Competence > Comprehension

16 Nov 2019

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 (for capturing prey, for 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. Some might argue this is why we now have the ability for flight, augmented by machines we’ve engineered and/ or manufactured.

Competence > Comprehension

Except that’s now how the technology for flight originally developed, and that’s not how technology generally develops. 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. This is why compentence is better than comprehension 100% of the time. If you need your car fixed, you hire a mechanic, not a physicist.

Value Added By Comprehension Requires Competence

That’s not to completely do away with comprehension, that would be silly. Science is comprehension and obviously that’s not something we want to do away with. Comprehension does a lot to offer as well, but it’s at higher levels of value, it’s more difficult and importantly it requires competence.

Part of the reason why great athletes or artists aren’t always the best coaches or teachers is because they’re too steeped in competence, too reliant on their intuition and can’t seem to develop (because they never needed to develop) good 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.

Great coaches make for great teams, and dynasties. There would be no Patriots without Belichick (comprehension). However, equally true, there would also be no Patriots without Brady (competence). You can’t play the game without the players, the coaches just add another level at which to be great.

Which brings us to what competence is: competence is execution, is the physical work or product produced. The quality of the output, which using metrics over time can be quantified, is the mark of the level of competency. Competency speaks in concrete terms by way of capability (physical, in the case of sport) and in results. Comprehension doesn’t speak concretely, it speaks in abstractions.

Given these facts, although comprehension can add value at higher levels–think great coach building a great team–preference goes to competence. There would be no game without players playing it, part of a great coach’s job is ensuring the team’s competence. At the highest levels of performance, strong conprehension is necessary but it simply can’t exist without competency.