<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Strip the tender noun. Weaponized incompetence is... > Strip the tender noun. Weaponized incompetence is labor extraction through strategic helplessness, and helplessness is one of the oldest instruments in the animal kingdom. The infant's cry moves the mother's hands; the begging juvenile gets the food; the low-effort forager in a troop learns that standing near a producer and looking incapable is cheaper than producing, and behavioral ecology has a name for it, the scrounger, and a finding about it, that scrounging persists exactly as long as producers keep paying. In a household the calculus is pure. Competence has a cost, in attention, memory, anticipation and time; incompetence transfers that cost to whoever cannot tolerate the failure; the transferred cost is paid in full by the partner who notices, because noticing is the labor; and every time the noticing partner pays, the failing partner is rewarded, which is how a behavior is trained into an organism without either organism ever deciding anything. The task done to eighty percent is not carelessness. It is the precise quantity of effort required to keep the producer producing while paying the least possible price for her continued production, and it is calibrated by a nervous system that has run ten thousand trials. {{Nobody is bad at a task that failure excuses them from. They are exactly as bad as they need to be for you to take it back.}} {{Strategic helplessness is not a character flaw. It is a foraging strategy, and you are the forage.}} {{Every time you redid it yourself, you paid him for doing it wrong, and he learned.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Strip the tender noun. Weaponized incompetence is labor extraction through strategic helplessness, and helplessness is one of the oldest instruments in the animal kingdom. The infant's cry moves the mother's hands; the begging juvenile gets the food; the low-effort forager in a troop learns that standing near a producer and looking incapable is cheaper than producing, and behavioral ecology has a name for it, the scrounger, and a finding about it, that scrounging persists exactly as long as producers keep paying. In a household the calculus is pure. Competence has a cost, in attention, memory, anticipation and time; incompetence transfers that cost to whoever cannot tolerate the failure; the transferred cost is paid in full by the partner who notices, because noticing is the labor; and every time the noticing partner pays, the failing partner is rewarded, which is how a behavior is trained into an organism without either organism ever deciding anything. The task done to eighty percent is not carelessness. It is the precise quantity of effort required to keep the producer producing while paying the least possible price for her continued production, and it is calibrated by a nervous system that has run ten thousand trials. Nobody is bad at a task that failure excuses them from. They are exactly as bad as they need to be for you to take it back. Strategic helplessness is not a character flaw. It is a foraging strategy, and you are the forage. Every time you redid it yourself, you paid him for doing it wrong, and he learned.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-strip-tender-noun-doing-wrong-learned ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->