Mirror Fog

The biggest practical consequence of competence reflection is that we are always understanding the world through a reflective fog.

Just like in a normal fog, up close you see things as they are, but the further away from you the more things fade into the fog. Unlike a normal fog, this fog is like a mirror. It reflects you and the stuff around you. So instead of getting an obvious cue that you are looking at something too hidden by fog, you see a false clear view. When you glimpse an idea’s outline in the fog, you see it painted with reflections of other ideas near you.

This doesn’t even apply to just “better” versus “worse” thinking. First, there are many directions of competence - you can be better in some directions and worse in others. Second, some directions are just different ways of thinking, not measurable better or worse. Third, a “smarter” person does not necessarily see farther - most forms of “better” are different positions in the fog, not vision range. Seeing farther in the fog is a separate skill: remembering how you used to think, finding new ways to think, and trying more of those ways on when interpreting anything.

Competence Reflection

Important to keep in mind when interpreting why people do things: we cannot see cognition which is better than the best we can conceive of.

Wecan see stuff which we can already do in our mind, done with more speed, capacity, endurance, or reliability.

Wecan see someone getting better results, and think that their mind is doing something better than anything our mind can see.

We can even easily imagine a mind doing something better than we can without actually being able to imagine that better something.

But when just looking at evidence of cognition that your mind can’t even create, what is your idea-fitting going to do? Probably the same thing it normally does: try projecting cognition that you actually can do onto it.

So we often assume that when faced with a “smarter” or “better” mind, or even a “worse” or different mind, it’ll be obvious. But often, we just see our own competence - or incompetence - reflected back.