Confidence Is Not Competence

Society has developed a deep admiration for confidence. We have allowed evolutionary survival heuristics to lead us into poor decisions and, in many cases, serious societal problems. Our evolution has not caught up with the modern world.

We are drawn to people who speak with certainty, who project authority, who appear unshaken by complexity. Confidence is interpreted as strength. Self-promotion is mistaken for capability. The individual who sounds sure of themselves is assumed to know what they are doing.

This instinct is understandable. But in the modern world, it is increasingly misplaced.

Why Confidence Once Mattered

For most of human history, confidence served a practical purpose.

When life was nomadic and survival depended on immediate decisions, hesitation carried real risk. Groups benefited from leaders who acted decisively, even if imperfectly. Certainty reduced paralysis. In environments defined by physical threats, scarcity, and time-compressed choices, confidence functioned as a reliable signal.

A leader who hesitated too long could get people killed. A leader who acted decisively—despite uncertainty—often fared better than one who froze.

In that context, confidence was adaptive.

The World Changed. Our Instincts Did Not.

Modern societies no longer face primarily survival-level problems.

Our challenges are not about defending against predators or rival tribes. They are not resolved through instinct, force, or immediate action. Today’s problems are systemic, layered, and interconnected.

Poverty, education outcomes, healthcare systems, crime cycles, economic stability, and social cohesion are not single-variable problems. They involve feedback loops, delayed consequences, tradeoffs, and second-order effects that are not visible at the moment decisions are made.

These problems require:

• Analytical reasoning
• Systems thinking
• Historical context
• Data interpretation
• An understanding of unintended consequences

Confidence alone is not sufficient. In many cases, it is actively misleading.

The Knowledge–Confidence Inversion

There is an uncomfortable truth society often avoids acknowledging:

Those who understand complex systems tend to be less certain, not more.

People with deep knowledge are aware of what they do not know. They recognize uncertainty, question assumptions, and seek additional information before committing to conclusions. As a result, they speak carefully. They qualify claims. They leave room for revision.

This behavior is frequently interpreted as weakness.

Meanwhile, those with limited understanding often display the greatest confidence—because they lack awareness of complexity. Oversimplification feels like clarity. Certainty feels earned, even when it is not.

The result is an inversion: the individuals most capable of making sound decisions appear hesitant, while those least equipped appear decisive.

The Problem Is Not Just Confidence — It Is Complexity

The greatest hurdle in identifying the root causes of societal problems—and then designing effective and efficient solutions—is the complexity of the systems in which those problems exist.

Modern societies operate within overlapping and deeply interconnected systems: human behavior, economics, medicine, science, financial markets, political and governance structures, legal and judicial systems, social and cultural norms, education, public health, technology and information networks, environmental systems, and infrastructure. None of these systems operates in isolation. Each influences the others in ways that are often non-linear, delayed, and difficult to predict.

These are not systems where any single individual can reasonably claim comprehensive expertise.

Yet society routinely places its trust in confident political figures who proclaim to have clear, definitive solutions to problems embedded within these systems—despite the fact that they are not experts, nor even remotely fluent in the systems they claim to understand.

Solutions are presented as if mastery is intuitive, as if experience in one area automatically translates into competence across all others. Just as concerning, these individuals rarely solicit meaningful input from subject-matter experts, nor do they establish processes through which competing expert perspectives can be challenged, debated, and refined into sound policy.

Complexity is not engaged—it is bypassed. Expertise is not integrated—it is replaced by assertion.

In this environment, the conditions for the Dunning–Kruger effect are not accidental—they are engineered. When the public is given simplified explanations stripped of context and tradeoffs, confidence grows faster than understanding. The illusion of clarity replaces actual comprehension.

The broader consequences of structural misalignment between leadership selection and institutional complexity are examined in Elites, Population Control, and the Myth of Self-Governance.

Confidence as a Social Shortcut

Confidence is appealing because it is easy to evaluate.

It requires no technical literacy, no verification, and no deep understanding from the observer. It feels reassuring. It reduces anxiety. It offers simple answers in a complicated world. But it should not be this way.

In a functional society, confidence would not substitute for scrutiny. We would ask better questions. We would demand clearer explanations. We would expect leaders to justify not only what they propose, but why they are qualified to propose it. Instead, we largely abandon rigorous vetting.

Part of the reason is our own limitation. Most people are not experts in the systems that govern modern life, and they are not expected to be. But that limitation should increase—not reduce—the demand for validation. When we lack direct expertise, the appropriate response is to examine the source of the solution: the qualifications, experience, and intellectual humility of the person proposing it.

Instead, we often evaluate solutions without evaluating the solver.

Competence, by contrast, is harder to recognize. It is conditional. It resists slogans. It requires patience and trust. It also presents another structural challenge: genuinely capable experts are rarely power-seeking. Many of the most knowledgeable individuals prefer to remain within their fields—science, medicine, engineering, economics—where progress is measured by accuracy rather than popularity. Politics, by contrast, rewards persuasion, certainty, and narrative dominance.

As a result, those best equipped to understand complex systems are often the least likely to run for office, while those most eager to seek power are not necessarily those best prepared to wield it.

This inversion has been observed for centuries. As Bertrand Russell famously noted:

“The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.”

Modern societies, rather than correcting for this imbalance, increasingly amplify it. Leaders are selected based on presentation rather than capability, certainty rather than understanding.

Politics: Where This Failure Becomes Costly

Nowhere is this dynamic more visible—or more damaging—than in politics.

Politics disproportionately attracts individuals who seek power, project certainty across subjects they do not fully understand, and present themselves as capable of solving highly complex systems through simple declarations.

Political failure is uniquely easy to conceal. Consequences are delayed. Responsibility is diffuse. Blame can be redirected. Narrative often matters more than results.

When confident assertions fail, they are replaced with new confident assertions. Scapegoats are found—usually the opposing party, another group, or some segment of society such as businesses or those positioned at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy.

The cost of these failures is not borne by the decision-makers themselves, but by the public that selected them.

Confidence becomes a substitute for accountability.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

When societies repeatedly reward confidence over competence, the outcomes are predictable—and deeply impactful.

One of the clearest examples is housing affordability. Across the United States and other Western countries, home prices have risen faster than incomes for decades. While some scarcity is real due to population growth, urbanization, and household formation, policy-driven constraints are a major contributor to both scarcity and cost.

In many cases, housing shortages are not the result of physical limits, but of layered regulatory decisions imposed on already complex systems. Zoning laws, density limits, height restrictions, permitting delays, environmental review processes, and local veto power significantly limit the ability to respond to demand with new supply. Over time, these constraints transform what could have been manageable shortages into structural ones.

In addition, specific regulations and local building codes—although often enacted for legitimate safety, environmental, and energy-efficiency reasons—carry substantial tradeoffs. Compliance costs, mandated materials, design requirements, impact fees, and prolonged approval timelines materially increase the cost of construction. Industry and academic analyses consistently find that regulatory and code-related costs can account for a significant portion of the final price of a new home, often adding tens of thousands of dollars per unit. These costs are embedded directly into housing prices and rents, pricing out marginal buyers and reinforcing long-term affordability challenges.

Rather than acknowledging this complexity, political leaders frequently reduce the problem to simplified narratives and confidently promote solutions that address visible symptoms rather than underlying causes. Measures such as price controls, rent freezes, or punitive restrictions on development are framed as decisive action, even though they often suppress supply further and worsen long-term outcomes.

The same pattern appears in poverty policy. Programs are routinely designed around simplified assumptions that treat poverty as a single-variable problem. In practice, benefit cliffs, work disincentives, housing constraints, education mismatches, and geographic immobility interact to create poverty traps that are difficult to escape. These systems persist not because their flaws are unknown, but because addressing them requires careful, politically uncomfortable tradeoffs rather than confident declarations.

Price controls offer one of the most consistent historical lessons. Rent control, rent freezes, and broad price caps on goods are repeatedly introduced with confident claims of consumer protection. Yet across different times and places, they reliably produce reduced supply, deteriorating quality, shortages, and black markets. These outcomes are not theoretical—they are observed, documented, and repeated.

The downstream consequences of these policy failures are now visible across much of the Western world. Countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Italy are experiencing varying degrees of public dissatisfaction driven by housing shortages, cost-of-living pressures, institutional distrust, and political polarization. While the specific issues differ by country, the underlying pattern is similar: complex problems addressed through oversimplified policy, followed by frustration when promised outcomes fail to materialize.

Public trust erodes. Frustration hardens into conflict. Polarization deepens. Citizens sense that systems are failing them, even when they cannot precisely articulate why.

These failures are not accidental. They are the predictable result of how leadership is selected and how policy decisions are justified.

The problem is not that confident people exist.
The problem is that confidence has been elevated to a substitute for understanding.

Closing

In a world defined by complexity, certainty is often a warning sign.

The greatest risk facing modern societies is not a lack of intelligence, but the continued reliance on instincts shaped for a world that no longer exists.

Confidence once helped us survive.
Without humility and understanding, it may now be doing the opposite.

Continue Exploring

If this analysis of confidence and complexity resonated, you may also want to read:

• You Are Not Free
• Elites, Population Control, and the Myth of Self-Governance
• We Built an Economy That Profits from Human Weakness