About a year back, I floated the idea of things that are “exactly good enough to suck.” Things that fall into this category—writing, music, art, whatever—are just barely of sufficient quality to get judged by the appropriate “serious” standard (professional journalism, a “real” band), by which standard they fail miserably. If they were only slightly worse, they’d be judged by the more forgiving standards applicable to talented amateurs, and come off quite well.
Well, a commenter on a post below mentions the Dunning-Kruger effect, which I suspect may at least in part be related to a kind of corollary idea. The Dunning-Kruger effect, as my commenter summarizes it, refers to the phenomenon the eponymous social scientists discovered whereby
people who were incompetent (falling into the bottom quartile) on humor, grammar and reasoning vastly overestimated their competence (mean assessment of competence level was 62nd percentile), but also did not recognize skill in others and revise their view of their own competence.
Here’s one story about why this might be the case—I’d have to look a little more closely at the distribution of self-assessment to know whether it’s true. Just anecdotally, genuinely smart and competent people tend not to be enormously impressed with their own intelligence or competence, not because they’re intrinsically humble, but because they end up surrounded by other equally (or, at any rate, variously and complementarily) smart, competent people, who provide the relevant yardstick. As Robert Nozick once put it, very few of us think: “Yeah, I’m pretty good for a primate; I can use tools and have mastered a natural language.”
Folks at the high end of mediocrity—the big fish in the shallow pond—look around and conclude they’re incredibly special. Probably the same obtains down the scale. It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if you think you’re the smartest person you know (and not a Nobel Laureate), you’re probably just not quite sharp enough to have brighter friends. In other words: just short of good-enough-to-suck. Of course, we can tell an equally plausible story that works the other way around: The lower you are in your relevant peer-group ladder, the more uncomfortable an accurate self-assessment is, whereas the second- or third-best along some dimension can be realistic about not being the absolute tops without feeling too bad about it.
In all its incarnations, the good-enough-to-suck effect depends on their being at least moderately sharp boundaries between the relevant domains. Sometimes these exist just as a function of what it means to have a reasonably cohesive professional or social group. Sometimes it’s because certain domains of knowledge or associated standards of quality exert their own sort of gravitational effect once they’ve first “clicked.” (Try not to see these strings of letters as words.) Whatever the reason, it’s hard not regard this phenomenon as sort of perverse—this roller coaster self-image is forced to ride
We can find the same principle at work on the consumption side of “good enough to suck” as well—which may figure into the inability to assess competence in others. Consider, for example, the consumer of music or movies who’s forever harping on how the majority of (top-40 radio hits) / (major studio blockbusters) are garbage. This is not wrong, certainly, but to obsess over it is to declare that your taste is not quite good enough for you to have long ago stopped noticing either category. Sure, TRL plays a lot of pap, but in 2008, given the glut of other options, why is anybody over the age of twelve who cares about music even aware of what’s being played on TRL?
Of course, as you round that corner, you’re hit with the uncomfortable realization that, in fact, you don’t know all that much about really good art/music/movies/whatever after all. Your taste has just become exactly good enough to suck, relative to the new domain. At which point it may occur to you, still more uncomfortably, that for precisely this reason you can’t be sure how many more such corners you’ve yet to round. Certainly I’ve had this experience: I considered myself something of a rock nerd, until I dated a real rock nerd and realized I didn’t have the first idea about 90 percent of the most interesting stuff done in the past couple decades. A slightly disconcerting experience, to be sure, but well worth it in the long run.
10 responses so far ↓
1 Daniel // Oct 2, 2008 at 1:39 pm
Now you just made me feel bad about myself. Hope you’re happy.
2 Xanthippas // Oct 2, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Of course, as you round that corner, you’re hit with the uncomfortable realization that, in fact, you don’t know all that much about really good art/music/movies/whatever after all.
Well, I’m not so low on the scale of taste that I fail to recognize it in others, but I’m definitely in the category above. I’ve spent most of my life not listening to really good rock and pop music* (instead accepting whatever was plopped before me via radio) and as I’ve discovered more and more good music these last few years, I’ve only lifted myself to the rung on the ladder that permits me to be aware of the fact that 95% of the people who are into really good music know about way much more music and have infinitely more subtle taste than I. Frankly, it’s depressing, but the only alternative is to listen to crap again. Art and movies? I don’t even bother.
*P.S. No, I don’t just mean ‘indie’ music either. I just mean good music, of whatever taste.
3 Laure // Oct 2, 2008 at 11:36 pm
I’m glad you had no pretensions about your film knowledge; your disconcertion might be out of hand.
4 Julian Sanchez // Oct 3, 2008 at 1:32 am
:p
5 Milena Thomas // Oct 3, 2008 at 2:20 am
I loved this post. I think I suck, and I can be proud of it now.
6 LP // Oct 3, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I’m not sure I’ve ever understand your fascination with hierarchicalizing both artistic talent and artistic taste — in those spheres, I’m pretty sure there’s an awful lot of subjective preference out there masquerading as objective criticism. Also, do you ever worry that such harsh criticism of anyone who begins to transcend the ‘amateur’ label might tend to discourage many amateurs from making any effort to improve themselves? Part I of this post, about all the ‘just-good-enough-to-suck’ writing editors have to look at, certainly had that effect on me temporarily.
7 Jesse // Oct 3, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Among my discourse community, this is known as “wearing the juice,” after the opening anecdote of the Kruger-Dunning paper, which can be found through the wiki page and is well worth reading.
8 Andrew // Oct 4, 2008 at 5:31 pm
“Consider, for example, the consumer of music or movies who’s forever harping on how the majority of (top-40 radio hits) / (major studio blockbusters) are garbage. This is not wrong, certainly, but to obsess over it is to declare that your taste is not quite good enough for you to have long ago stopped noticing either category.”
I think there’s a better explanation here: it’s not that said consumer’s taste is not objectively good enough yet, it’s that for some people, getting to shit all over everyone else’s taste is *the whole point* (or at least, a substantial perk) of having good taste to begin with. If I could indulge in a little armchair psychology here, I’d be willing to bet that most music nerds and film buffs were not exactly quarterbacking their football teams back in high school, and it’s not unusual for people who come up short when judged by the standards of their peers to seek out alternative criteria by which they come out on top. Most of us hipster wanker types grow out of this eventually, but I think if we’re honest with ourselves we’ll admit that attitude was not exactly foreign to our way of thinking when we were younger. This is also why the “top-40 sucks!” guy tends to be on the young side, in my experience.
9 dave.s. // Oct 6, 2008 at 6:37 am
My dad came out of a little town in Minnesota where he had been the hottest thing to hit the high school in YEARS, then went on to a second-tier college. He never shook the idea that he was the smartest guy in the room. Then he raised me in Berkeley, and I never got that idea because it was refuted in every room I entered.
10 Running On Thin, Cracking Ice (or, another self-indulgent whine) « The musings of an Australian classical liberal in Washington DC // Oct 24, 2009 at 2:55 am
[…] know such people, I obviously still feel ‘outside’ their circles. I quite liked the line Julian Sanchez once wrote “It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that if you think you’re the smartest person you know (and […]