The Anti-Skill
According to the dictionary, a skill is a learned capacity of doing something competently; a developed aptitude or ability. Being skilled at something also means consistency: you are genuinely apt to do something if you can do it several times and, with more or less degrees of varying accuracy, still be successful in your task. If you’re playing bowling, scoring a strike once could have been just pure luck. Scoring ten (and not necessarily all of them in a row), well, it indicates you know what you’re doing. Getting skilled at something requires a good dose of trial and error, where failures are observed and fed into the loop to avoid repeating the below-par outcomes, thus increasing the probability of success.
That being said, let’s look at the opposite side of the spectrum, where the inept lies. If you screw up something once, well, it happens and you could do better next time. Now if you bomb something consistently, one after another opportunity you are given, that’s also some sort of a skill. Sure, it’s a somewhat bizarre skill, but skill at last. So let’s call it an anti-skill.
Think of bowling again: if the ball goes to the gutter once, twice, thrice, ok, I mean, been there, done that. It’s not easy to get the stupid ball centered in that slippery lane. Now if you throw 50 damn times and all of them meet the gutter and not a single pin goes down whatsoever, man that’s a skill. I mean, it takes actual effort to be so bad. Kudos! Now you need to go find if you can do something with that anti-skill of yours. See the woman in the video below: bad luck or anti-skill1?
If you look around, you will find plenty of the anti-skilled kind. People who screw it up over and over by making wrong call after wrong call in an eternal chain of haphazard decision-making. They are anti-skilled specimens in action worth observing (from a safe distance). You ever seen people who manage to annoy every single human being who comes in close contact with them? They are social anti-geniuses; it takes real skill to be disliked by everyone.
You could think that one of the most fascinating parts of the anti-skilled is their unrelenting refusal to learn. Feedback, evidence, data, and even outright failure appear to be shrugged off with the grace of someone convinced that the universe, not their decision-making, is the problem. But I tend to disagree: the anti-skilled have a learning loop in action, only tuned with a minus sign added somewhere in the chain. They are continuously learning how to do it “better” every time, which means worse in the skilled frame of reference. Be careful if you ever find TWO or more anti-geniuses at work together, as the sum will be greater than the individual contribution of the parts.
In a world that likes to preach about mastery, here’s to the anti-skilled, for it takes a certain kind of twisted genius to dominate the art of fucking it up in a recurrent capacity.
The controversial Francis Galton, inventor of the Galton board, nods from a cloud (or from hell, as he was a notorious racist)