from Hacker News

Complex Systems Won't Survive the Competence Crisis

by Anon84 on 5/22/25, 10:18 AM with 5 comments

• by Rochus on 5/22/25, 12:45 PM

  The article argues that America is experiencing cascading systems failures across multiple domains because of a systematic prioritization of diversity over competence in institutional hiring and promotion practices. Though it does so without establishing a clear causal relationship. While presenting temporal correlation, it fails to demonstrate that diversity policies indeed are the primary cause of these failures, rather than numerous other factors like budget constraints, management decisions, or technological changes.

  Even without bringing diversity into the equation, the Peter principle already well explains why hierarchies tend to converge toward incompetence, and thanks to the Dilbert principle, we know that the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the management ;-)

• by weard_beard on 5/22/25, 11:16 AM

  Don’t bother reading this garbage.

  TL;DR “We are all doomed to become gibbering monkey men because black people are bad at the SAT.”

• by ringeryless on 5/22/25, 11:36 AM

  what a load of bs. i anticipated a reasonable article at the outset, i even agreed with the thesis statement that changing political mores are resulting in a decline in meritocracy, and i was directly considering Hegseth and Gabbard and RFK as ideological appointments with no competence.

  instead, the article purports that diversity iniciatives are to blame, not rash MAGA ideological purges or Trumps random economic policies.

  this article is garbage. gtfo