[cs137]

Although I think "impostor syndrome" is vague and over-diagnosed, it's a natural reaction to a diseased society such as ours.

Capitalism tells you you can be anything you want to be, if you're good enough. Of course, most people are never going to get anything good--the decent opportunities were mostly allocated before we were born. Watching this, the naive conclusion is that only the very best are going to get anything, and that everyone else just sucks. (And, if 99.9% of people who try to do something suck at it, it's just reasonable to assume a high probability that you also suck. Priors. Self-perception does not typically have enough resolution to conclude otherwise.) The other possibility is that society is deeply and thoroughly corrupt, but to voice it makes a person sound bitter... and bitterness, at least in the US, is extremely socially unacceptable, especially when one is right.

If it were a college, it would look like this.

    Person: Hi, Labor Market University Dean. I'd like to major in writing.
    Labor Market: No can do. We've got too many writers. 
    Person: I suppose I'll major in... machine learning sounds fun.
    Labor Market: No slots left. All taken.
    Person: What about business leadership?
    Labor Market: Hahaha, no.
    Person: Well, I have to do something. What've ya got?
    Labor Market: It looks like we've got room for you to major in... subordinate bullshit, subordinate bullshit, and... subordinate bullshit.

Of course, to speak of impostor syndrome usually implies that the person actually is competent (not an impostor). And so, it tends to be most prominent in people who (a) are quite good at what they're doing, and (b) have beaten the odds to achieve some recognition and success. The problem, at that point, is that you start to see so many charlatans who get just as much in the way of rewards as you do. What this establishes is that worldly success, rare as it is in anything worth doing, is not indicative of skill or talent, at least not in any field where there is even an iota of subjectivity (athletics are a different story). There's too much corruption and there's too much noise.

As humans, it comes naturally to find patterns when they aren't actually there. If we fail, it's too easy to accept society's narrative that we deserved failure and aren't really fit to be more than a business subordinate. If we succeed, we see both (a) the failure of people as good as, or better than, we are, as well as (b) undeserved success of incompetents even at the highest levels. The first case is one of perceiving a spurious pattern; the second is a case of watching the pattern break down and concluding that external indicators of one's competence carry almost no signal, thus falling back into an I-know-nothing state... which tends to make a person feel incompetent... because how good can you be if you don't even know whether you're good[1]?

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[1] In reality, there is at most a weak correlation between one's competence and precise confidence thereabout; however, if we make certain assumptions of rationality that sometimes hold and sometimes fail, we are led to expect that they would correlate.

[nonrandomstring]

> you you can be anything you want to be, if you're good enough. Of course, most people are never going to get anything good

I mentioned this devastating mismatch between promises and realistic opportunities in a comment yesterday. It's baked into the education system now, which has become something of a racket for selling broken dreams.

> And, if 99.9% of people who try to do something suck at it, it's just reasonable to assume a high probability that you also suck.

I pause to ever mention Jordan Peterson here (because usually that leads to massive down-votes), but anyway, he has a major blind-spot in assuming dominance hierarchies are congruent with competence hierarchies. People who laud meritocracies often forget this.

> worldly success, rare as it is in anything worth doing, is not indicative of skill or talent

"The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong...." Getting over this is an important part of growing up, and I think some people don't quite get that.

> The other possibility is that society is deeply and thoroughly corrupt

What I think happened is that our shared "noble lies" became embarrassing sordid tales of uncle Bob screwing the pooch. After your prime minister has fucked a pig's face it's almost impossible to recover and re-orientate. Is there still an institution that hasn't been utterly razed by scandal?

> because how good can you be if you don't even know whether you're good?

Without objective measures and exposure to genuine competence you can respect and aspire to there is no yardstick. The demise of recognisable institutions took this away.

> bitterness, at least in the US, is extremely socially unacceptable, especially when one is right.

That's a bit weird. A WASP thing? British culture allows more for a general sourness around class resentments. We know our leaders are over-privileged incompetents and make light of it openly. But not to the extent of utter nihilistic cynicism as Russians.

I want to say that US Americans don't have the quiescent injustice of class hanging over everything... but I am not sure that's true. You just deal with it differently across the pond.