Oh God. Here comes the dreadful truth

Minimally competent is what now passes for professionalism. How long is this sustainable?

Gemini 2.5 (w/ Nano Banana)

I was in court a while back testifying before a judge who ultimately issued a verdict based on a very novel concept. While I’m not qualified to question this judge’s legal acumen, I am qualified to evaluate their math. The verdict rendered in the case was based on the unlikely concept of the number 36 somehow being less than the number 25—something that is not mathematically possible in any base or domain less than R¹⁰ (you never know with those string-theory rapscallions).

This reminded me, not in a good way, of one of the most notorious high-profile professional faceplants of this century—occurring just a few years ago—when New York Times editorial board member Mara Gay and MSNBC anchor Brian Williams demonstrated their incomprehension of fundamental math on national television by ciphering that $500 million divided among 327 million people would give each American citizen $1 million, replete with explanatory on-screen graphics courtesy of a crack team of producers at MSNBC.

But hey, I’m a math and science kind of guy. Perhaps my expectations are simply too high in this regard. What, after all, is a mere five orders of magnitude or an errant “>” sign between friends, eh? Otherwise, this all smacks of the elitism of competence. We can’t have any of that.

Unfortunately, for better or worse, we do. In the case of my mathematically challenged judge, the pièce de résistance was that they employed AI to write a decision containing the most unctuous affront to math-based reasoning that bad dreams are capable of conjuring—in a simple case that required less than a day to argue. I couldn’t decide whether to cry or tear my hair out.

Yeah, I know; I am a smug elitist, chumming for abuse. I’ve staked my claim to an exceedingly small parcel of real estate along the social and political spectrum reserved for unwoke snobs, where elitism is defined as expecting that educated professionals generally know what they are saying and doing and give a damn about their work. Imagine that.

Go ahead and let me have it. I’ll endure anything to make the pain of being wrong go away.

In an age where all of the knowledge in the world is literally at one’s fingertips, we are, in terms of basic professional competence, knackered. And when it’s not lack of knowledge, it’s lack of effort or jacked-up priorities. Any way you cut it, it’s less than great.

I am confident that at least 50% of Americans are familiar with three Taylor Swift songs, while less than 5% could name Newton's three laws of mechanics to save their lives (and less than 1% of those explain what they mean in lucid terms). Even fewer know what Σ means in an equation after four years of college, including required math courses.

Almost no one understands even very simple probability and statistics (see a chat forum on any remotely technical topic for details) required to make sense of life. Disable cars in any university administration parking lot by disconnecting a few spark plug wires, and if the U is more than a few blocks from a grocery store, everyone might starve to death before they figure out what to do.

Hell, turn off the electricity for a few days in the business district of any major city, and The Walking Dead might not look like a work of fiction.

But the worst affront to both my personal dignity and hope for humanity in all of this is that QuillBot informs me that my word choices for these essays reek of condescension to mass audiences that are asleep by the third paragraph. I’m going to do something about that as soon as I’m done condescending.

In competence as in all things, one reaps what they sow—and we are now doing just that. These days, professional classes are filled with people from whom we demanded little in terms of breadth, depth, effort, or rigor in education and training. Though I’ve always possessed little confidence that pedigree was necessarily a guarantee of anything related to quality, even I am dismayed at what now passes for nominal professional acumen.

As a result, I have, these days, almost no confidence in organizations or pillars of government. What little confidence I do have is reserved for individuals within those organizations who stand out because anything above adequate is rare enough to demand attention.

In fostering kids, I work with a social worker, a wonderful young woman in her 20s, who is the only person in all of child protective services in my state I’ve encountered who can find their way from their head to their ass with their hands. She's smart, energetic, and caring. She’s the definition of indefatigable. God knows why.

I don’t know how long she can hold out in a broken system that screams “FU” at anyone who bucks the conveyor belt of mediocrity. I can see on her face every time we walk out of court the damage done from an irredeemable system run by low achievers. You want to know if the Peter Principle is legit? Spend some time in courtrooms. Or, for that matter, in any government office.

I wonder how much more time this young woman has before the suck machine reduces her to a shadow of what she is now. How difficult is it to be the lone person in the system who doesn’t have time for networking and get-ahead strategies because she’s always out busting her ass on a case? Then, after all of that, how hard is it to lose a case in front of a judge who’s confused by a math concept less complex than a license plate number with the help of AI?

When push comes to shove and your education wasn’t enough, there’s always AI when things get gnarly.

What makes all of this worse is the prevalence of Dunning–Kruger syndrome. I have a suspicion that our math judge kicks back with Scientific American in their spare time and fancies themself a savant when it comes to fancy ciphering with their friends at Rotary.

Beyond that, when all else fails, there’s arrogance. When Dr. Anthony Fauci, the longtime head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), famously stated that criticism of him for his opinions concerning the Covid pandemic was tantamount to criticizing science itself, “because I represent science,” he did incalculable and lasting harm to public trust in the professional class.

Though Fauci was correct in asserting that medical science evolves as our knowledge about any disease increases, he was doing so in the context of having been wrong in several of his early Covid assertions. These assertions drove policies that impacted our reaction to the Covid pandemic with profound and deleterious consequences.

At some point, why should anyone implicitly trust the bearer of a medical degree if their ability to diagnose in a crisis isn’t statistically better than an Uber driver’s?

Higher education, where the betrayal of the public runs deep, is even worse. A disturbing amount of what passes for scholarship these days is shoddy, thinly veiled activism, and it’s the reason that academic research is mired in a reproducibility crisis. Since virtually all of the professional class is college educated, it’s not difficult to draw a few straight lines from here to there.

So, I don’t know—it’s up to you—but I don’t trust anyone anymore just because of their pedigree, their name on a letterhead, or impressive office space. I don’t look to organizations to get anything done; I look for people within those organizations who are worth a damn and then value them like a price above rubies. That’s how I roll.

Yes, it’s bad. But I do know a social worker, a few scientists, engineers, and medical professionals, and an attorney or two who are good in the pocket and welcome to share my foxhole if things do go south and the Reds decide to push the button down. I hope that’ll be enough.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.