Scott took it too literally. See also how the broader rationalist community took issue with Sam Kriss for inventing a not-obviously-fake historical figure.
The biggest takeaway for me is that you shouldn't expect to succeed as a manager by meeting (or exceeding) KPIs. It's about as effective as being a "nice guy" and expecting intimacy in return.
The KPIs are there for assigning blame, not for identifying key personnel. You can game them to increase your compensation if you are already doing something that an even bigger manager finds useful and important. Conversely, you can get away with half-assing every official performance indicator as long as you keep delivering the real thing.
That’s a good takeaway and if anyone doubts you just think about how you set “goals” in the HR system every year during annual review time , vs. what your boss talks to you about
"If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"
On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.
On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.
The Berne books Rao cites as explanations of Gametalk are solidly good entries in of themselves, although it's probably best to use an LLM to get search results of the best introductions to TA first to see if they've been surpassed.
1. business people sold themselves as the best to manage companies and took over companies (just like lawyers do in governments), changing the norm from decades ago when it was more likely for engineers to run companies than some kind of McKinsey guy
2. but they have no idea besides business/money metrics so they quickly become overwhelmed and decide based on who makes the most compelling argument ("don't bring me more problems, give me solutions")
3. sociopaths exploit this by telling the execs what they want to hear
4. only after a while, after significant investment of resources in the decisions/projects proposed by the sociopaths it comes up to light it's complete nonsense
5. the sociopaths are aware of this, so they usually pivot before SHTF or they even exploit the situation to ask for more to "fix" the problems
6. the execs who backed the sociopaths want to cover their own asses so they hide the problems from higher ups for as long as possible (CEO, board, investors, shareholders, clients, authorities, public)
7. competent people are pulled out of productive work and thrown to solve impossible or even contradicting situations; some burn out, some leave, and the ones who stay are often stained forever like they were the cause of the problem
Sometimes the sociopaths are external consulting companies or companies offering some magic huge system that they promise will solve all the problems.
This is really ableist. Sociopaths? Most people in charge of running companies from top to mid-level are average people, even if some dark-triad coded people exist. What you're angry at is what capitalism is supposed to do: maximize value for the the capital owning class, that is to say ownership. There was never some engineer owned utopia. Business culture has always been this way, in fact, its only been worse in the past pre-socialist/labor movement times, not just with labor (child labor, long hours, dangerous conditions, etc) but also product (poison put in bread to make it cheaper, etc.) There is no way out of this dynamic in capitalism because this is all fundamental to capitalism.
The translations make no sense to a German native speaker. The list even swap meanings, i.e. between confusion and clutter.
Accurate translations are:
Verwirrung = Confusion
Zwietracht = Discord
You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'.
Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exist in theory, it is just then number two [Zwei] and the noun for a traditional costume [Tracht] strung together; would be a great name for a German shop that sells used/pre-owned traditional costumes btw.)
Unordnung = Clutter
Beamtenherrschaft = Rule of the public servant class
Illuminatus! is one of those works where there's a decent chance this is just a mistake or oversight, but also a decent chance this is exactly what the authors intended. You never can quite tell, and they definitely liked that.
I think the reason that English speakers swap ie/ei is that the pronunciations of these is not really consistent in English (at least in the American accent I speak), and I can't think of any words where both orderings exist but have different meanings. So the general impression I have about this is that I know there are supposed to be rules about it, but it seems pretty arbitrary and unimportant semantically.
I like the first blogpost or two. If I recall, it quickly shifts into a pop psychology grindset self improvement book if you keep reading the posts. Its reach starts to exceed its grasp.
Hot take: being clueless is better than these essays make it out to be. The examples are all really socially annoying people (Michael, Dwight) but I've known some pretty nice and pleasant middle managers who had generally great lives. They probably could've gotten all of that with less work but perfectly hitting the Pareto frontier is quite difficult.
According to this theory, the Clueless are the ones who suffer the most.
They invest most, they care about made up goals nobody else cares about, they play by rules everyone else thinks are dumb, they feel loyal to a company that doesn't love them back, and because they are more invested in the company, they are the ones who feel the loss the most when the sociopaths pull the rug.
I think it's actually the Losers who have it better: they are simply not invested enough, they are replaceable but also find their place in other companies, and in any case, failure affects us-- I mean, them -- less simply because they are not invested as much and they never felt any loyalty.
"Loser" is a loaded term because it sounds like the cultural, lowercase loser ("so and so is such a loser!") but it actually means "loser in the game of maximum capitalist profit and power". But if you're not really playing that game, being a loser at it isn't so bad.
Yeah perhaps a better term for Loser is Abstainer. Because the Sociopaths also can certainly lose at the game of maximum capitalist profit. Loser/Abstainer just chooses not to play the game.
losers, clueless never had to be productive, just scapegoats. But now losers dont get that buffer window to try and become sociopaths, they just dont get hired at all.
This is why I come to this site. Some of the tech stuff goes over my head and limited skills, but this article was insightful and still so relevant. It probably applies to non-profit organizations that tend to falter after their visionary (aka psychopath) leader retires.
And it likely applies to a ton of churches out there, especially megachurches, where you walk in to the lobby and see leadership books by their star CEO aka pastor about leadership or life lessons or whatever. But those megachurches churn through employees until they find just enough psychopaths (aka executive pastors) willing to be assholes for God, plenty of clueless who are happy to serve as that middle management, and then those who are okay with being loyal and doing just enough week to week for a paycheck.
I've seen it all too often.
Check out the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus if you want a glimpse about what happens to those who actually call some of those megachurches to live into what they say - like actually caring for their neighbors.
I liked that model a lot, but it made me a bit sad too.
All my life I was bad at being a loser, somehow I never really felt I fit in. I thought this was because of psychopathic tendencies or something. However, after reading this I realized there was another option and I was just clueless.
It is perhaps crucial to note that Venkat Rao, the author, himself found an escape from the system under study here; he’s been consulting or otherwise feral for about 15 years.
Readit News
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
The biggest takeaway for me is that you shouldn't expect to succeed as a manager by meeting (or exceeding) KPIs. It's about as effective as being a "nice guy" and expecting intimacy in return.
The KPIs are there for assigning blame, not for identifying key personnel. You can game them to increase your compensation if you are already doing something that an even bigger manager finds useful and important. Conversely, you can get away with half-assing every official performance indicator as long as you keep delivering the real thing.
I see some correlation here to hesitancy in adopting LLMs for coding.
"If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"
On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.
On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Politics and the English Language aimed at the language sins of attention economy era social media.
Dead Comment
Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
1. business people sold themselves as the best to manage companies and took over companies (just like lawyers do in governments), changing the norm from decades ago when it was more likely for engineers to run companies than some kind of McKinsey guy
2. but they have no idea besides business/money metrics so they quickly become overwhelmed and decide based on who makes the most compelling argument ("don't bring me more problems, give me solutions")
3. sociopaths exploit this by telling the execs what they want to hear
4. only after a while, after significant investment of resources in the decisions/projects proposed by the sociopaths it comes up to light it's complete nonsense
5. the sociopaths are aware of this, so they usually pivot before SHTF or they even exploit the situation to ask for more to "fix" the problems
6. the execs who backed the sociopaths want to cover their own asses so they hide the problems from higher ups for as long as possible (CEO, board, investors, shareholders, clients, authorities, public)
7. competent people are pulled out of productive work and thrown to solve impossible or even contradicting situations; some burn out, some leave, and the ones who stay are often stained forever like they were the cause of the problem
Sometimes the sociopaths are external consulting companies or companies offering some magic huge system that they promise will solve all the problems.
Sociopaths exploit information asymmetry.
Classic: https://web.archive.org/web/20051013062258/http://www.kuro5h...
Verwirrung Season of Chaos January 1-March 14
Zweitracht Season of Discord March 15-May 26
Unordnung Season of Confusion May 27-August 7
Beamtenherrschaft Season of Bureaucracy August 8-October 19
Grummet Season of Aftermath October 20-December 31
From the book Illuminatus!
Accurate translations are:
Verwirrung = Confusion
Zwietracht = Discord
You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'.
Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exist in theory, it is just then number two [Zwei] and the noun for a traditional costume [Tracht] strung together; would be a great name for a German shop that sells used/pre-owned traditional costumes btw.)
Unordnung = Clutter
Beamtenherrschaft = Rule of the public servant class
Grummet = Second hay harvest
Chaos is the opposite of order and the opposite of Ordnung is Unordnung
They invest most, they care about made up goals nobody else cares about, they play by rules everyone else thinks are dumb, they feel loyal to a company that doesn't love them back, and because they are more invested in the company, they are the ones who feel the loss the most when the sociopaths pull the rug.
I think it's actually the Losers who have it better: they are simply not invested enough, they are replaceable but also find their place in other companies, and in any case, failure affects us-- I mean, them -- less simply because they are not invested as much and they never felt any loyalty.
"Loser" is a loaded term because it sounds like the cultural, lowercase loser ("so and so is such a loser!") but it actually means "loser in the game of maximum capitalist profit and power". But if you're not really playing that game, being a loser at it isn't so bad.
And it likely applies to a ton of churches out there, especially megachurches, where you walk in to the lobby and see leadership books by their star CEO aka pastor about leadership or life lessons or whatever. But those megachurches churn through employees until they find just enough psychopaths (aka executive pastors) willing to be assholes for God, plenty of clueless who are happy to serve as that middle management, and then those who are okay with being loyal and doing just enough week to week for a paycheck.
I've seen it all too often.
Check out the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus if you want a glimpse about what happens to those who actually call some of those megachurches to live into what they say - like actually caring for their neighbors.
All my life I was bad at being a loser, somehow I never really felt I fit in. I thought this was because of psychopathic tendencies or something. However, after reading this I realized there was another option and I was just clueless.
Suggested starter essay: https://meltingasphalt.com/personality-the-body-in-society/