are many competing definitions of humility. Here, I'm referring to avoiding unwarranted assumptions about superior competence.

Humility is sometimes confused with false modesty – a deliberate downplaying of competence. A world-class powerlifter saying "I'm strong" is just stating a fact, and pretending otherwise is false modesty, not humility.

Technically, false modesty is lying, and personally, I'm not a big fan of false modesty. I certainly don't consider it a virtue.

In any case, I think the correlation between low competence and low humility comes from competence bias. When we don't know, we're more likely to overestimate our abilities than to underestimate them. This is sometimes called the illusion of competence.

Honestly, I'm unsure whether attempting to have greater humility necessarily leads to greater competence. While trying to avoid unwarranted assumptions of superior competence is laudable, it's hard to know what an unwarranted assumption is without competence, which is often crucial for performance evaluations.

In practice, trying to avoid competence bias by just "trying really hard" – like most other biases – is not likely to work.

If this holds, it means one of the most reliable mechanisms for developing humility is – counterintuitively – developing competence. Or, at the very least, it means competence is often a necessary condition of humility.

I'm not going to speculate much about the other necessary and sufficient conditions of humility, other than to acknowledge that it doesn't seem like humility always necessarily follows competence. I'd have to think more about that.

I do think one typical thing I see in competent but not humble people is an assumption of "transferability" of competence: that being good in A automatically makes them good at B. This particularly comes up with people that come accross as lacking "overall" humility – ie arrogant people.

In any case, competence transfer doesn't necessarily contradict my thinking here: confidence bias is still at play, leading people to make unwarranted assumptions of superior competence in fields where they lack expertise.

So, if competence goes hand in hand with self-honesty and humility, why do we sometimes struggle to understand how people who aren't competent feel?

Competence empathy – thinking as if you were incompetent

In fields where we are competent, it's hard to truly grasp what it's like to be incompetent.

In the book Proof of Stake, Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin describes how he feared a fundamental design flaw when designing his cryptocurrency – otherwise, why hadn't anybody proposed a similar idea before?

In practice, Ethereum was an astoundingly novel and complicated idea: reading about Vitalik's insecurity after reading (or rather, trying to read) his whitepaper seemed almost preposterous! Of course nobody came up with that!

This natural lack of competence empathy is one of the things that makes gifted teachers so great. It can be surprisingly hard to imagine yourself in an incompetent person's shoes while also knowing how to build their competence efficiently.

Again, feedback is a common way to build competence empathy. If there are clear scores, it's easier for a competent person to look at a score and realize that somebody isn't very competent—"Oh, okay, that makes sense." But without that scoring support, it can be quite hard.

When I took my first guitar class, my teacher said, "Eventually, when listening to a song, you can usually tell how many cymbals the drums have." I thought the idea was absurd, but now I don't know what it's like to hear a song as just a blur of cymbals – I typically tell each of them apart.

For example, when having dinner or vacationing somewhere with live music, I often contort my face at a lousy musician, while my wife is simply amused at my despair. I, unfortunately, can't replicate what it's like not to notice a horrible musician.

Competence empathy is not about recognizing when someone is incompetent but understanding how they experience the world. It's the ability to think like them, to feel like them, and to grasp what it's like to struggle with something that now feels effortless to you.

So let's summarize what we explored today: competence, self-honesty, humility, and competence empathy.

Bringing it all together

Today, we explored why self-honesty, humility, and competence tend to go together.

• Self-honesty is challenging without the competence necessary for self-evaluation.
• Humility is challenging without the competence to avoid unwarranted assumptions of superiority.

Therefore, we typically see strong signs of self-honesty and humility in extremely competent people, and improving competence is one reliable way of building self-honesty and humility.

Competence empathy, in turn, is our ability to think, feel, and see the world as those who lack competence do. It is challenging to develop competence empathy once we are competent.

While competence, self-honesty, and humility reinforce each other, the better we are at something, the harder it is to empathize with those who struggle in areas where we don't.

I hope this reflection helps you develop self-honesty, humility, and competence and makes it easier to recognize and navigate your lack of competence empathy when it happens.