Competence vs. Comprehension

Daniel Dennett in “The Evolution of Minds” talks about competence vs. comprehension: how organisms/ systems that evolve don’t comprehend/ understand why they’ve evolved the functions/ compentencies they have. Understanding is another whole level above being competent at something, and usually an unnecessary part.

Birds evolved the capacity for flight (competency), which comes with all types of evolutionary advantages (capturing prey, evading predators, etc.), but they didn’t evolve the ability to to understand why flight is useful or why they evolved the ability in the first place (comprehension). The capacity for understanding an ability is totally separate from the ability itself. At the very least, they are orthogonal, and more likely they’re in slight opposition.

Arguably, humans have great capacity for understanding. Arguably, we don’t need competency for abilities, like flight, where if we just understand them enough we can just engineer and/ or manufacture them from our understanding.

Competence Precedes Comprehension

Except that’s not how the technology for flight originally developed, and that’s not how technology develops in general.

Aviation technology didn’t develop by taking the laws of aerodynamics and building a machine that harnesses them in a clever way to produce flight. That’s not how it worked, the first great breakthrough in human flight didn’t come from physicists or scientists. The first great breakthrough came from 2 brothers who were bicycle mechanics, experimenting, iterating and imitating what they thought worked for birds. Their genius wasn’t from understanding, it came from mechanical competence and application of that competence. The understanding of why exactly it worked came later, the science trailed the engineering.

And, believe it or not, this is the dominant pattern in human technological development. We don’t understand how many drugs that we know work well, and use daily, actually work (e.g. aspirin’s mechanism of action is still unknown). The inventions of written human language and the telegraph preceded information theory. We still don’t have a good understanding for why deep neural networks work as well as they do.

And then, the biggest kicker of them all, there’s the machine/ organ we rely on for literally everything—that which you trust to determine what to trust—our brains, the interworkings of which we still only have a cursory understanding of.

With all of the talk of the danger of black boxes in machine learning and scientific research, it’s amazing how little white boxes–things where we understand and can explain their mechanics–there are out there. And, even way more than that, of those things that are even white boxes, what proportion of the population can actually explain how they work? There are many times the number of things which we undestand as a society, but individuals take for granted and effectively treat as black boxes (e.g. cars, again your own brain, etc.).

And I don’t think this is such a bad thing. My point here is this: when it comes down to it, what matters most is competency, that things work. Not how they work, or understanding why they work. If you need your car fixed, you hire a mechanic, not a physicist.

Comprehension Requires Competence

That doesn’t mean we should completely do away with comprehension.

Science is comprehension and that’s obviously not something we want to do away with at all. Comprehension can be very valuable, even though it’s more difficult. Once we’ve developed a new technology, we gain a deeper understanding to optimize and take it to the next level.

One thing to remember though: competence is a typically a prerequisite for understanding.

Part of the reason why great athletes/ artists aren’t always the best coaches/ teachers is because they’re too steeped in competence, too reliant on their intuition and never needed to develop ways of communicating that competence to others. The best coaches many times come from subpar athletes that love the game and dedicate time to studying it, rather than playing it.

No doubt great coaches make great teams. There would be no Patriots dynasty without Belichick (comprehension). However, even more true, there would also be no Patriots dynasty without Brady (competence). Competence is execution; comprehension is strategy.

This is why competence > comprehension. You can’t play the game without the players. You can’t win without executing.

Competency speaks in concrete terms, in execution and in results. Comprehension doesn’t speak concretely, it speaks in abstractions.

It can’t actually play the game.