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See the Scott Alexander review:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...

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

> Scott took it too literally

He does say in section (I):

> I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”

He shouldn't have taken this advice literally either.

Just curious what’s the definition of “success” here? Getting promoted and getting a better compensation?

And self-actualization, if you're into that.

> arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology

I see some correlation here to hesitancy in adopting LLMs for coding.

Explain.

to hazard a guess: the better your coding model is, the less you have to assess your fundamentals, and thereby suffer arrested development.

I was thinking of our natural reluctance to adopt newer and better tools because of our comfort and expertise with old ones.

I know I should have experimented with LLMs sooner, but leaned into my instinctive "VIM has gotten me this far" attitude.

Liked this comment:

"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.

and then I'd show him a news broadcast from last week, where the president of the United States of America literally said "War is peace".

Is the use of "literally" here, and the use of quotes, meant to be taken literally (as in, he literally said this)?

Or is this the sense of "literally" which actually means "figuratively"?

I love that we ruined our escape character in language.

We now need a new way to convey to listeners that our words need to be taken literally. Perhaps the VBA method and just double the 'literally's:

I took a flaming shot of tequila and my mouth is literally literally on fire

A post to the Truth Social account for Donald Trump included: "The heavy and pinpoint bombing, however, will continue, uninterrupted throughout the week or, as long as necessary to achieve our objective of PEACE THROUGHOUT THE MIDDLE EAST AND, INDEED, THE WORLD!"

That's the closest thing I'm finding. Not seeing reporting that he literally said "war is peace".

That sounds more like "peace through superior firepower" rather than "war is peace".

Can we be literal? It means peace through using superior firepower to kill people.

Sure, but it's not equating the states of war and peace, but asserting that war is a method for achieving peace, presumably when everyone on the other side is incapable or undesirous of attacking or threatening same.

Are we forgetting the context of who started the war?

It's just not relevant to the statement "I'm punching until they can't punch back" who threw the first punch.

There's a vast gulf between "having" superior firepower as a deterrent and "using" superior firepower for mass murder, particularly against elementary schools and desalination plants. The latter is war, at its worst.

Beatings will continue until morale improves?

You can't make this up.

[dead]

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.

Adhering to the predictable/ritualistic/comfortable nature of "Gametalk",

Here's one question I asked:

"How does Eric Berne's Gametalk as interpreted by Venkatesh Rao signal to the sociopaths that those who engage in them are losers worth talking to? Distinguish between "channels" that Eric has identified as well as new signals that Rao or others have discovered."

https://youtu.be/9B3oem_56jg?t=52s

Can you expand on your included youtube link? It's not clear the relationship.

I'll admit the connection is loose, personally found it amusing because:

Mike is the archetypal nihilist (Sociopath or Loser), the other two would potentially be engaging in a Clueless interaction if Mike wasn't there, according to the Scott/Rao theory of jokes, you need 3 for a Loser joke.

The preceding banter seems to be more of a Loser Gametalk: no social status is at stake; it's irrelevant to their white-collar role. Mike's Straighttalk intervention is typical of a sociopath; the wall breaking joke is that these Losers don't know what his real job is. If they did, the pointless but playful debate would have died a violent death-- because it'd get too real

If these were Clueless middle managers debating their value to their company, it might even be out of character for Mike to notice them..

I guess one day there will be a massive leak of executives chats with their LLMs, and we'll find out what they really think.

I think that’s called the Epstein Files.

Used to think that Epstein was a Posturetalker but turns out he is a native Gametalker

[dead]

(2009)

Previous discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

What I've seen many, many times.

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...

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.

In case you are serious, engineers were most likely to lead companies until the 70s. In some countries they still are. The negotiated middle ground was engineer + MBA. But even those are kind of going out of fashion and instead there are marketing/HR/accounting + MBA filling up boards and leadership.

It's also a function of young ambitious people just following the money over time. Finance has grown and grown and grown because it's the easiest place to skim the cream. Combine that with the fact that it's transferable from company to company and it's clear why the trend. Obviously the only innovation these people are capable of is financial innovation (repackaging derivatives, ever-more-convoluted deal structures to snow people, etc), but that doesn't much matter as long as there is a sufficient base of enough new companies with actual innovations sprouting up that it provides enough grist for the finance mill.

What's the ableist angle here..?

The MacLeod Life Cycle reminds me on the 5 seasons of the illuminati calendar:

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!

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

Grummet = Second hay harvest

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.

Frahnken-STEEN vs Franken-STINE

Right, we truly don't have a strong rule about differentiating these in the standard American dialect! Most people say STINE for this one, but if you say STEEN, nobody is gonna be confused or tell you that it's wrong.

Exactly, Americans do use both pronunciations .

But Beamte are heavily linked to bureaucracy.

Chaos is the opposite of order and the opposite of Ordnung is Unordnung

TIL

What makes the Gervais Principle interesting is that it frames organizations as systems that are supposed to become pathological over time. Instead of reforming them the economy just replaces them through mergers, layoffs, and new startups.

In that sense, the real “governance mechanism” isn’t internal management at all but the external Darwinian churn of the market.

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.

The Clueless is the person who actually believes his work makes a difference and wants to do a good job. Not necessarily a terrible way to live, although it should be acknowledged that the Loser frees up time and energy to devote to other things, notably family.

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.

The problem with these theories is that they fall apart as soon as you start adding or modifying the types. Because they aren't actually correct, just simple and flattering.

Fully agreed. I think "Loser" is a misnomer. And indeed, going by the essay, the Sociopaths can also lose big... they are willing to risk it all for personal gain, but it can end very badly for them if they miss their window, their manipulations get exposed, or decide to do illegal things to get ahead (high profile cases in my mind: Enron, Epstein, etc).

The names come from a cartoon that predates Rao's essay. He simply reused them because they mostly work. Just like the Sociopaths are not all literal sociopaths, the Losers are not all literal losers.

Yes, I understand this. I was simply making this explicit, it was a good idea to clarify that neither Losers nor Sociopaths match the common definition of those terms.

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.

This is interesting enough, I’d buy a book about this (audiobook at least).

I’ve tried to limit myself to only the best and most practical books about leadership that didn’t start corporate speak, and I doubt Gervais Principle would be quoted or used in work conversation, so it’s perfect.

You’re in luck, he sells it as a book: https://www.amazon.com/Gervais-Principle-Complete-Office-Rib...

What other books did you find in that style?

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.

Give the Melting Asphalt blog a try, it's a solid resource on those two tiers.

Suggested starter essay: https://meltingasphalt.com/personality-the-body-in-society/

Being clueless can be admirable, I think. These are the people you work with who put in the work even when it won't lead to a fatter paycheck for themselves. The essay makes them out to all be useless middle managers, but the actual top contributers to a team also fit most closely with this category.

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.

I'm consulting or otherwise feral for about 12 years.

Didn't make me less clueless, I think...

I've always been a clued-in loser because I lack the sociopathy to get promoted :(

This essay was my bible at Google. It openly matched internal hierarchy and our own secret GDNA testing results illustrated it directly showing VP and above scored highly on the need to dominate over discover truth etc.

The problem was to my existential horror: i couldn’t use this knowledge to get anywhere beyond clueless. Because super large western organizations either purposefully hide information or are full of stupidity so much that they can’t share it.

I never could climb to any kind of safety —- until I realized that was the point. There is no safety. You only climb if you recognize death is inevitable, leaving those who want safety behind.

So now that I’m further up: Peter Turchins elite over production is my new nightmare

I resonate with your comment but completely reject the conclusion. Death is inevitable, who cares how high you climbed on a ladder you didn't define? Why is that meaningful?

Money is nice, dont get me wrong, but to value the climbing itself?

Doing hard things is tautologically good.

Hard war over easy peace, then?

It's more like, good things happen to be harder while bad things are more often easy. So being able and eager to do hard things lets you actually choose (and then hopefully you choose the good stuff).

How so?

> Doing hard things is tautologically good.

Bahaha yeah overwork is virtue, sure

I didn't say anything about "overwork." No need to make assumptions (or just make things up).

Bullshit. Many things are hard because they shouldn't be done and systems have evolved to make the thing hard for good reason.

I see you’ve probably never spent time in a large, ossified bureaucracy.

There are plenty of things in the world that are hard only because they’ve been made difficult by people who either don’t want them done, don’t understand, or greatly benefit from their not being done, but would be a fantastic idea to do.

Such as get a new coffee maker for our office, but it would take two years, multiple committees, and an electrical study in order to do so. No i am not kidding

They said "many things", not "everything".

It’s interesting. That’s all. Boredom is death for me.

The safety, if that’s what you wish to attain, lies in living as frugally as you can while vesting your RSUs for as long as you can bear, and GTFO of the rat race.

This is a lie for smooth brains who think they’ve figured out the “hack” to the system.

Usually resulting in living as if you worked a menial job not having a family and essentially working hard to not achieve anything. Then mostly living the rest of your life consuming your own smugness.

On the contrary, the frugal option is quite often the cooler, more fulfilling one:

- riding a bike instead of driving (makes you fitter, hotter, increases mating potential)

- cooking food (impressive to friends and potential mates, makes you and your family healthier)

- building furniture, tech stuff, whatever (your stuff is customized to your own tastes and situation)

- playing music in a band (get paid for a Saturday night out instead of paying for it)

- helping friends and asking friends for help in return (builds social ties)

> Peter Turchins elite over production is my new nightmare

The Lamborgini Urus is a sign of the apocalypse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6_Z0yGwtx0

Conveying information via 10min+ videos that people preusmably watch at 1.5x+ speed is also a sign of the apocalypse.

As the essay points out, we losers have only two paths out of loserdom. The first is to leverage sociopathic tendencies, to scheme and maneuver and accrue power (probably as a minion to an actual sociopath, I don’t think transformation happens except at the early stage of a career). The second is to check out and coast, tacitly improving our position without actually striking a new bargain or finding any safety.

My own losing trap, which I think is common, is to try to periodically make sense of the organization and map a logical path forward for myself. This never works. My career progress in the organization has actually come about through sheer accident and/or lucky association.

Man does this hit home.

Same mostly, you can increase your luck a small bit by the strategy you outline, but then you reach the limit of Elite Overproduction where your competence will work against your lucky pretty fast (Elites start to hate the competent and dont want them around since they make them look bad)

From what I have observed. Quiet people who speak sense and don't get involved in arguments, never rise to the top, whereas those loud morons almost certainly do. Often because those quiet people think they'll be less shouty, nagging. As long as the quiet ones can get on with the job and the loud pricks don't interfere, it makes the organisation dysfunctionally work. That said, world would be much nicer if these types could be just sacked. They don't contribute anything but increase stress and eat the salary budget that otherwise could be redistributed to the rest of the productive workers.

The quiet ones need to learn to speak up when they have something important to add. Just sitting there quietly and not speaking, not participating in discussions, and not speaking up when something is wrong, is NOT noble.

"Quiet" people who know when to speak absolutely rise above anyone else, in a professional setting, in my experience.

The right time to speak up about something that's wrong is always NOW. Why? Because if you knew and didn't say something at the earliest possible moment you will get blamed for inaction later.

If you don't say something when you see something is wrong, never say anything about it (at all). Otherwise you're asking for trouble later when the shit eventually hits the fan. "You knew and didn't say anything‽"

Even if someone gets upset at you for speaking up, that's still a better situation than being blamed later when the real finger pointing occurs.

"Don't look at me! I warned about this!" is a very real get-out-of-jail-free card in medium to large organizations. Especially if you have your objections in writing (save all emails!).

As a great example: At my work, the company made a piss poor decision to buy an (expensive) enterprise product that I warned would not work to solve the problem it was being purchased to solve. I warned them ahead of time that it wouldn't work. Then I warned them in the middle of the project and again, at implementation time.

When it didn't work, management came down HARD on everyone. In the middle of the finger pointing meeting I pulled up my emails which were sent to the people trying to point the proverbial finger and the meeting was over. Just like that! I saved the whole team with the simple act of voicing my objections in writing at every stage of the project.

If I didn't do that I have no doubt that some scapegoat would've been fired. Instead, no one got fired (sadly, because the normal rules of incompetence don't apply to the clueless/management layer, haha).

Unfortunately, to this day management never takes my offers of, "instead of purchasing this terrible 'enterprise' solution for millions of dollars, give ME that money and I'll produce a solution that's better in every way. I'll even have it up and running faster than we could requisition and install the product!"

The problem is knowing the "when", or better yet choosing the "right" one. Don't ask me about these targets I have on my back.

Many times and in many orgs, the window to speak up opens too seldomly and it's barely cracked open...

I see your naive opinion attracted lots of negativity. In perfect world decades ago the quiet ones had a chance. With right approach and good timing it worked very well: https://www.bmwblog.com/2025/02/10/bmw-3-series-touring-hist... And that was seen in German economy growth. Now it’s completely different. Result is secondary, process is most important: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/munich-...

Now it’s noise and screaming. You can speak up, result will be the same as if you would do that in the forest. Loud bullshiters will be promoted. Your technical opinion with properly perceived problems will be discarded as stupid. Welcome in the age of noise. And it also reflects in the current German economy and probably politics too.

We've got to pick our battles.

Yep. And some people will just never take it will and do everything they can to sink you if you disagree with them.

Being able to yell and scream and be loud yet choosing to be calm and quiet can be noble in the right circumstances. Being quiet and timid because that's all you're capable of doing is simply being ineffectual and weak and isn't noble even when being calm and quiet is the right thing to do.

Yes but how else will they live a rich internal life where they are the hero’s and everyone else is useless.

If they speak up their illusions might be shattered!

[dead]

"most loud morons rise to the top" is very different from "most of the top are loud morons".

Also I don't think either is true in general, but it is partially true in fundamentally social regimes like sales an bureaucracy where mother nature isn't involved so truth isn't a major factor in success.

I think critics use the word "moron" too often to mean "someone whose intelligence is different from mine, and doesn't have a respect for truth as a universal principle". Ladder climbing "sociopaths" apply their intelligence to social puzzles that many engineers and scientists ignore or don't understand. And some people are smart but also bullies, and dominate people who might be smarter. That's different from being a dumb bully.

Okay, so then — who gets squeezed more by AI: the clueless or the losers?

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.

But clueless need losers to exist, so as a second order effect, they lose as well.

I have enjoyed this article series many times in the past. Having been in all three classes, he got losers and clueless correct, but he is mistaken on the sociopaths.

1. Sociopaths don't recruit. They build fiefdoms and leverage social ties. How many times have you seen a random guy making minimum wage become senior management? Almost never. The exception to this is people who are hired to be in the running for senior management who are moved all over the company at a fast pace to get the lay of the land.

2. Losers are sociopaths who do not have the birthright to be sociopaths. Put the other way around, sociopaths are losers born into valuable social ties. Their natures are the same. Power corrupts. Most people never learn what they become with power. The clueless are the strange ones, the glue that holds everyone together and keeps the lights on.

3. As the author says, gametalk is obtuse discussion distinguished by the stakes involved. That is normal human social patterns, only distinguished by the stakes. If direct, straightforward discussion was the norm, we wouldn't need to use adjectives for it. The clueless are once again the outliers of the organization. The stakes and who gets to use them are the dividing line once again.

It's hard to think that most people are so selfish they would throw their group and others under the bus for benefits, but if you look for it, you will see it everywhere. Most people do not have the ability to exercise enough power to make it obvious.

Think about Resume Driven Development. Half of it is clueless people genuinely excited for Brand New Thing, but what about the rest? They know that in five years, companies will demand ten years of experience in Brand New Thing. So what do they do? They push for Brand New Thing wherever they can. This lets them accumulate leverage for their next job. Who does this hurt? Their company and everyone who has to deal with their Ball of Mud when they leave. This is the moral equivalent of some senior manager taking short-term gains at long-term loss to grab a fat bonus and fail upwards into another company.

I really enjoyed the series, but it has the same problems as other realpolitik subjects. Clueless will grab onto it thinking they can become the next Alexander the Great or Jeff Bezos and make a fool of themselves. The essential ingredients are never spoken out loud, and topics like this are always gross oversimplifications by their very nature.

My own version has True Psychos at the top, you have to be one to climb your way to the squid games corporations play.

There are at least four kinds of underlings. Most middle managers are a combination. First you have the Douchebags, people who traded their morals for money. Second you have the Punching Bags, mercenaries whose moral code is akin to the mafia. Third there are Teabags, unintelligent Dunning Krueger types who are the shrill mouthpieces of the TP. Fourth you have Poop Bags, people who clean up after everyone else.

Anyone else can't scroll on this site?

Focusing only on the second and top layer of the diagram, I usually call them “the increments and the excrements”.

I find all these principles to be wrong. Having worked in many companies of many sizes in many industries, there's a more variable distribution of characteristics of office workers. They can be sociopathic, empathic, competent, incompetent, kind, mean, sincere, duplicitous, flexible, inflexible, passionate, aloof, personable, antisocial, motivated, unmotivated, productive, unproductive. And they're always a mix of these things.

Some people are promoted without reaching their level of incompetence. Some leaders are actually empathetic. Some middle managers are effective. And some low-level grunts are consciously and happily both productive and exploited without desire for more. Granted, they're in the minority, but they do exist. I would rather there be language to describe and venerate these people, than to paint the whole world with a pessimistic brush.

The whole point of stereotyping, which is the basis for the "Gervais principle", is to cover up any subtly or nuance and feel smug about ourselves when doing it. You coming in here with your "actually real people are more complex and varied"... You're spoiling the fun!

Have you seen a blockbuster full of nuance, pastel colors, and "yes but"s? A publication like this needs to be garishly gloomy and scandalously cynical to generate enough stir. It draws attention. Why would one think that a book about exploitation and self-deception won't exploit the reader a tiny bit?

The most interesting parts of the essay are the ways that Rao (a full proponent of the niche psychotherapy school of transactional analysis) applies his view of psychoanalysis to describe the social dynamics between coworkers with differing levels of nihilism.

He argues that the 'sociopath class' of social-climbing nihilists map 1:1 onto the leaderships of large organizations but it's rare in the real world. Usually there are people of all levels of naiveté and nihilism at all ranks of organizations, with naive true believers mixing with nihilists at the top, the middle and the bottom fairly equally, because the world has too much churn to settle into the kind of density-separation equilibrium he describes.

That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck. They saw their parents do The Office in real life.

Interesting is also that Michael does make a really good arc from season one to when he leaves. He remains clueless, or rather he it dawns on him he does not want to become like Ryan or David (the articles sociopath). Like he says in a later season “Business is about people.”

The smartest thing they did with the US version of The Office after season 1 was to make Michael highly competent in sales and its longterm relationships. S1 and the UK version of the show viewed the boss as incompetent at every level, it was much more cynical. Making Michael marginally competent gives him an empathetic leg to stand on for the audience. Had they kept Michael exactly like David Brent it probably would have still been hilarious but flamed out around season 2 or 3.

I agree, it made his character arc more interesting. Also, the entire show is centered around Michael. The later seasons really suffer without him.

It is also useful because it shows an old adage: people get promoted to their level of incompetence. Michael is actually an excellent salesman. He's a bad manager. He was promoted to branch manager because he was good at a different job.

This is just like when a really good engineer is promoted and becomes a bad manager.

> That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck.

Wouldn't that make them even bigger ~losers~ Clueless?

The ~losers~ Clueless are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!

Putting in +25% extra into their job for a 5% promotion, for example.

Putting in effort for anything other than money is in the companies interest - they want people to be happy with vibes-as-compensation instead of money-as-compensation!

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EDIT: I meant to say Clueless, not "losers".

> The losers are strictly those who put in more effort than they get in return but who cannot see it!

I think those would be the losers who get promoted to clueless, at least in this metaphor. The losers who aren't clueless are putting in the bare minimum work that doesn't get them fired. If they overperform, they (according to the theory) get promoted.

I fully agree this nasty "vibes-as-compensation" bullshit, "we're all a family", etc, is in the interest of the top leadership. The sociopaths, if you will.

You're correct, I meant Clueless, sorry. In my defense, I last read this when it was first published, so maybe ... 15 years? 20?

Gen Y was supposed to be values-driven too, Gen X invented slackers and grunge who were all about authenticity, boomers were children of hippies, beatniks preceded hippies…

The malaise afflicting Gen Z is more- secular- than cultural, I fear. The endpoint of economic trends.

> boomers were children of hippies

The hippies largely were Boomers, not their children.

The status legibility lesson is priceless, and even more so now that the portion of Sociopaths has grown dramatically, so that many "losers" are now dark triad types.

The "organization evolution" diagram is missing a crucial step, usually happening just before "death": some Sociopaths start trading intelligence (required, to a certain level, if to sustain crucial efforts in producing positive results) for mediocrity, in order to gain full obedience (the Clueless being hired are no longer A+ or A, but rather D, E, etc. level players, fully & blindly dedicated to the "leader"). This step is to be observed today in some governments.

Ironically the original Office, featuring Ricky Gervais, has a much better and more nuanced implicit theory of management than this.

Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.

The actual upper management, sociopathic or not, are certainly not scouring the underlings for underperforming sociopaths phoning it in to promote (imagine Keith being promoted!), and are actually more interested in making them redundant to make efficiency savings. We don't see senior management at all, they don't see most of the employees at all and they clearly don't have much idea what's going on, initially considering promoting Brent (because he applies for it and can bluff his way through an interview) but then in the second season bringing in Neil to oversee him and get rid of him (because they've started paying attention). Neil is obviously more socially adept which is probably why he's been promoted higher at a younger age, but he also appears to be actually good at his job. On the other hand, Gareth whose career appears to have topped out at assistant to the Regional Manager, ends up getting Brent's middle management job though he has zero social skills and actually liked the guy whose seat he takes, because he wants it, he grafts and he's there. Most of the others in the office neither work particularly hard nor particularly care for seeking promotion. And it's a paper company, they don't exactly have many ways to identify high performers anyway and the really ambitious and talented people are elsewhere.

(We don't see the people at the top at all, but they probably went to the right school, started in middle management somewhere else and hopped jobs adding bullet points of performance they can claim credit for to their CV until they got C-suite titles and compensation)

> Brent (Gervais) is neither a sociopath nor the top dog he thinks he is, he's a middle manager who it's implied was legitimately good at sales, but is not at all good at the role he's been promoted into because it's a completely different one.

I think in this hierarchy Brent is supposed to be Clueless rather than Sociopath.

I agree it doesn't 100% match the characters.

By the way, I like Steve Carell but the British show was much better than the US one.

The distinction between losers, clueless and sociopaths has been very useful in my career.

It made me recognize how many times I, or people I know, was the weakest link in the chain, the clueless.

So have been the many examples of power talk and the importance of information.

have anything to read more about the power talk stuff?

Not really to be honest because the framework under which Venkatesh Rao talks about power talk is a bit different than how most sociologists see power talk.

Sociologists focus on tone, Rao focuses on the content.

In The Gervais Principle information is a currency and treated as negotiation leverage. You never give it for free, unless strictly in the boundaries of your job. Thus, under this lens, you collect as much information and never give it away for free.

Suppose you're a software engineer and a service you work on is slow.

There's two ways you can go about it:

"Our API has a 300ms+ latency, I have some ideas on how to fix it" -> giving information, and work for free. You're in the loser/clueless category.

Which of those depends on your awareness: are you aware of the political game and ignore it and focus on the craft? Loser. Are you not aware of the political game and try to do "what's best for the team/company"? You're clueless.

Then there's the sociopath's version:

"We may have a performance issues affecting reliability. Before we go deeper, we should decide who owns performance optimization."

This is power talk. Even if you don't own the performance optimization you still:

- communicated that you hold information others don't

- you're setting the tone and direction of the meeting

At this point somebody may raise the point of "which performance issues?" and here the hard part begins, how do you navigate and play the game? Are you prepared to motivate why ownership comes before information?

In the end, probably the best way to learn power talk in the context of the Gervais principle is to experiment, observe and study. Because no other sociologists has focused on it with Rao's angle.

Thanks

This is broadly accurate, but if anyone feels like freaking out and quickly needs an antidote to the "high" class of sociopath grifters, perhaps could find some solitude in Wim Wenders' Perfect Days for a few hours.

well, i guess this has been posted on hn before, but i've never read it, so thanks for posting again. i'm glad i spent most of my work day reading it instead of doing work (but maybe just because some of the conclusions helped me rationalize the futility of my own job in a way i've been struggling with lately).

the part near the end discussing the loser's realization and process of transitioning into sociopath (or ending up "worse" than before) reminded me of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. it's been over a decade since i read it but i think the underlying idea is fairly similar to that process.

Previously...

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41214180 - Aug 2024 (173 comments)

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33298158 - Oct 2022 (149 comments)

The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25486869 - Dec 2020 (60 comments)

The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1267202 - April 2010 (27 comments)

The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=937541 - Nov 2009 (32 comments)

The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to "The Office" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881296 - Oct 2009 (63 comments)

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I don't think those two things are alike at all, unfortunately, however "cool" it feels to make such an analogy.

Perhaps it's worth going and reading about actual slavery and what it was like.

perhaps is doing a lot of massaging there

I love me a good massage

Either side of an analogy can have factors at different scales. But it can still be a valid analogy.

If you are saying that because slavery was much worse, then modern slaves should just suck it up and work harder. Then that isn't really helping is it?

This is kind of the argument "others have had it worse, so lets not try to make anything better for people today".

Are you seriously equating the modern office and work, where, you know, you can go home after, to life as a slave on a plantation? Sure, analogies can have factors at different scales but the scales come into the equation when the factor is the axis we are analyzing.

Is your issue that life requires action to maintain it? Do you believe no work is required at all in life? The idea that work is like slavery is deep when you're 14 and then not so much.

No one had said our modern lives couldn't be better but you don't have to liken our existence to slavery to get to "things could be better".

The tools of slavery have evolved but the overall end goal has not. The almost cliché slavery depiction of the chain and whip had evolved into the coolie system, the offshoring system and the kafeel system. The office is simply a part of that family of exploitation methods. There is a difference between serving the collective good and being a slave.

Many of us want to work on something greater than ourselves, to contribute to society not out of selfishness or lifestyle, but to genuinely help society function and make people happy. Many of us aspire to make a small dent in the universe with something great, something that can stand the test of time, building a thing in defiance of our own mortality in the hopes that our ancestors remember us, learn from us and run with the torch of civilization, to improve the human project to a level of greatness that we may ourselves never witness. In a way, to create is one of the highest forms of self expression as a human.

This is entirely different from reality, where retirements are wiped out by financial sorcerers, after decades of fulfilling your end of the social contract, trading in your productive years to a company that _does not care about you OR your community_, where run away inflation, debt and taxation are used to funnel capital to other competing nations or a unwitting fifth column whether that is transmigrasi in Indonesia, the influx of Indians in Texas or the mass refugee stream to Europe caused by US-Israeli inflicted wars, which has already surpassed in numbers the transatlantic slave trade, the endless wars that balance domestic unrest with a common enemy to rally around the flag, and the accompanied transfer of wealth across nations as these warmongers decide which country gets axed to serve the greater powers. There is no saving for retirement, there is no freedom, there is only bondage, death and taxes.

Meanwhile, the collective fruit of western society is plundered through the illegal pirating of the intellectual output of millions of creatives who poured everything they have in it, and it is plundered by the very same class of people that sued common folk for pirating software, music, movies and books. Aaron Swartz would roll over in his grave to see how the government supports companies like Google, OpenAI and Anthropic who rely on plagiarizing IP at scale.

The collective fruit of an entire civilization’s labor is plundered before your very eyes right before they launch it into a cataclysmic war that wipes away the very people who dedicated their lives to the sciences and humanities in order to further the human project. To deal such a low blow is an atrocity that is worse in its impact than the plantation system, it is reminiscent of the bronze age collapse that leveled ancient Egypt.

No good deed goes unpunished, as Ozymandius found out the hard way.

Maybe it is about agency. If you have no agency, aren't you a slave? If your boss is expecting a blowjob or will fire you, is that not pretty bad?

I didn't know that American Slavery was the benchmark by which we can use that word. If I'm not literally being whipped I can't use that word now?

How about servitude? Subjugation? Yoked? What is acceptable now?

Okay if not American Slavery what's your benchmark? Having to do things you don't want? I'm being serious. You use extreme language and hyperbole so it's hard to take you seriously. Do you think your situation is akin to like, someone being held hostage in a call center and forced to scam people? Where is the line, in your mind?

Because it is a hard line to draw, doesn't mean I'm not being serious.

You are objecting to using the word 'slave' as a descriptor, except in extreme cases.

But the term slave is often used in culture for a lot of things.

Being a 'slave to your addictions', 'a slave to your desires', 'an office slave', 'wage slave'. etc.... I'll spare you a list of hundreds of examples.

I think since you are the one objecting, then you draw the line.

I tend to think it does hinge on 'agency'. If you are trapped. But, sure, being trapped in an office today, is not as painful as being trapped as a slave in the US south. Does that mean the office worker should just shut up and deal with it, it is comfortable enough?

I do think agency is the fulcrum and concede I was being too pedantic. I do think even from an agency perspective it is possible to "drop out" to some extent but not completely, but that's why I asked about the work aspect. Even if you are not working a 9-5, life does require work. That some choose to toil the fields for their food or sit in a cubicle, you must work all the same. So are we slaves to life?

Maybe the problem is if you are working for someone else.

If you are toiling on your farm to survive. Or even hunting/gathering for food. You do need to work to live. So a slave to life? All life is a burden? Even Buddhist have 'all life is suffering'.

But toiling in an office, is usually for someone else's benefit. You are only getting a fraction of your work back in pay. So if you are 'trapped', unable to change, and working for someone else's benefit, then a 'slave'? (wish I had some Marx quote to fit here).

It is bit of slippery slope, since i'm not trying to include every person that just complains about working because they would rather play video games.

And yet, in a market system, the 'rat race', we all do have a sense that we are 'slaves to the system'.

Lots of word salad in this nonsensical write up anyway, but the author lost all credibility when he said that David Wallace is an ubersociopath.

you might need to reread his thesis again

Reading word salad once is enough for me, thanks.

<< author lost all credibility when he said that David Wallace is an ubersociopath.

This one got me interested. Can you elaborate? It is a show, but there is absolutely plenty of evidence within the show to support that claim.

Such as what?

There was plenty of evidence that Jan was a sociopath, or Ryan (obviously), but David had quite literally 0 sociopathic tendencies. Plus, this author said something about how David (and Jan) were both 'clueless' about Michael's incompetence, so it isn't like you can argue that David knew he was incompetent but tried to get him promoted to corporate anyway (which would obviously have been manipulative, although that alone wouldn't make him a sociopath).

When Dwight did random crazy shit, like set a fire in the office to do fire safety awareness day, David told him straight up that he couldn't do that and why. At no time did David display a lack of social skills, lack of empathy, or antisocial behaviour (except for a bit after he gets fired and prior to starting up Suck It). The most you could probably say there is that when Michael and Holly were forced apart (Holly back to Nashua), David was a bit muted - but even then, he tried to send Michael on a vacation (which got Michael laid in the end), even though the episode ends with Michael raging at David.

I'm happy to hear what the 'plenty of evidence' is.

It's been some years since I've seen The Office, but I thought David was the only somewhat reasonable person. Don't see how he would match up with the sociopath either, but my memory might be failing me.

> At no time did David display a lack of social skills, lack of empathy, or antisocial behaviour

I don't remember David much, but let it be noted that the essay uses "sociopath" in a different way than the commonly understood definition, much like the essay's use of "losers" doesn't mean what people usually mean by loser (as in "so and so is such a loser!"), it means "made a bad economic bargain / they are losing in the capitalist maximum profits & power game".

Better at hiding it. The sociopaths aren't 'obvious', they put on a mask, and the better the mask, the more they look normal.