Successful Suck-ers

Suppose that people's success is a factor of multiple traits and talents. The less of any one talent someone has, the more of another they'd need in order to explain their success.

This has an awkward upshot: if you truly believe that your political/romantic/artistic enemy is an idiot, you should be more impressed at their success, and more eager to figure out what axis they're uber-talented on to make up for their idiocy.

• success might be determined largely by the positive trait "luck", so you can still just say "they're bad but they got lucky."
• there might just be way more people who suck than people who don't suck, so even though being good at things increases your odds of succeeding, just by base rates the people who succeed are still likely suck-ers.
• people's negative attributes might actively help them succeed. This seems to come up often as a second-tier defense when people complain about politicians:

"[rival party political leader] is an absolute moron."
"If he's so dumb, how did he trounce you so thoroughly at the last election?"
"Oh, because the voters are also dumb."

• (I do not like this. Also: it's awful watching people you dislike succeeding, and it's easy to attribute bad traits to people you already dislike, so they're probably not as dumb as you say they are, and they might in fact be incredibly smart).

Probably the most productive response to the success of people who strike you as talentless is to figure out which talents they have that you don't appreciate. But this is also the least fun response.