Presumption of guilt, probably. The Patrick Bateman charicature of affect. But then this book is basically churning loser to realize that they should know their place, for fight to the top if they dared.
I was thinking much the same thing but wasn't sure how to put it into words. I see a bit of all three types in myself, but most of the time I don't really give a damn about social status or "fitting in" because I'm a loner weirdo. All this jockeying for social status and manipulating people just sounds so exhausting. Would Rao respond that people like you (and me) are just putting on a show of "look how much I don't care" in order to gain status?
In this system if you work for someone else and have no desire or possibility of achieving a position where other peoples’ work makes you more money you are a “loser” whether or not you are happy. He specifies that he means economic loser in a capitalist sense and not a loser at life. Among the ways Losers differ from the Clueless in that they find their meaning outside of work and can be perfectly content. That doesn’t mean you have to play status games but if you do they will be a different pattern than the other groups.
If I remember correctly, this is similar to how the original blog posts describe Toby: he’s a Sociopath by nature who tries to align himself with the common man (i.e. Losers) instead, but can’t do so completely because the Sociopath bell can’t be unrung. Something like that.
I’m not autistic myself, but I think I’d be a “hermit” too: I’m a Loser because I’d rather just be a W-2 employee and pursue my passions on the side (I’m too risk-averse to do otherwise), but I care more about my own personal pleasure than the approval of society.
Hermit is a loser. Doesn’t matter if youre deluded or not, you take the deal of a safe pay check for minimal work. Stanley from the show is a perfect example.
What you describe as "the Hermit" is the primary audience of the Gervais Principle: self-describedly highly analytical people who like cynical essays, they really know what is going on behind all the masks, it is only for X or Y or Z they are not the smooth successful operators in their social world.
Only good theory of reality is the one that has practical utility, so what good is a theory of social relations one can't put into practical use because it didn't come with the manual of interpersonal skills?
If rationality is defined as winning, then the people into polyamory are winning as much as they like the "only the strings I like until I don't" attached sex.
And right away we start off with perfectly crafted Clueless comments; all about pseudo-legal niceties and one-upsmanship while utterly ignoring the interesting aspects (which are difficult, and so impossible to place within the simplified, legible, world-view of the Clueless).
Can someone tell me what "postrationalist" is? I keep hearing people talking about it and I'm just not clued in enough to internet subcultures to know what it means in practice. My exposure to "rationalism" itself is pretty much just limited to SSC/ACX; like I know who Yudkowsky is and I've read a less wrong post or two but that's about it. What does it mean to "post-" the movement?
LessWrong defines it as "A post-rationalist is someone who believes the rationalist project is misguided or impossible, but who likes to use some of the tools and concepts developed by the rationalists" and I think that definitely applies to Venkatesh based on reading his blog posts and twitter. It's about accepting that the rationalism movement provides value and makes some good points, but deliberately stepping away from the goals and structure of the community.
So what's the difference between a "post-rationalist" and someone like me who has kind of lurked in these spaces for a while but never made the whole thing part of their own identity? Or is there not one?
"Post-" kind of has this sort of framing that whatever is being "posted" is being judged as obsolete.
Honestly I don't think there is a real post-rationalist community, so it's currently just a descriptor for lurkers (like me as well) who don't feel at home on LessWrong and the SSC-derived subreddits. If anyone knows of a good post-rationalist community let me know. I would not count SneerClub as post-rationalist, that's closer to anti-rationalist most of the time
The community is definitely there! See @vgr, @eigenrobot, and @roon on Twitter, for example. The community often refers to itself as "TPOT," This Part of Twitter. There was even "Vibecamp" (@tpotvibecamp) a sort of postrationalist Woodstock organized by @gptbrooke a few months ago.
As I understand the lingo, you're rat-adjacent (because you percieve yourself as having related beliefs, some subcommunity overlap, but not a member of the community.) Post-rat is someone in a similar position, but who explicitly concieves of themself as rejecting the rationality community while keeping some kernel of their beliefs which are actually true (often the general model of people's minds and epistomology.)
There's not one, except what they choose to label themselves.
There's also not a difference between a "post-rationalist" and a "rationalist" except what they choose to label themselves (since every rationalist has plenty of critiques of the "rationalist movement").
I generally think of it like Fugazi is Post-Punk: Ian and Guy were big time punks in Hardcore bands, then moved past the limited Hardcore genre and developed something new, which contained recognizable elements of the genre but expanded beyond its borders.
A post rationalist is someone who read, consumed, believed Rationalist doctrines; then moved on to other stuff that is outside the boundaries of Rationalism.
Both rationalists and post-rationalists agree in the technical machinery of science -- deduction, induction, experiments, blah blah.
But rationalists believe (explicitly or implicitly) that the axioms upon which this machinery should operate are "obvious" and "common sense". Think Newton or Kant.
Post-rationalists are willing to accept that the axioms are far from obvious, and that when a set of deductions appears to go off the rails or to conflict with reality, rather than continue to insist on the deduced result, we should reconsider the axioms.
Math were the first to get there with people like Cantor in the 19th C.
Physics got there with Relativity and QM in the 20th C.
Of course like anything, this is a live issue not in the hard sciences but in Social Science and Philosophy. Now what are the axioms of Social Science? Well, opinions differ but you can think of some that might correspond to "mainstream social science in America right now".
And you can imagine that some people in this space would be very upset if you were to argue that, if deductions from those axioms repeatedly reach results that violate common sense or empirical experience, then maybe the axioms should be re-thought. Hence the anger behind the labels...
David Chapman discusses this in (OMG, so much!) detail at meaningness.com.
I identify rationality with what he calls "the systematic mode", postrationality with "the fluid mode".
Rationality is believing that a "scientific method" exists, and that the actual history of science somehow was built upon it.
Post-rationality is accepting that real science was built on superior pattern recognition skills, that many can look at a pattern of facts and numbers and see nothing (losers), a few know the *standard* *formulaic* means by which to extract data from the facts and numbers (clueless), and a very few possess the pattern recognition skills to see something truly different (your Newton's, Einstein's, Gell-Mann's).
Of course saying that science is an intrinsically aristocratic activity, that very few have the "scientific taste" to genuinely advance a field, does not match the tenor of our times. And so we get nonsense, like "the Scientific Method" to keep the clueless happy while the rare genuine geniuses operate on post-rational "scientific taste".
Well, I guess that's me. Rational evaluation generally takes so long that the choice is past before it can be completed. So I tend to evaluate mock-ups ahead of time, and then pick the one that seems closest to applicable (and only trust it if several of the closer mock-ups give the same answer). But to me that looks like rationalism in a situation with constrained resources.
I wonder, wouldn't Yudkowsky himself qualify these days? Certainly he doesn't seem to think that the sanity waterline would rise quickly enough for the world to not be destroyed.
That's quite bemusing to me. I've got a degree in philosophy/been reading phil for approx. 15 years and I've never once heard of the "rationalist project". That's not to attack the concept, I just find it odd/interesting that the internet runs according to ideas that seem to have nothing to do with academia, and vice versa.
Have you read the old le#wrong discussions of academic philosophy between Yudkowsky and (I think) Lukeprog? There is not much interest in either side, with some exceptions.
Among several amusing things about the poorly chosen name 'rationalism' is that Hume would have shown more interest in the 'rationalist' wariness of cognitive bias, and the Bayesian approach to truth, than Descartes. In other words, 'rationalism' (at its best, at least) seems to me to be more in the tradition of empiricism and skepticism. It seems less in sympathy with the methodology of actual rationalism.
That said, I think Descartes would have been more likely to worry about hostile AI, and to embrace utilitarianism.
I don't understand. What does dissolving that distinction mean? Some guesses:
Is it the claim that deontology is the rationalization of (natural) emotions, while consequentialism comes from reasoning? (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/62p74DvwNHgQXCXcH/are-deontological-moral-judgments-rationalizations) I understand this as part of the argument for not acting according to deontology. I don't see it as part of an argument for why deontology is not really distinct from consequentialism.
Is it the sociological claim that most deontologists are probably consequentialists deep down? (With enough people tied to the trolley tracks, will most self-identified deontologists push Fat Man to stop the trolley?)
Yudkowsky used that phrase in a couple of places in the sequences, IIR. I interpreted it as another way of saying “they’re not really talking about the same thing,” or “this question needs reframing.”
Your guesses seem worth thinking about, but what I had in mind was, people use heuristics and legal systems that look sort of deontological, and create budgets for hospitals that look sort of utilitarian.
There is some deeper trade-off going on, that depends on how narrow the goal is and how difficult it is to get useful estimates of the relevant variables. Nothing is pure heuristics, because we live in a relatively stable society where estimating some variables is costless, because they are static enough to not require much thought. Nothing is pure consequentialism, because our calculations depend on a preference ranking that is not constructed by explicit calculation. And to some degree, one solution can be translated into the terms of the other.
Or we could think of society as a self-modifying system. Has it solved the alignment problem? Sort of. Maybe. It hasn’t killed everyone yet. The ancient Greeks might not think so.
Deontology or consequentialism is not really the immediate problem we face, ordinarily.
And what sorts of deontology and consequentialism are we talking about? Does deontology require us to articulate an absolute rule, or a philosophical system like Kant's, or is it the overlap of the system I intuitions of highly trained persons, or something else?
Is it even relevant? Are there deontologists who really make no exceptions? I guess they make lots of revisions and end up with epicycles? Are there consequentialists who break the law or violate social expectations frequently for the greater good? Or do they act like it doesn’t really make much difference?
Maybe we can think of rules and calculations as yin and yang, or tools in our toolbox.
This does not dissolve the problem, or we would feel more confident that some synthesis has been reached. Maybe someone else could take a better stab at it.
My interpretation is that it's a group of people that have been active members of or lurked in the rationalist community for a few years but then decided to take whatever they consider to be "the good bits" and distance themselves from the rest.
The stuff they consider to be the 'good bits' is often the rationalist epistemology / method of reasoning and the stuff they want to distance themselves from can be everything from AI risk to atheism.
Also pretty likely to be into pretty wooey meditation / psychadelic / spiritualist stuff from a quick skim over their twitter accounts. Frankly I haven't been super impressed by the community.
Same. I remember people suggesting Chapman's Meaningness blog when I expressed an appreciation for spiritual woo (despite not really "believing in" it — it just appeals); went ahead and read it, and then thought "well, this is a bunch of nonsense."
That might be a slightly-harsh evaluation, because I have a big pet peeve re: people talking authoritatively about Buddhism while presenting a skewed or outright incorrect version of doctrine; but still. Nothing else from the community I've seen since has really changed my mind about that.
Well, I have no idea about Chapman, but I have to assert that "Spiritualism" is, indeed, worthy of consideration...if properly understood, which is difficult, as very few practitioners bother with understanding. I suspect part of the problem is with translation, but also often the metaphors used aren't those that would be picked in current forms of expression.
E.g. it seems to me that Zen's "break the back of reason" is basically about developing an awareness of the parallel processing nature of the mind's apprehension of sensory information as opposed to languages more serial nature. Whether this is actually do-able may be a different question, but it's certainly possible to partially do it for short periods of time.
I saw that word and immediately felt I knew what it meant. Especially taken in context with this quote from Rao:
“There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before.”
I believe postrationalist refers to someone who sees past what Jon Haidt describes as the “rationalist delusion”. That is, the idea many hold that the conscious mind, rather than the subconscious mind, is responsible for their decision making.
I really relate to what Rao is saying. Once I truly understood Haidt’s work and stopped seeing politics as a matter or good and evil, but instead just a bunch of different tribes organized around different combinations of fundamental moral values, I started finding it very hard to *be* a member of any tribe. I became deaf to the “raw, unintelligible” sound of a language I was once able to experience.
My recollection is that when Rao first used "post-rationalist" to describe himself, it was in the same sense that Haidt means, and the fact that a different group of people were calling themselves "rationalists" was just a source of playful confusion.
I often saw him mentioned among lesswrong-adjacent people and never by anyone else, so I assumed he was so close to the community that that is what he must have meant.
Well, the words are used differently different communities.
Yes the tribal "bay area rationalists vs other places post-rationalists" feud is one version; but there is also a separate, parallel, much more interesting discussion going on about the limits to rationality and how to get beyond it WITHOUT going backwards to the world of woo or a kinds of solipsism.
To be glib, a post-rationalist is someone who's seen that question asked too many times.
Less glibly, afaict there was a collection of ex-rationalists, and people who looked at rationalism but never really accepted it, and to this accreted various people who agreed with these ex-or-not-quite rationalists on various things, usually more on a meta or vibe level.
I'm less familiar with the particulars of why various people left (or disagreed with) rationalism; I think there's been a fairly wide variety.
I say this as neither a rat nor a post-rat, merely an observer
I’ve noticed what I call “radical Consequentialism” in a lot of political ideas, primarily stemming from the far-Left.
It’s essentially any idea that purports to be based on a certainty that X individual action will cause Y systemic result. For instance, if Bob doesn’t “do the work”, he will uphold “White Supremacy”. Or if Suzy doesn’t use someone’s preferred pronouns, we will move up the “Pyramid of Genocide”.
It’s kind of like that Ashton Kutcher movie, The Butterfly Effect. People not only imagine their actions have more of an influence than they actually do, but also believe that they can predict the first, second, third... nth order effects of other peoples’ actions reliably enough that everyone should forgo their own desires and obey commands.
They don’t predict second and third order events. The wish cast them. This is evident when you look at the complete inability to predict utterly obvious second order events if they don’t fit in with the first order goals of an intervention.
I’m definitely not suggesting that the people who make “radical Consequentialist” claims can accurately predict 2nd, 3rd... nth order consequences of an action. (Nassim Taleb did an nice explanation of how impossible that would be using an example with pool balls in one of his books.) And I agree with you that they can’t even accurately predict the obvious 2nd order effects. However, they sure do believe they have this ability. So great is their belief that they can’t seem to understand why anyone would doubt them, haha.
Would you lump people who spend their careers trying to demonstrate all of the ways humans are not rational actors in with postrationalists? I’m thinking of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Thaler.
Quite the contrary. Humans not being rational actors is central to modern rationalism. Heck, the central original forum was named Less Wrong, because not being wrong isn't concieved of as an option. Through lots of careful work on rationality you can get better at being rational more of the time. You can get less wrong. But in the view of modern rationalists you simply are not built as a rational actor.
This is a common response among rationalists, but it papers over a real difference of emphasis and risks falling into a motte-and-bailey. The key pivot is:
"Through lots of careful work on rationality you can get better at being rational more of the time."
The extent to which / sense in which this is true is the bone of contention. Rationalist often enough take this to mean "so let's get back to Bayesian probability and utility theory and stop worrying about the other complications," whereas postrats are more likely to say "we can get better by learning and using good tools, but it's overselling to call that 'getting more rational.'"
>"we can get better by learning and using good tools, but it's overselling to call that 'getting more rational.'"
Better at what exactly? If it cashes out to more accurate understanding of the world and better predictions, I think this distinction is mostly pure semantics.
Regardless, the question was about Haidt, who has spoken against Cartesian rationality but whose philosophy (Haidt's) is fairly foundational to modern rationalism (which is a very different movement from De Carte.)
If you fully take on board Haidt and related thinkers, what you end up with does not look much like rationalism. Sure, you can say, "Oh, but that just *is* modern rationalism," but it's hard to maintain that without some motte-and-bailey.
In the same way that humans are sinners is central to Christianity. Because being free of original sin is not an option. Through lots of careful good works you can get better at being a good Christian more of the time. You become less sinful. But on the view of the modern clergy, we are all sinners.
Not if you still take rationalism as an ideal. A post-rationalist is more likely to think that rationalism is an incoherent or incomplete system. Sometimes this means you have a meta-system, such as David Chapman's reasonable/rational/meta-rational framework.)
Lots of people discuss it for sure. People disagree about lots of important things, though. If you want a chance at making progress on a topic, at some point you have to move away from focusing on whether it's worth looking into and actually study it at the object level.
Imagine if climate scientists refused to start looking into possible solutions until 70% of Americans agreed that anthropogenic climate change was a significant threat...
Oh if you're referring to the "we're 99% certain to be doomed" sentiment that has shown up recently, then personally I'd agree that seems pretty overconfident. I'd put the chances of AI disaster quite a bit lower (maybe like 30%, though I'm not an expert, and I'd put it higher if nobody were concerned about the problem).
Thing is, a lot of people seem to want to act like they're very certain the other way. If a nuclear power plant were 3% likely to go chernobyl, it would have to shut down immediately even if that cost billions. To allow AI with no safeguards of any kind would only make sense if the risk is basically zero.
I've come to think about it this way, which may or may not be how self-identified postrationalists think about it: Postrationalists concede that the foundational ideas of the rationalist project (like Bayesian epistemology) tend to be correct, but have disagreements with conclusions.
For example, the rationalist community can be seen as obsessed over low-probability events such as x-risk. A postrationalist may note that we don't really have a good general theory on how to deal with extreme longtermism (it comes to us intuitively that we should be doing some temporal discounting, but how exactly, and then some utilitarians would say that lives a thousand years from now in fact are exactly as valuable as our lives) or very low-probability events with very big outcomes, and to the extent you can write down utility calculations, they are pretty much useless due to being susceptible to small differences in starting conditions when there in fact are lots of unknowns and unknown unknowns. She might care about longtermism a great deal, but feel that the rationalist way to go about it is misguided and that, if we really care about longtermism, the actually rational thing to do is to throw all (or most of) the utility and probability calculations to the rubbish bin and just focus on building a good and just world right now.
Or, many self-indentified rationalists are polyamorous, supposedly on the grounds that there really can't be anything wrong with that so long as everyone involved is aware of the arrangement and consents to it. A post-rationalist might conclude that IF humans were perfectly rational agents, that reasoning would be perfectly sound and there wouldn't be anything wrong with it, but since humans aren't unfeeling robots capable of perfectly informed consent but are in fact capable of experiencing emotions like jealousy, the actual best strategy to achieve good life-outcomes for yourself, your spouse, and potentially your children, is precommitment to a single relationship. As I recall, Scott discussed similar points in the post following his marriage.
Of course, if you define rationalism as "systematized winning", then these kinds of supposedly postrationalist stances, supposing they are correct, would be rationalist. But then, if the broader rationalist community keeps obsessing over in-practice impossible utility calculations and modeling human behavior under trivially wrong model of agents (when bounded rationality or models that don't talk about agents at all would be more appropriate), or at least you perceive them as doing such (as noted in another comment, bounded rationality has always been central to rationalist ideas), it does make sense to take the stuff you think you can use and then move on.
imho it primarily was a description given to a variety of people who passed through the LW/rationalist community only to exit on the other side. At the most basic level, it's the philosophy of "rationalism is a tool to be learned and used where appropriate". Until recently, most "postrationalists" were called that only by other people, to gesture at this sort of thing.
In recent years it's become a self-description that some have taken on, and I can't speak to that usage, but the above is relevant to Venkatesh Rao and much of the extended-Ribbonfarm networks.
I read “post-“ as something which could only have existed post the other thing. It can be completely different in character, naive to the original concepts, or frankly oppose them. But yet some crucial aspects are indelibly in the footsteps of.
my interpretation from having read/absorbed loads of rationality + postrationality writing:
"post" in the sense of "going beyond", usually not "getting over it/being done with".
"Rationality" being the vague set of things most people in this fuzzy subculture are familiar with and can discuss with one another without having to explain much. (decision theory basics, LW sequences, HPMOR stuff, some economic terms like marginal utility, pareto-principle, Schelling points...)
I'd say that postrationlists are creative high-concept oddballs who synthesize and "refactor" (that's a Rao-term) various abstract concepts from various disciplines. With some awareness and/or inclusion of rationality ideas, but doesn't have to directly reference or use LW-terminology.
Can be super niche and obtuse, go very weird and have marginal audiences:
Can be pretty insightful and/or be mental masturbation. The term "insight porn" encapsulates both. Venkatesh Rao fits the label pretty well.
But even this sequence from Yudkowsky himself would fit into the category of postrationality writing, simply because it's beyond what most rationalists would instantly be familiar with:
Nice point, you could also say that a post-rationalist has grasped the limits of rationalism without abandoning it completely, much as a post-Lacanian knows that his work will never form a unified theory but yet offers a valuable model with unique insights
I used to identify as post-rationalist. (My beliefs/preferences about it haven't changed, but Jacob Falkovich convinced me that using the label was unhelpful.) Here's how I'd put it:
Post-rationalists are people who interact with rationalist spaces socially and agree with many of the big rationalist ideas, but tend to disagree on goals and methods in a big picture sense, and prefer social norms and situations that are more normal (or at least weird in a different way from rationalist-preferred social norms). The "post-" is as in "post-modernism": Postmodernists thought that the modernist project of systematic acquisition and application of knowledge was doomed to ultimate failure, and post-rationalists tend to feel the same way about rationalists. Being a post-rationalist is part ideological differences, part social/norm preference difference, and part status game (to "post-" something is to claim higher status than it).
Here are some overly-broad and not-entirely-fair generalizations to give you a better idea (abbreviating to R and PR to save keystrokes):
-Some Rs prefer much of LessWrong's content to Astral Codex Ten's; almost no PR's do.
-Rs and PRs are both mostly atheists; however, Rs see religion as mostly bad or harmful while PRs generally see religions as containing important true insights, or as being good for persons and societies
-Rs are usually liberal, libertarian, or progressive; PRs are more likely (but still unlikely) to be conservative, traditional, or reactionary
-Many Rs hate their "meat-body" and are excited to be uploaded; PRs are more likely to feel at home in their body and are more skeptical of mind-uploading
-Rs skew transgender and autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent. PRs skew neurotypical but just pretty weird.
-PRs seem more excited about drugs for some reason
-Rs tend to like city amenities on net; PRs are more likely to live somewhere remote, or to want to.
-Rs like to build and rely upon explicit systems; PRs like to develop and rely upon intuitive or implicit judgment. (Neither group seems significantly more effective, in my experience)
-Rs dislike status games and are bad at playing them. PRs are mostly okay with status games and are average or good at playing them
-Rs love "Thinking Fast and Slow" and "The Better Angels of our Nature"; PRs love "The Black Swan" and "Seeing Like a State"
-Rs worry more about AI using all the negentropy in the lightcone, and also seem to worry more about things in general; PRs worry more about civilizational collapse.
-Rs think David Chapman is talking nonsense or pointing out the obvious; PRs think he is getting at something true, difficult, and important, and which is fundamental to the "post-" in "post-rationalist"
-PRs are always going on about Chesterton's Fence
-Rs are more often directly earnest; PRs are more often ironic or postironic.
-Rs mostly think that "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing with made up statistics" and are optimistic about the ability to measure things and apply systems to them. PRs are deeply concerned that [Availability Bias/The Streetlight Effect/McNamara's Fallacy] means your system is optimizing for the wrong thing and probably increasing misery.
-Rs are nearly all Utilitarians of some flavor; many PRs are not Utilitarians.
Post-rationalist thought leaders include Venkat Rao and some guy called "Eigenrobot". Maybe also the Weird Sun group if they're still around. I'm not on Twitter so I'm not terribly current with the scene, but it seems like most of the discourse is happening there.
The irony is over my head. Rao has an essay about geek culture appropriators, right? Geeks/Mops/Sociopaths or something like that? I'm afraid I don't follow Rao very closely.
To take your comment seriously, I'd say post-rationalists are nerds, in terms of what content they consume and produce, what topics and hobbies they are interested in, etc. But in terms of social behaviors and competence they are more "normie".
IIRC Rao distinguishes true geeks from appropriators by motivation and content generation--nerds generate content out of interest; appropriators do so to seek social status (if at all). Since post-rationalists generate geek content out of sincere interest in the topic, that would make them geeks in that framework, not appropriators. (albeit, that they are perhaps geeks with more social options than the typical rationalist)
I don't know if that holds though. It's been a long time since I read any of those writings.
Otherwise your points all hold w/r/t the thrust of the essay. (Although, you might say that post-rationalists are a little more mops-y when it comes to some rationalist-core topics [Bayes, AI risk, effective altruism, or similar...])
From my perspective this is bang on - kudos. Guess I should go check out this eigenrobot chap. Assuming I can sufficiently collapse his wavefunction to locate him, that is.
Also, have you tried drugs? They’re delicious.
Personally, as someone who grew up highly nerdy and socially awkward, a major inflection point in my own shift towards empathy, increased social wellness, and greater understanding of my past situation was when I tried LSD at fifteen.
I really do think there are parts of the brain that unlock, can only unlock for some, when psychedelic substances are applied.
So, as an example of another low percentage chance, very outsized impact phenomenon, I would exhort all rationalists to try a controlled experiment at least once.
> a major inflection point in my own shift towards empathy, increased social wellness, and greater understanding of my past situation was when I tried LSD at fifteen
A close friend of mine has the same story, except it was mushrooms instead. I'm pretty happy with my life, and pretty good at socializing, emspathizing, etc, so I'm not sure how helpful it would be for me long-term. But if a lot of people are in your situation, that would explain the popularity of drugs.
2. You will unlock perspectives and subjective experiences you literally cannot have any other way, and that could not exist for any other person. It's maybe akin to getting VIP seats to an exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime performance art exhibit.
3. If you find a good group of friends, you'll all have some marvelous stories to share and an adventure you can bond over going through together.
Basically, to me, it was worth finding out at least what all the hullabaloo was about, and discovering exactly that, as well as corners and subconscious aspects of my mind I literally was not aware of and was unable to use prior.
Bay Area rationality has always had a lot of tension between openness and closure, between the approach where you should believe in whatever conclusion the best epistemology leads you to .... and the approach where things are mostly settled, and in fact, more settled than scientists believe.
Thats pretty standard. Most organisations do. Objectivism is even officially split into two organisations that differ on closure/completion versus openness/ evolution.
Bay area rationalism has a sort of unofficial divide with the Yudkowskians representing the the closed tendency and the Codexians the more open tendency. The postrationalists could be considered an even more open tendency, since they have actually abandoned the various forms of one club golf -- Bayes is the only epistemology, and so on -- whereas the Codexians are only willing to consider the possibility.
So postrationalism has a difference.of.approach to rationalism. Rationalists sometimes say that postrationalism isn't fundamentally different because it's derivable from rationality, in theory... But rationalists aren't using it in practice.
The "post-" is a bit of a misnomer, IMO. The label, as it tends to get used, seems to mainly refer to writers that have audiences who also enjoy rationalist blogs.
The label may have sprung up because people tended to read the rationalist canon *first* (e.g. Less Wrong, Sequences, Overcoming Bias, early SSC).
As far as I can tell, there's three epicentres of post-rationalism: (1) Rao's Ribbonfarm, (2) Chapman's Meaningness, and (3) twitter communities filled with mostly anonymous accounts with cartoon avis who do a lot of shit-posting and "vibing" but are usually fairly familiar with the rationalist canon. The biggest account is probably Eigenrobot.
A potential discernible thread is *illegibility*. Good intros to the concept are the reviews of Seeing Like a State by either SSC or Rao. The twitter community seems to place a lot of value on illegibility. This is mainly done by an implicit agreement to avoid talking about any object-level ideas.
I've seen others refer to post-rats as those who also place value in emotions/spirituality. They may take aspects of rationalism, but realize that cold game theory calculus doesn't give you everything you need out of life.
I've also seen people less sympathetic to post-rats describe them as those who are more concerned with seeming cool and avoiding cringe. (The "rationalist" label is admittedly awkward.
My guess is that anyway who considers themself a post-rat would read Scott. It's also difficult to say why Scott isn't a post-rat writer himself.
I found this essay on the subject incredibly helpful when I was wondering what the difference was between rationalist and postrationalist. Mostly, PRs care more about vibes and just don't like R's vibe.
Cards on the table, my podcast, Fluidity Audio, is nothing but Scott Alexander's UNSONG and David Chapman audiobooks. So, take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I don't know, this seems a little - obvious? Oh, the boss is not your pal? Life is not fair? Work hard for nothing, get nothing? Maybe some people do need to be told this. Maybe I'm just being a Loser.
But I honestly don't see what Sociopaths get out of it, unless they do are deluding themselves. I'm so clever, I know what ultimate reality is? I'm the one making others dance to my tune? Yeah, and so what? It doesn't ultimately mean anything; being President of the multinational global consortium is as meaningless as giving out "Employee of the Month" awards to your Clueless subordinates to keep them running on the treadmill. In the end, it's all just quarks and stuff.
I mean, as a Loser, I'm very happy there's a guy out there plotting and scheming and looking for backs to stab so he can end up CEO of BigCorp plc and spend 80 hour work weeks devising takeovers and mergers and increasing the share price, while I just have to turn up, do my 9-5 for five days a week and draw my pay cheque. The Big Boss means nothing to me, because I have no personal loyalty or investment in who it is; I have to work for someone, and if it isn't him then it will be some other guy. Sociopath is climbing the ladder hard as he can to get to the top, to work for - me, in the end. He's doing all the work of keeping the company going while I do my minimum at the bottom of the ladder, and which of us is happier in the end? Seeing as how it's all meaningless in the great scheme of things, and there is no reality, why not me?
Social status is valuable but it also ain't what it used to be, at least on the one definitely-real scorecard that we can actually measure. High status males used to have wildly higher rates of reproductive success than any other part of society but in modernity CEOs only have moderately more children.
Second reply: on reflection this doesn't actually explain it, though. Historically high status men put a lot of time and energy into mate-guarding. The phenomenon of high-status men having lots of sex with women that they aren't monopolizing is still very weird.
There are two strategies for an amoral man with resources seeking to maximise #(surviving offspring):
1) Impregnate n women and help feed them and their children;
2) Impregnate m women, where m > n, and leave them barefoot and pregnant.
Strategy 1 was dominant for most of history due to poor transportation imposing practical limits on m and Malthusian conditions meaning that many of the unacknowledged bastards in strategy 2 would die. But now we have lots of food, social security ensuring that single mothers get access to that food, and fast cars, so strategy 2 is clearly dominant.
Mate-guarding is worthwhile in strategy 1 due to the high paternal investment that can potentially allow for brood parasitism, but in strategy 2 there is no point. It doesn't *matter* whether a woman who has a CEO's kid has somebody else's kid later, as long as she keeps feeding the CEO's kid as well and as long as the CEO isn't paying for the somebody-else's kid.
(This is not an endorsement of being a deadbeat dad, just some game theory.)
It's a decent stab at the hypothetical equilibrium, but the observed equilibrium is that the high-status CEOs are only going after women who are of medium to high status and thus able to consistently use birth control and/or abortion. The players in the game who are successfully using strategy 2 to have reproductive success are mostly not in formal employment and are instead the most successful of a criminal parallel-status subculture.
2b: Run a fertility clinic. I'm surprised that one happens. It's almost as though there are a few men who want descendants without caring that much about sex or power.
This does have the advantage of being reasonably sure that the mothers will have adequate resources.
"Historically high status men put a lot of time and energy into mate-guarding."
Because harems weren't about "oh, she's hot, I'll have her", they were as much or more about political alliances, tribute sent by subjugated/allied kingdoms, trophies of war, and traditional mores.
The real action in harems was the competition amongst the women to be the mother of the next emperor/khan/sultan, because that was where the power lay; first, become the favourite, second, have your son recognised as heir apparent, third, make sure he survives to take the throne, fourth, wield power as mother of the sultan (and sometimes that will bring you into conflict with the new favourite wife/concubine).
"The phenomenon of high-status men having lots of sex with women that they aren't monopolizing is still very weird."
Because the current high-status men are not interested in begetting heirs to succeed to whatever they have; what position does Leonardo diCaprio have for a son to inherit? 'Being an A-list movie star' is not a heritable role. Having a choice of attractive women who want to sleep with you in exchange for fame/money means that you don't need to maintain a harem of your own, while still getting the kudos for being able to have a lot of attractive women making themselves sexually available to you. If you really want to establish a family, you can pick one out to be your wife, and if you want to move on after a while, you can divorce her and have a new trophy wife.
The children of movie stars have a better chance of becoming movie stars than people in general do, but I don't know whether it's enough better to set off similar dynamics.
I would imagine CEOs and other high status people have vastly easier access to sex. And for better or worse, evolution hasn't given humans much of a direct drive to pro-create, but instead opted to make sex (and status) attractive.
Still doesn't fully explain it. The amount of effort required to maintain a well-guarded harem is higher than the effort to maintain a harem that isn't well-guarded, but high-status men in the past who maintained harems almost exclusively maintained well-guarded harems despite the guarding being worth zero or negative marginal sex.
It starts to get a bit circular, but I think the reason they put the effort into guarding those harems was that a khan who didn't guard his harem would be at risk of losing status and thus being killed, so a society that gives status to male reproductive success produces different behaviors than a society that gives status to male sexual success, and modern society is the latter and not the former.
Except there's the example of the Cohens, who actually do appear to be descendants of some one particular male from a very long time ago. They were very high status (descendants of Aaron in direct male line) in the Jewish subculture (at least in Europe), but weren't wealthy enough to have harems or guard their wives against infidelity. The explanation that I heard was that the wives who strayed only wanted to stray with higher status males, and all the higher status males to any Cohen (in that subculture) would also be Cohens.
I would argue that what the Sociopath gets is *freedom*. As a Loser, you are confined to doing what your bosses and social peers want you to do. As a Clueless, you are confined to performing the object-level tasks that the CEO wants you to perform. But a Sociopath can do virtually anything he wants. If he wants social status, he can get it; if he wants to build a spaceship, he can build it -- or rather, he can manipulate society to get it built for him. A Clueless or a Loser can both be happy in their lives, but only the Sociopath gets to choose the life that he leads.
Au contraire. There is no more controlled person than the CEO. I was sitting in a bar, and a CEO now billionaire sat down next to me. A CEO can't even talk with some fool in a bar without risking trouble. Now you and I can sit in a bar and tell all manner of lies, and no one cares.
A high tech CEO can't tell his wife he's flying to Austin, because she might tell her hairdresser, or some friends, and stocks might get traded on this "insider info" and that my friend is insider trading, and people go to prison for it.
All of the forbidden acts you've listed involve status games and social approval. A Sociopath would not want to participate in such things anyway, unless they were instrumental goals in service of his grand design. The CEO does not go to the bar to relax -- he goes to his yacht.
Elon Musk is the "new money" class of clueless, frolicking before getting corporate raided (again), whilst the "old money" class is always silent. See also: Michael O Church's classification of US Presidents. Raegan is a Loser (deregulate harder?), Nixon is Clueless (EPA is the new communism), Kennedy has a long bloodline and is a slayin' "Sociopath"
Reagan didn't do much deregulation. His administration just did more than his immediate predecessors. But that was en vogue all over the western world. Not sure how much you want to blame the personality of one man for a worldwide fashion?
I think your example CEO would still map to "Clueless". By my read, I think the motivations for the sociopath are some combination of 1) get their physical needs met while exerting as little effort as possible and 2) get some chuckles along the way by making other people jump through hoops
Doesn't Elon Musk famously work extremely long hours and spends very little money on personal luxuries? He doesn't seem like someone who is trying to "get their physical needs met while exerting as little effort as possible." The people I know who are like that do seem like sociopaths, but they're not CEOs. They're mooches and manipulators who find people they can take advantage of and live parasitically off them for as long as they can before the person wises up and cuts them out of their life.
Yeah. If you want to maximize rewards and minimize costs, find a reasonably-conscientious member of the opposite sex who is financially secure, butter them up with every nice sweet word in the book, then get married/have kids and you're probably set for life as long as you don't do anything completely stupid. Being a CEO is a loooot more work than just making sure your spouse doesn't leave you.
>Even for an attractive woman doing this, there are limits on how little effort you can put in before you get dumped/divorced.
You are overestimating the population as a whole. I don't have to get married to the average person - in fact, I'd rather get married to someone in the bottom few percentiles, in terms of likelihood to divorce/dump me. There are a lot of people for whom "dump him, girl" is not going to be something they consider valid without some clear reason, and even a modicum of effort can keep you out of that area.
> Doesn't Elon Musk famously work extremely long hours
Given his social media activity, I doubt. Maybe in the past. Also, what counts as work for someone like him?
> spends very little money on personal luxuries?
Well, it might be preferences. From my perspective, loads of money don't really buy much (besides freedom from having to earn more). If I was a billionaire I expect I'd spend the time in pretty much the same way as I do now.
You can't really get a meaningfully faster personal computer past a very low ceiling. You can blow money on yachts or multiple houses or whatever - but I don't see the appeal.
Wealth is spread exponentially, but utility of additional dollars for personal stuff goes up logarithmically.
I think this is exactly the point of contention. If I have got his public persona correctly, Musk has a vision of electric cars, conquering Mars and maybe better way to moderate Twitter. They are a set of preferences.
On the other hand, so are "keep with the Joneses", whether Joneses are suburban accountants or multibillionaires you meet at Davos and "do the Right Thing, as codified by legible legitimate authorities" (you may insert either "human rights and equality experts" or "principle of free speech" as legible legitimate authority for your preferred Twitter moderation policy). Both would make you Clueless. Or "be the Wonder Human Being in your mental peer group" sounds totally possible life-path to billionaires, too (which would make you Loser).
Does it make him less of a Clueless if he is driven to work long days (and has a more high-profile job) to feed more unconventional inner demons resulting from different upbringing and life experience than your regular workaholic has?
IIUC, he doesn't spend that little money on personal luxuries, he's just got a non-standard idea of what luxuries are. Taking your own personal jet on a trip isn't not spending some money on personal luxuries, even if the trip is for business purposes.
I always thought Elon is very concerned about whether others like him. A random private citizen criticized his submarine, and it ended up becoming this ridiculous melodrama involving libel cases and pedophilia accusations. It didn't seem like the reaction of a reality-oriented individual.
Because there is no challenge or thrill in being the only Sociopath at the head of a company of Clueless and Losers. It's like an adult playing in the ball pit. Irrespective of their social or financial success, Sociopaths thrive on the status games that are played with real stakes, and where failure has real consequences, as opposed to the status games Losers play where the only stakes are the estimation of your peer group.
Not necessarily. Remember how the middle management structure is designed to award credit upwards and shift blame downwards? It's always more difficult to backstab the guy above you than the guy below you.
All the sociopaths just got promoted by magic, right? If sociopaths are at the top of the ladder, by definition they have to promote others for those others to get to the top of the ladder.
Sociopaths get promoted by pretending to be clueless --- hardworking loyal henchmen. What's more sociopathic than pretending to be something you're not for personal gain?
Assuming for the sake of argument that "sociopaths run the company" this seems by far to be the most accurate theory for how they get promoted.
"Sociopaths are just so cool that all they want is the company of other cool sociopaths, because the plebes bore them" sounds more like edgelord-ism designed to appeal to failed self-identified sociopaths from the internet. It makes no sense as a working theory of how organizations operate.
Even assuming "a sociopath in charge," that sociopath doesn't want competition, they want to surround themselves with a mix of: (a) a majority of yes-men/loyalists who will help keep their position secure, and (b) some number of competent or connected individuals who can keep the organization on track and growing.
And it's a lot of hard work to compete for the handful of (b) opportunities, but any aspiring sociopath can pretend to be (a), which helps them climb the ladder.
I see it as sociopaths optimizing for personal gain, while the clueless optimize for group gain and then hope the rising tide lifts their boat with everyone else's. What this ends up meaning is that it can be more personally beneficial for a sociopath to work with other sociopaths to boost the sociopaths up than it is to work with only clueless people to boost everyone.
Imagine you are on the board of a corporation, and the board is making a decision between something that benefits the board members in the short term versus the investors in the long term. A sociopath board member will vote for the one that benefits the board, a clueless person will vote for the one that benefits the investors. A sociopath wants the board filled with other sociopaths.
In some sense *every type* optimizes for personal gain; they all just use different (or no) measures.
Losers play the popularity contest; the loser board member votes whichever way the they think the group will go.
Cluelackers play meritocracy; the clueless board member votes based on whatever yardstick of principles/values they’ve selected. Most of the time that’ll be “whatever’s best for the shareholders” (scare quotes fully in effect), so that they can feel good about themselves regardless of the actual outcome or how well/badly they understand “shareholder interests.”
(I mean, c’mon - shareholders aren’t some borg-like homogeneous bloc anyway. The point is the simulation of objectivity, to placate one’s ego that they aren’t just voting with the sheep.)
Sociopaths play a game unique to them, with whatever means they have, to accomplish whatever they decide the next best move is. There is no endgame, there is only “more/better.”
So a sociopath board member may be trying to set the company up for a hostile takeover they’re secretly negotiating on the sly, while also, in turns, working all the other board members into a false consensus by the right combination of ego-stroking, gaslighting, shade-throwing, subtlety, rumor, masked behind an overall aura of earnest concern that is a complete facade, so that they implicitly have the subconscious trust of the room and can thus tip the scale just so, letting the dominoes tumble exactly as planned.
Or, maybe yes they perceive that the rest of the board are also sociopathic, or want them to be, to prove to themselves that they are *even better* at the political machinations game than any of these dilettantes, so they can gloat in the glorious destruction of their “peers.” If that’s what’ll currently get their rocks off.
If you want to understand how the sociopath game works, watch umpteen seasons of Survivor, then ask yourself “ok, so the obvious, perfectly rational metastrategy for winning, that all the winners followed, is... what exactly?”
I think your definition of sociopath is different than how the author is using the word, because that directly contradicts what the author says in "the gervais principle" (the actual distilled principle) itself:
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."
As for "why would they" - because they know that they need to cooperate with other sociopaths in order to get anything done.
I think this is where the typology fails. It elevates the "sociopaths" to their own sphere and driven only by the stereotype of evil overlord. Did the author ever ponder what happens on the C-suite level where there should be quite many people who are good at the sociopath level "heads I win, tails you lose" games and they interact quite a lot with each other?
I find it more likely that the social world of "sociopaths" who compete (or collaborate) with other similarly "high level" players would feel recognizably similar to how "losers" experience their social games, only the stakes are more ambitious and being successful demands higher level of perception and gumption.
(Remember it is the Ribbonfarm definition of "sociopath", not the clinical definition.)
This is almost exactly what Rao describes in the book: Sociopaths play the same status games as Losers but with actual stakes, namely their professional reputation and position in the company. Losers are stuck at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy (by choice) and have nothing to lose; the only stakes they have are the estimation of their peers, and they gain from leaving their relative status ambiguous. As a result, Loser status games never really change anything, but Sociopath status games could lead to a change in the CEO of the company, getting or losing a multimillion dollar bonus, or one of your peers ratting you out for large-scale fraud. It's something that this review hasn't really touched on at all.
But then the Sociopaths themselves are psychologically indistinguishable from the Losers. By this logic, if you take a Loser and randomly give him some very high-level position of authority, he'll behave the exact same way as a Sociopath does. For this categorization system to actually mean anything, the Sociopaths would have to have different goals entirely.
Why do you think that a man who spends his life working on important long-term projects to improve our lives is a sociopath? This sounds like knee-jerk slander to me.
As people have said multiple times in this thread, we’re using the book’s version of the term sociopath, not the usual definition. I’m just saying that Musk is shooting for big goals and is mostly unconcerned with being graded by an establishment rubric (clueless) or being well liked and fitting in (loser). No particular negative conclusion intended, although Musk certainly has his flaws.
Oh, right. Though I think it's difficult for people outside someone's social circle or peer group to know whether he wants to fit in and be well-liked. Maybe he wants to be well-liked by tech billionaires or scientists. I'd also guess that tweeting is more-correlated with wanting to be liked than with wanting to manipulate people. OTOH Don Trump likes to tweet, too, and I don't think he cares about being liked.
It all gets complicated fast. The archetypes are interesting but don't particularly map to real people. I would guess Trump definitely wants to be liked by people he considers high status or supporters and also enjoys being disliked by his enemies.
1.) It Would produce very different people, I think. If you don't care about the fake reality of status games or other people and want low effort physical needs satisfaction, that should look like FIRE or savvy homelessness, maybe.
If you are really good at getting what you need out of a company with small amounts of effort, why would you want to retire early?
Silly example: coasting along as a Google employee with free food and laundry service might be less work for someone who knows enough programming to get started at Google, than to actually do your own cooking (or manage the logistics of getting other people to cook for you).
I think this is an example of the weaknesses of the typology, because the premise that people's positions in society track their places in the typology just isn't borne out in reality. CEOs can be "losers," world leaders can be "clueless," the idea that the people who've actually in charge see through the mask and constructs, I think is really just a cynical flavor of wishful thinking.
Well, one could imagine (and some people do) that some CEOs and world leaders are effectively middle management, so it doesn't necessarily break the model for some of them to be clueless (and maybe losers) if you subscribe to those ideas either in strong or weak form.
More importantly and more generally applicable, a typology doesn't need to be 100% predictively accurate to be true or useful. I haven't thought about it enough to say one way or the other, but that not all types are in their expected roles and vice versa isn't really an argument against the framework*. Especially since he discusses all 3 types can fail to achieve their goals (just because you're a sociopath doesn't mean you're guaranteed to run a company), and that people can change types as well (which would necessitate them being out of place for their type for at least some transitory period of time).
*Not saying that some demonstration of correlation isn't required to support the theory, just that 100% perfect type to role mapping isn't necessary.
I don't think the sociopath is necessarily supposed to be happier or more enlightened. If anything, like you say the loser could be considered the most enlightened because they've decided the respective grinds of the clueless and the sociopath aren't worth it. I gravitate more to the idea that the sociopath comes up with their own goal, regardless of legibility, the clueless adhere to legible, socially acceptable goals, and the losers care the most about social relationships because they're not doing the other stuff.
You could also argue that part of the structure is that each group considers the others chumps.
Assuming the taxonomy is correct and useful, and then trying to extrapolate wildly from it:
It's quite likely, in fact, that the average Loser is happier than the average Sociopath, since Losers are the closest people in a modern society to a "normal" hunter-gatherer setting with reciprocal social norms and abundant, healthy interaction. Sociopaths scored a real-world-corporate-climbing advantage by nuking several parts of their brain, but those parts of the brain were put there by evolution [or God] and so once they are gone other parts of the brain start sending a disquieting dripfeed of "something is wrong..." signals. This manifests as Sociopaths feeling that "something is missing" and increases the odds that they have extreme mental health crises up to and including suicide when their goals fail (which they can, since Sociopaths are in competition with other Sociopaths). By contrast, Losers as normal humans have a good embedding in a complex web of social interactions.
This might be a stretch, but one could even hypothesize that the rise of mental health problems in the modern day could be partially explained by the increasing complexity of the modern world and ubiquity of gamified digital interaction having a tendency to convert healthy Losers into Clueless.
This is some AndreasHofer72 speculation, bruv, but I LIKE IT. (/s)
> This manifests as Sociopaths feeling that "something is missing" and increases the odds that they have extreme mental health crises up to and including suicide when their goals fail (which they can, since Sociopaths are in competition with other Sociopaths).
My idea, is that Sociopaths has neither affective empathy or agreeableness (ability to love), Clueless has neither cognitive empathy nor openness to new ideas (understanding of others), and Losers have neither impersonality nor extraversion (content at getting played). Thus Sociopath wants true love, and Clueless wants to be understood and cared for.
How do they correspond to the "sociopath exiting the system" or "clueless barbell strategy" (risky bets mixed with hyper-security, instead of middle of the road)?
> But I honestly don't see what Sociopaths get out of it, unless they do are deluding themselves.
My guess is money and/or power. If all there is is material reality, then earning 10 times more as the Clueless/Losers gives you more leverage in that material reality.
Ah but that's the misframing at the heart of this whole "dark triad"/"sociopath CEO" genre. The sociopath doesn't usually get money and/or power. There are many, many more sociopaths than there are CEOs.
So even taking this taxonomy at face value and assuming that sociopaths are overrepresented in the high status money & power class, most sociopaths are just sociopaths and also unsuccessful - one might even posit that "unsuccessful sociopaths" are the key market for books like this to exist since they revolve around telling unsuccessful sociopaths that their perspective is unique and special and just like the mindset of powerful people.
Power more than money. Power over personal life of others, to be more explicit. It's the motivation for many CEO or higher management, from what i have observed. Not in my own company, because being part of it makes analysis harder, but looking at my family, especially my father. He was a small scale CEO while there is no chance I become one except by accident... We are are similar physically and mentally: Same amount of laziness, I'm more clever logically (iq) but he's a better actor/orator...i am more psychopathic in the sense i am less sensitive to other jugement and suffering, and more interrested in material goods (and probably sex), but the biggest difference, i think bigger than the academic achievements and technical orientation (which outsiders will immediately mention when comparing my father and me) , is that he was interested in "ruling" much much more than i am. Maintaining formal and informal hierarchical, patron/client relations...
Also far more generous than i am, but analyzing this as objectively as i can, i think it's part of this ruling tendency (automatic and unconscious, i don't think he consciously calculated this as manipulation). Ruling was really a big part of his ultimate goals, while it's not my case (nor is it for my brother): money (material well being and security), sex, status within peers, and freedom (minimize being ruled) yes, but not ruling... Maybe that's indeed arrested development: We (brother and i) stopped at adolescent (band of friends, without unambiguous hierarchy, each having it's expertise/roles), while father went to traditional pater familia, head of family / chief of tribe...
Maybe it's an artifact of typical father/son relation, and i see patterns where none exists, but i don't think so...
Part of why you're you and not your dad, is because you're his son. By this I mean, his CEO role is filling a niche in his life, but also filling the same niche in yours. If he were not filling that niche in your live, you'd feel compelled to fill that vacancy.
About using others ... I don't mean it in a negative way, I don't think you do either. But he is probably more the team captain than the meaning of the term sociopath provides. The team captain needs to define who plays first base, etc. define roles and responsibilities. I liken it to walking in the desert vs riding a horse. When you're walking, you have to watch for every step so that you don't fall on a cactus. When riding a horse, you point the horse in the general direction, and you can look at the scenery, whilst the horse takes care of where to step. I'm sure his company is the same way. People try to do the right thing, but don't know the right thing (their roles), because they don't see the big picture. Someone has to make sure all the roles get filled. And that leader needs to do things that make the workers happy, even sometimes tricking them into doing things that make themselves happy.
But also, you have to realize that without him, they're nothing. The workers probably love the company just as much as, if not more so than your dad. The reason, is the company may be part of his life ... but for many of the workers, its their all. For instance, if (ala Schitz Creek) the company failed today, your dad would be devastated ... but how much so compared to the mid-level manager who has 100% of his portfolio in the company stock? Dad probably has good investment management, and has his investments spread around. He may have to downsize the family house in a financial disaster ... but for a lot of the little people. The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck, they're unlikely to have financial backup, and downsizing for them means moving from the house into a car.
I myself am Clueless at best. I tend to work overtime just because I want to see the job done right, for no additional material reward. I've tried working 9..5, but couldn't really do it -- I could rarely find a better use for my time than fixing some broken code. People like me make useful pawns for the CEOs of this world; I have never had wealth or power, and I never will. Objectively speaking, I've chosen the wrong path in life, but then again, it never felt like a choice to me. I suspect that the predilection for Cluelessness is largely genetic. You rolls your dice, you takes your chances...
"I Became an Ubermensch and all I Got Was This Lousy Empire"
Its possible that some of the 'Sociopaths' realized that all they needed to enjoy life was dental and a decent salary. Maybe they walk among us, as unfirable mid level employees that collect a paycheck while browsing Reddit all day.
This is why I would argue he picked the wrong terms. “Losers” can be happy and fulfilled, they are just “economic losers” in a capitalist world because they don’t leverage other peoples work for their own benefit.
My impression is that the Sociopath has very different motivations than the Loser. You might be happy with your 9-5 of minimum effort for the sake of a paycheck so you can go out and get drunk on Friday's and vacation in Italy for a few weeks per year, but the Sociopath doesn't care about any of that, because he craves power instead. It's Rao's explanation for why middle managers are, more often than not, terrible at their job and only good for yelling at people and making them miserable. This is because they're Sociopaths and yelling at people and making them miserable makes them feel powerful. They got to this position because a Sociopath higher up the ladder recognized them as fellow Sociopaths, and gave them their wish in exchange for being able to exert power over them in turn. And so most Sociopaths make the devil's bargain of having total power to abuse their underlings if they are willing to endure their superior's abuse in turn.
It's been a while since I read The Gervais Principle but that's what I took away from it. I certainly don't recognize this in real life myself, but then I don't have a conventional office job, and it's certainly a better explanation for why everyone hates their boss than any other I've seen.
"It's Rao's explanation for why middle managers are, more often than not, terrible at their job and only good for yelling at people and making them miserable. This is because they're Sociopaths and yelling at people and making them miserable makes them feel powerful. They got to this position because a Sociopath higher up the ladder recognized them as fellow Sociopaths, and gave them their wish in exchange for being able to exert power over them in turn."
Not really. In Rao's formulation, most middle-managers are Clueless.
I think the "sociopath" (NB: not a literal sociopath) gets to have goals that they try and achieve in ways that are actually effective.
Consider lay-offs. The "losers" (NB: not actual losers) act to reassert status illegibility by reassuring themselves that the job never defined them anyway, and by cutting contact with anyone who's hit hard by it. The "clueless" (NB: not always clueless) go through a personal crisis, if they even get fired in the first place, because they were true believers in the company. The sociopaths saw it coming months ahead because they ignored the CEOs bullshit emails, and either shuffled themselves and their favourites into safe positions, or had been interviewing for weeks and have a new job lined up.
Again, they don't seem to be literal sociopaths. I get the impression you could replace the terminology with something like "9to5ers," "believers," and "cynics." I also don't think it's clear that sociopaths are better than the other two, although Venkatesh Rao seemingly does.
Rao Venkatesh would agree with you. I vividly remember the last passage in the Sociopath chapters talking about the sheer emptiness of reaching the last level. It was not a happy place. I guess we're not made to live completely without masks.
He was also pretty emphatic (which the review doesn't mention and probably should) that Losers are the winners in this game. They go to work, put their 8 hours, then spend their live actually living. Family, friends, hobbies.
Also speaking of categories-that-do-not-really-match, meaning psychology talks about treating your work as one of job, career and calling. First is for the paycheck, second is for advancement, third is for passion. They may or may not match with Loser, Sociopath and Clueless, respectively.
Yes. Absolutely agree. The major thing I didn’t like about the book was what I considered to be a poor choice of terms as the term “loser” needlessly slants the meaning.
This is what I'm wondering too. A Sociopath who truly didn't care what others thought about him is far more likely to be a recluse than a leader. If the opinions of other people are absolutely meaningless to them, why bother interacting with them at all? Why care about power or influence or status at all, or even about money beyond the relatively low amount required for them to live comfortably? If the Sociopaths are really supposed to be entirely asocial, you'd expect them to just stay home all day getting drunk/high and watching TV or playing video games, and maybe visit a prostitute whenever porn wasn't enough. (Which ironically fits the stereotypical image of a loser far more than the Losers category does.)
Of course, it could be possible that the Sociopath's nihilism is so all-encompassing that a lifestyle of idle hedonism wouldn't have any appeal either. Maybe they'd realize that wanting lots of sex and drugs and good-tasting food is just a result of evolutionary drives adapted for a vastly different environment than the one they're living in, and thus ultimately pointless like everything else. But at that point, I'd expect them to become even more withdrawn, not less. They wouldn't have any reason to do *anything* beyond the absolute barest necessities of survival like eating, drinking water, and using the bathroom. They'd end up being one of those half-catatonic psych ward patients that just sit in a dark room doing nothing all day.
It's a surprisingly common trope that top business[1] leaders are sociopaths, but so far as I can tell, and I know one or two, this is garbage. Top business leaders are almost always magnetic personalities with an outsize ability to both inspire and empathize with people. They pretty much have to be -- there's no other way to get a very large number of people to enthusiastically devote themselves to your vision, and, unlike politics or the military, in business it is very rare that you have any great ability to command notwithstanding any lack of buy-in from the rank and file. Generally, persuasion and inspiration are the only ways to get your will implemented, and very successful leaders are eerily good at doing both, at least from what I've seen.
Of course, portraying CEOs a sociopaths would naturally be very comforting to the Clueless who have glumly come to suspect they're *not* headed for the corner office, that their climbing has a natural limit well below their ambitions, and are wondering what's gone wrong. "It's because I'm not a sociopath! Oh, OK, that's not so bad...!" Good way to sell business books, eh? Since your fat market segment is naturally among The Clueless, those who can smugly derive additional confidence that they are neither Losers nor Sociopaths. Ka-ching!
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[1] I emphasize 'business' because political leaders usually are sociopaths, I think, since unlike business leaders (who traffic in the achievable of necessity), political leaders necessarily sell lies, indeed things that we all know very well are lies -- that all the children can be above average, that nobody can be poor, that each and every citizen is a noble soul and evil exists in the world solely because of foreign devils, a sprinkling of deviants, or shadowy conspiracies -- and, unlike normal people, they have to have the ability to lie without the slightest compunction.
> Top business leaders are almost always magnetic personalities with an outsize ability to both inspire and empathize with people.
This "job description" is not mutually exclusive with sociopathy; quite the opposite. High-functioning sociopaths are known for being charming and "magnetic", precisely because they are able to approach charisma in a purely detached and rational manner. To them, humans are a complex instrument with a quirky UI that can nevertheless be quite powerful if used correctly -- like Blender, perhaps, or a modern combine harvester.
Yes, I agree the first part -- being magnetic and charming -- is fully consistent with sociopathy. But not the second (empathy). And really good leaders have to have that, because they need to understand the emotional state of those who work for them -- if for no other reason than to know how far they can count on them, and in what direction.
I grant there are some limited areas where sociopaths can be outstanding, but I think they are mostly sole proprietorship kind of things, like being a surgeon or tech evangelist, where the "magnetic" thing comes in very hand for excellent PR and interactions with the public *but* the lack of empathy, which would cripple the ability to lead a large organization, doesn't hold you back.
I've known some business leaders that seemed to be quite good at empathy, but upon more extensive review, I think they were faking the empathy. You can't fake real empathy, but you sure can fake the external signs of empathy.
I overheard the owner of a company that was well known for empathy laughing about cutting more employees than we needed to during a downturn. He was very careful not to do so when I was there, but didn't realize I could still hear. I am aware of lots of signs that he had true empathy, but each and every one of them could easily have been crafted to portray empathy instead of naturally shining through. It didn't help that a lot of the stories emphasizing his empathy came from him or his family members.
It's not that business executives are especially likely to be sociopaths (the vast majority aren't), it's that high-functioning sociopaths are especially likely to be business executives, at least according to a study that was done a few years back. The same study showed that high-functioning sociopaths were also likely to become surgeons and chefs, so people whose takeaway is "being an executive is an evil job suited for evil people" are drawing the wrong conclusion entirely. It's more "these are the few high-status jobs where it's even possible for a high-functioning sociopath to be successful at all, because they don't require a lot of affective empathy" rather than "these are the jobs where sociopaths excel over non-sociopaths because their callousness gives them an edge."
That said, Rao's definition of Sociopath is so far from the actual clinical definition (and even mutually exclusive with it to a degree) that talking about real sociopaths is entirely off-topic here. Real sociopaths would ironically fit best in the Clueless category if they were high-functioning (not because they're naive idealists, but simply because they're more inclined to focus on the work itself rather than status games), and wouldn't fit in any category if they were low-functioning (since they'd likely be unemployed or doing some job that doesn't involve social interaction at all).
Well the reverse correlation is useless for prediction, given the low percentage of genuine sociopathy.
Anyway, I like the parsimony of my explanation for the confusion: if I'm writing a book and want to make millions, I need to appeal to the secret desires of my readers that need sophisticated rationalization. So if I want to make a lot of money writing a book about weight loss, I'm going to write about how it's all totally not your (the fat person's) fault, but rather society's, or your genes, or the food industry's, et cetera, and also that you can lose weight in some easy-peasy way that is (1) totally unlike anything you've tried before, (2) definitely not as simple and painful as eating less and working out m ore, and possibly (3) being suppressed by a shadowy conspiracy of people whose ill-gotten gains depend on keeping you a fatty. Success!
And if I write a management book[1], I'm going to say you totally deserve to be a CEO with a private jet, because you're smart as heck and people like you, and the only reason you're having a hard time with it is (1) the people above you are sick rat bastards, and (2a) they will keep you down or (2b) you don't want to be like them anyway. I'm certainly *not* going to write that becoming one of the handful of people who lead gigantic firms is, like winning Olympic gold, some complex function of extraordinary native talent, intense training, and luck. That will send my book to the 5 for $5! table at the bookstore in no time.
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[1] A subgenre difficult to distinguish, philosophically, from MILF pr0n.
I don't think the author would disagree with this - he uses "sociopath" outside of the common usage of the word. For example, neither David Wallace nor Robert California are "sociopaths" as the word is commonly used. Both of them show empathy and normal human emotion at varying times. What separates them from the "loser"/"clueless" categories mostly comes down to their motivations and to their wilingness/ability to exercise agency
It's my experience that people make arch or sly use of a word idiosyncratically because they want to borrow a little of the connotation surrounding the common use while being able to plausibly deny that they meant that AT ALL. Feels pretty dishonest to me.
I think it's a cleverly-devised schema that only works because Venkatesh Rao is a good writer, not because it's accurate. I used to have more faith in his structure, but I tried using it for explanatory power with other people and found that the mappings just aren't very clean.
> But I honestly don't see what Sociopaths get out of it, unless they do are deluding themselves.
That’s just it - they’ve gone beyond any “means to an end” / “instrumental vs terminal goals” reasoning. They’ve concluded, or rather, feel they’ve been awakened to the reality that, structured philosophy like that is all pretend; meaningless. That’s the nihilism part.
So they do it because, what the hell - might as well have fun using as much of your own influence, manipulation, power, etc to go as far as you can. Pull off whatever insane stunt gooses your endocrine responses. Fuck around with it all, because you can, and wrap yourself in as many layers of seeming-eusociality as you can as just one more expression of how completely you’ve pwned reality and the rubes around you.
“Be your best self” takes on the dark meaning of “ruthlessly become.”
This book has had more influence on me than any I've ever read to do with businesses, companies and management. Maybe it pops more if you've spent time in offices, to mean generic gray office parks and supposedly wacky startup offices? It's extremely applicable to my experience working in advertising and marketing departments at small and midsize companies. I think these Rao-ian power dynamics are most visible in such organizations.
Having worked in startups, medium size businesses and large enterprises, I can say I've seen a lot more of the psychopathic behavior among the startup founders than the C*Os of larger outfits. Or maybe those embedded in the Fortune 500s are just better at concealing it!
According to Rao this is normal in a startup. Most people at that stage are committed and are high performing. The sortation does not occur until maturity. Think Jobs staying CEO while Woz gets sidelined.
Maybe I haven't worked in a company of the right size and temperament, but I've never really seen Dilbert-esque office politics in the wild. I imagine you need a company with enough layers of management that "climbing the ladder" becomes a going concern.
I've read that software development used to be really vulnerable to the Peter Principle (because programmers are famous for not having people skills so putting a programmer into management would end disastrously), in recent years it's become common for software development to have a split career ladder - you can go into management if you have the people skills for it, or you can just become a more and more senior software developer working on more and more complicated projects. I wonder if this model only makes sense in certain types of hierarchical environments.
That’s a good insight. I think you’re right that it needs to be an organization with a fat enough layer of middle management to let these dynamics play out. Then you can see the losers and sociopaths clearly in context.
The most significant and counterintuitive claim seemed to me that
1. top management people performed below average when they were lower-ranked
and
2. now that they are top management, they help (some) other people who perform below average ascend to top management, preferring them to people who perform average or above average
This wasn't a very accurate description of the book. Let's take somebody in an entry level job, on a project designed to end in 8 months. A bad or lazy worker will just do badly and get fired at the end. A Loser will do is share of the work and move on to the next project. A Clueless will put lots of effort and in a year will be Team Leader, with lots of extra work and basically the same pay.
The Sociopath on the other hand will spend most of his time to learn the structure of the company, the power lines, the important people and any possible way to get ahead. He doesn't ignore his actual work because he's lazy, but because he's simply to busy doing the actual important stuff (from his point of view). He'll deliver stellar work - but only when the bosses boss is around.
His Team Leader will dislike him, because the Team Leader a clueless. But one (or two, or thee) levels of management further above, somebody will recognize him as somebody who can play the game at a higher level. At the very least, he'll be recognized as somebody who's socially adept and can tell the difference between strategy and tactics. So he'll be put on a fast track and skip the boring and dead end middle management positions - because he'd be wasted there.
Critically, that has to happen around the 6 months mark, because by month 8 his project will be a failure and he has to start from scratch at a different company. This kind of stone-stepping is characteristic for a Sociopath's career. It's also eerily similar to most politician's careers as well.
Okay, but assuming this entire categorization isn't complete bunk, and sociopath managers can recognize other potential sociopaths... what incentives would they have to put them on a fast track to high positions? Surely every sociopath would want to be the only one who "can play the game at a higher level", and would want to be surrounded with clueless people who work hard on the stated company objectives and let the sociopath reap the profit?
Why would someone who cares more about office politics and their own career than about company productivity reward potential rivals?
You can maybe argue that a level N sociopath would want level N-1 sociopaths because they're the only guys savvy enough to wrangle the N-2 sociopaths and regular clueless/whatever people... but at that point you're getting back to the null hypothesis of "managers get promoted based on their ability to motivate their teams to do good work".
And of course, the prior is still on "this entire classification is bunk because all management book classifications are bunk".
They don't recognize them as sociopaths, they recognize them as competent people, or more precisely competent at upper management.
If you need a departmental or branch head, you don't want somebody who works 9-5 and only cares about his after work life. You also don't want a clueless, because the clueless aren't independent enough - they live to play the game as it's presented to them (aka become the employee of the month). And since large organizations need a constant supply of upper management, it's reasonable to take such people and groom them early.
In this respect I think the categories really do offer some value. At least I can easily recognize extreme losers (happy ones) and clueless. Sociopaths are rarer, and by definition less easy to spot.
Zvi also has a series on moral mazes, which is definitely a very good read (tho long).
I'm still extremely skeptical. Your entire class of reasoning would sound about as convincing by replacing "clueless" and "sociopath" with "Hufflepuff" and "Slytherin" or using Myers-Briggs or five humors or classical elements or D&D alignments.
It's super easy to make up thematic classification and to start telling stories about how social dynamics fit into these classes. But I'm not seeing any evidence they have any predicting power, or that they're any better than some other classification set I could make up in 5 minutes.
("Really, what organizations want is to have Lawful Good people at the bottom, Lawful Evil people in Management, True Neutral in accounting, and Chaotic Evil in executive positions!")
Some categories are valuable for their predictive power (you go to a doctor when you're sick, not an engineer). But some just help you make sense of the world. They just serve as quick heuristics, or help focus your attention when something is blatantly out of category. After that, you use better mental tools to sort things out.
A sociopath wouldn’t want to invite anyone they perceived as an actual threat (regardless of type) into a position where they could get backstabbed or blindsided. That’d be stupid.
They would also however not want to keep such a person at a distance, where they might lose visibility on them, the other person could use the shadows to strike from, etc.
What to do?
Well, disarm them with kindness, pull them in, convince them you’re no threat to them and in fact you see opportunities to divide and conquer together. Lure them with your superior authority (if you’re on the upper hand organizationally) or with your obvious prowess (if you’re lower) and sweet talk them into joining forces. Do it slowly, cautiously, and deliberately because you don’t want to seem too obvious that you’re buttering them up for a devastating and brutal betrayal.
That honestly sounds like a just-so story with very little grounding in actual corporate practices. Again, anything you can explain with this theory can already be explained by the "managers get promoted for being good managers" default with no sociopathy involved.
You asked the question “ Okay, but assuming this entire categorization isn't complete bunk, and sociopath managers can recognize other potential sociopaths... what incentives would they have to put them on a fast track to high positions?”
So tell me, because I’d rather not waste either of our time, are we proceeding from here with the assumption that the categorization isn’t complete bunk, or not?
I feel like I see a lot of these archetypes at the high school I teach at - among the teaching staff, the site administrators, and the school District administrators.
It likely exists but I don’t want to ascribe my interpretations on to what might really be going on between different groups of students. I guess I just personally find it much more interesting (and directly related to my work life) to notice the adult interactions rather than the student ones. Within the confines of my math classroom, I try to teach the students all about the same, though it is clear that they have differing motivations.
Sounds like Rao is desperately trying to come with an (imaginary) structure to justify himself to himself. And sounds fairly obvious, and at most marginally more useful than, say, Myer-Briggs.
Such cynicism seemed have been the fashion in 2009. That was the era of PUA blogs, Alphas and Betas, red pills and blue pills, mean-spirited End of Men feminism, etc.
Yes, I'm intuitively skeptical of any theory that goes "people are divided into X groups, of which one is clearly smarter and better and by the way can you guess which one I'm in? :D"
The world *might* contain a group of superior people, but I require some evidence (not drawn from fiction!). There something fearfully attractive about categories to humans: if the existence of some categories is asserted, it's easy to slot things into them. For categories usefully to describe the world, we need some evidence that things cluster accordingly.
I read these blog posts a few years ago, and I agree they do not work as full archetypes. But, I feel like Venkatesh had some good ideas and decided to see what happened if he built it out into a full theory, with moderate success. The Ribbonfarm group blog this was posted on has a lot of interesting content like this, my personal favorite is Wittgenstien's revenge (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/09/03/wittgensteins-revenge/) where the author argues that facts don't exist.
I think these 3 categories work better when you realize that they're archetypes within the specific context of Business, which is one social world with it's own rules and structure. In reality, people live within multiple divergent social contexts at the same time, and which archetype they follow depends on the context. For instance, I would consider myself a (well meaning) Sociopath when it comes to topics related to religion/politics, but within Business I definitely act predominantly as a Loser, because I have deliberately turned down advancement of the type discussed and care far more about social approval. People behave dramatically differently within different social contexts and any archetype system that doesn't take that into account is going to be limited in its application
Yeah, I think if you view the archetypes as largely context-dependent, they make more sense. I still think it's way overdetermined, but that's true of any theory like this one.
"Business" seems much too generic to be one social world with its own rules and structure. Isn't it really about a specific type of business context, i.e. the one portrayed in the Office?
"Wittgenstein's Revenge" is just the usual confusion produced when someone notices that the standard rationalist metaphysics of absolute clarity and certainty don't work, yet keeps trying to use words as if they did. "Fact" is an invalid category only if you interpret it from the very mindset that you criticize by saying it's invalid. We still need the word "fact" for propositions that we're very confident of. We just need to stop being overconfident so much.
Having not read the book, how much of this description of Loserdom is meant to coincide to what most consider liberalism broadly defined (a second-best system where everyone can define how they are special in their own way)?
Hahaha, this book was clearly written by a sociopath. The guy simply can't imagine that someone would choose to be empathic towards other people. In his eyes, if someone is empathic, it is because that person trying to win approval or just acting out their social programming. No, dude, the critical voice in my head is not my parents, some teachers, or some spiritual guide. The critical voice in my head is my own. And yet I choose to be empathic towards others because I enjoy it. And I don't crave power over others, because I find it very limiting for my goals and personal happiness.
So in his classification I would be a sociopath? I thought a sociopath was someone that didn't feel empathy towards others. But it seems like his definition of it is more as someone that is not subject to social pressures. Do you see how such a definition looks like it comes straight from a sociopath? It seems that he can't conceive of empathy as an "internal locus of control" type of attribute.
What exactly does he say about Gandhi? Does he think Gandhi was faking his concern for others as a path to power? Or does he think Gandhi did feel real empathy but it was secondary to his desire to succeed because of some "will to power" drive?
Ok, thanks for the explanation! A lot of the stuff makes more sense now. But I get annoyed when people make up their own definitions for words that are very different from their common usage. "Sociopath" is not the best word to describe the concept he is trying to capture.
Also, as a side effect this now makes it more difficult to talk about actual sociopaths (one of the greatest problems of humankind, in my opinion) with anyone who has read the book.
I strongly prefer either the term "psychopath" or the more clinical ASPD in actually serious cases. "Sociopath" has lost too much of the bite the concept deserves out of overuse, IMO.
If you will yourself to be epic-level empathetic, like, if you’re *striving to be Gandhi or Mother Theresa, every day, as your sole driving focus*, then yes, you’re a sociopath (even if you aren’t literally Gandhi yet).
If you’re just, like, “hey man, I’m my own person, and I care about people, and I’m not just a sheep, I matter!” then you are a total Loser.
Venkatesh's (probable) actual intention behind calling Gandhi a sociopath: Gandhi is commonly thought to be a manipulative and cunning politician, who often subverted nationalist interests in India in order to hog the limelight.
I don't think calling Gandhi a sociopath shows that he understands empathy. Gandhi was really weird, and his actions could be interpreted as selfish, esp. by a sociopath. I've read a lot about Mother Theresa, and she was definitely a sadist and a masochist, but managed to pursue her kind of pleasure in a way that earned her praise. Terms like sociopath, sadist, and saint are socially constructed to have all their properties line up with "good", or all to line up with "bad", which does not respect real human nature; so the inferences we draw about people using those terms are often wrong, notably the inference that someone who is unselfish is good. Many Catholic saints seem to me to have been unselfish sociopaths, sadists, or masochists.
It's interesting that we see these archetypes in The Office, Dilbert, and other work-related media like Office Space ("straight shooter with upper management written all over him" = sociopath). There's definitely something to it.
What might be to it is it's a good, comic story to tell, regardless of its truth value. Executive management often comes off as psychopathic to rank and file corporate workers, so there's a humor bias towards writing them as literal psychopaths. It's similar to the humor bias in a lot of political humor.
- First is that Lacan's 3 structures isn't necessarily the correct move here. Most people in business are neurotics, with sociopaths leaning closest to _perverts_, because the pervert understands social reality, but views it as meaningless. Think Patrick Bateman. Psychotics tend not to do well in business at all, because they can neither play the game from the "inside" as with neurotics, or from the "outside" as with perverts. They struggle with social structure's existence, period, and historically end up doing more solitary pursuits (art, revelation, etc: note that Moses needed an Aaron to actually implement his prophetic vision).
- If we wanted to tie in Lacan's theory here, better to deal with the "RSI" layer (Real, Symbolic = the Other, Imaginary), expressed as "registers" or in terms of the Gordian Knot. Unfortunately for everyone, these terms are used almost completely differently for Lacan, especially "Real". What Venkat refers to as "sociopathy" seems to be the dominance of the Imaginary over the Symbolic. Quick background: we haven't really discussed the Symbolic but it is what it says on the tin: "social reality", which is also the same thing as the big Other (because the big Other is a form by which we speak about "social reality").
For Lacan, that whole thing about "quarks and stuff" belongs strictly in the "Imaginary" and *not* the Real (I can hear the protesting, give me a second). The "Imaginary" is called that because it's constituted by *images*, not because it's *fake*. So, a lot of early exposure to, say, Science, is about developing imaginary constructions, and similarly, Venkat's discussion of "the real world" stems from the Imaginary register: the executive who wants to achieve some sort of *vision*, which they imagine and then set out to enact in the world (have you read Arendt's "The Human Condition"? I highly recommend it).
The "Real", for Lacan, is a *rupture*, the Kuhnian Paradigm-collapsing moment that disrupts all our best laid plans, and is always traumatic, the encounter with something that absolutely resists our attempts to symbolize. All trauma stems from an encounter with the Real. What Venkat describes as the path of the sociopath is indeed an encounter with the Real, which smashes through the Symbolic register of one's childhood and forces them to reconstruct their symbolism (= structuration of reality) at a higher level, in this case devaluing social reality (what Lacan might call "the social bond") in service of their Imaginary, or alternatively re-evaluating their desire, which used to respond to gold stars or high-fives because back in grade school, gold stars and high-fives got you what you wanted, but you now need a different approach.
As far as I can tell, what Venkat is ultimately describing is specific way of resolving trauma (by becoming a "sociopath"), which for Freud is merely the formal separation of parts of the psyche. Something happened that you can't process. Now you have a part where you still remember it happening and associate things to it, and a part that can't explain and thus can't accept it. You're split in half. This is all trauma is (and "hysteria" is the short circuit). As Lacan says, the highest ethical aim of psychoanalysis is "never give way to your desire", and learning to play manipulation games at the level of the social field is a great way of doing this, although many might see it as... perverse.
Anyway it all gets tangled up, because Venkat is mixing developmental narratives (ethics) with psychoanalytic theory (formal construction based on a specific set of constraints re empirical observation). I think a better connection is with Fussell's Class", reviewed here ages ago. Do you not see echoes of the "sociopath" in the "barbarians" of the upper class, "clueless" in the "philistines" of the middle class, and "loser" in the "populace" of the lower class? The divide between classes, for both Fussell and Venkat, is not just material but also *social*, in terms of what kind of interpersonal reality they inhabit. And, to me, that's the most interesting part: how does a person become encultured to properly "upper class" socializing? What do they gain and lose along the way? Are we not properly accustomed to seeing the journalist bluechecks as "clueless"? We can inhabit this external space of observation without falling victim to Venkat's analysis, because Venkat is writing about business archetypes, rather than properly *social* ones. Perhaps we're all Class X now?
- A final comment on business, rooted in personal experience: these roles are flexible, and the main question is not *how* you relate but *to whom*. I think Venkat is absolutely correct that the function of management is distribution of blame, which falls from capital holders/investors and clients, to the C-suite external representatives, to C-suite internal representatives, to clueless managers, and eventually becoming work on the losers' desk. Each role exists in relation to the other roles, and the games involved are naturally different as a result of differential conceptualizations of task and domain. I don't necessarily think this *needs* to take on a metaphysical weight; often CEOs are just as motivated by developmental psychology as the lowest level developers. The psychoanalytic question is: what's the basis of their desire? Do they want to get rich? For what end? I'm sure you get different answers at large corporations vs small ones, and I appreciate Venkat's work in making things legible, but the question is ultimately "what's lost?"
The most dramatic cases are things like outsider art, like, look up Henry Darger. It's not metaphorical to them, instead it's a quite *literal* rendering of a very complex imaginative world, which is felt as absolutely real. Typically they'd be unable to even grasp why normal people (neurotics) would find it interesting (i.e. the fact that we'd apply an interpretive process to a piece of art even though it wasn't "meant" for interpretation). I have seen this in my personal experience with a psychotic friend: he made a great pun, which I and my other friend laughed at as he looked at us curiously. We tried to explain the pun to him, and he simply couldn't understand the dual meaning/implication that made it funny for us.
Darger in particular wanted his work to be destroyed when he died, but his wishes were not honored. Kind of sad IMO.
Oh OK. I'm still getting used to Lacan's terms and, as his use of "neurotics" is not the one in ordinary usage, I wasn't taking "psychotics" to mean what it might normally, but it sounds like it might. I thought you were suggesting that most artists might be "psychotics", but that is apparently not the case.
Ah yeah, more like "for the relatively rare psychotic person, art is one possible thing they can do to survive, since business is probably out of the question."
Unfortunately, Lacan is mostly "Freud redux", so to get a grasp of Lacan, you need to have a really deep knowledge of Freud. You might be able to learn some things but it wont cohere without that specific background. That said, nosubject.com is good as a (terse) reference.
this is the fun post, but here is my Lacan-flavored spin:
1. Real is when the company has some "dark" needs, where C-suites pushes their plans to Mid Management, even when desires and articulation may not align.
2. Imaginary is where company identifies itself, where Middle Management preach to the laboreres and public on what to do next, and what the goals are.
3. Symbolic is when company tries to do things to follow their self-identity, sounds like labor class serving the C-suites, but they can never be a perfect work drone.
I think Dilbert, Alice, Wally, Asok, etc are supposed to be Losers (though it doesn't really work here - they're drones, but as engineers they're inherently less social-focused). The Pointy-Haired-Boss is *sort of* Clueless although not a perfect example. And Dogbert, Catbert, and the bald big-headed CEO are clear Sociopaths.
Wally is a loser, taking pleasure in doing as little work as possible. The others are more clueless, in that they expect the system to work for them and are upset about it not doing so
I concur. Wally is a Loser, all the other engineers are Clueless, and the Pointy-Haired-Boss is a Sociopath. He's not very intelligent, but that's not required.
The pointy haired is still clueless, cus he is not torturing people for fun, he is inept in doing good. "Nice Guy Sociopath". The baldie is the real deal, "silent deadly".
While the PHB is the basically the definition of clueless, he is not Clueless, as that would require him to be focused only on the object level goals and be ignorant of the power structures within the company.
And while he is certainly evil at times, his petty evilness mostly comes from his lower-c cluelessness.
Take https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-19 (in which the PHB asks Dilbert to implement changes suggested by the PHB's wife.) For me, this does not look like a sociopath coming up with a new way to torture his employees ("We are switching to COBOL" would probably be a lot more effective than whatever random ideas his wife came up with there) and more like someone whose is playing out his socially assigned role of manager, which would code him Loser.
Baldie and Catbert are probably Sociopaths.
The engineers sometimes seem to care about the success of their projects (or safety concerns) instead of being motivated by paychecks and social relationships, so that would code them Clueless?
> The engineers sometimes seem to care about the success of their projects (or safety concerns) instead of being motivated by paychecks and social relationships, so that would code them Clueless?
Nah, they're all Clueless, not Losers, with the exception of Wally. This is especially highlighted with the introduction of Asok, whose defining trait is his blind trust in the system and which the other characters make fun of him for. Asok and Tina are the fresh meat, so to speak, while Dilbert and Alice are more experienced and disillusioned but still beholden to the archetype. Note the paired characters, which highlight the reaction of women to workplace discrimination (Cynicism =Alice>Dilbert>Tina>Asok). Meanwhile Wally has checked out entirely and is actively looking to exploit the system where he can, making him a low-status Sociopath rather than a Loser. He has no pretensions about his specialness. His female counterpart is Carol the Secretary.
The biggest Loser in the series would be Ratbert, who is explicitly motivated only by a desire for approval and hopes that one day someone will love him back, followed by the Elbonians, who do bad work and use misogyny to harass higher-ranking women like Alice, but are hilariously ignorant of their own flaws and never take responsibility for them. In third place is Bob the dinosaur, who is motivated by nothing and wanders around acting more or less randomly.
Actually, I might be jumping the shark on the Elbonians. They live in a world of literal mud and make no pretensions about their specialness, so maybe they're a country full of Wallys?
I think the comparison to Lacan is relevant here. There's really no good mapping, which suggests that one or the other (or both) are wrong. I think it's possible Rao's sociopath description is more or less correct, but I think the point of _The Gervais Principle_ is to keep manipulating the clueless, giving them a very legible system that they can act within.
I'm also not convinced the system applies beyond the corporate environment at all. Again, Lacan seems more generally applicable (though I don't know if I buy it either).
The reviewer didn't talk about it, but I thought one of the most interesting parts of _Principle_ was Toby's descent into loserdom, deliberately putting the masks back on because that's what makes him happier.
> There's really no good mapping, which suggests that one or the other (or both) are wrong.
Speaking generically, this doesn't necessarily follow. If one system divides people into tall and short, and another system divides people into fat and thin, and there's no good mapping between them, it could be that one or both are wrong, but it also could be that the two systems are orthogonal and that you could get a more-complete taxonomy by taking the cartesian product (in this case giving 4 groups: tall-fat, tall-thin, short-fat, and short-thin).
I'm not convinced the model even applies to the corporate world. I think what he's describing is more like the personalities who tend to surface at the point of civilisation collapse/social destabilisation. The Russian Revolution would be a good example. There you do find the classic rule-breaking and entitlement that sociopathy describes. Who cares if it says General Post Office on a brass plaque outside a building? You can just rip that off, stride in, and reclaim it as party headquarters. It could also be that protest groups operate in the same way. I've not particularly well read in that area. But from meeting some of the people, you can definitely see a lot of the same personalities at the helm.
You're a Loser in Rao's terms. The difference (and I'm loosely quoting here) is visceral, not intellectual. Knowing in your head that everything is bullshit (an oversimplification of his premise but meh) is not the same thing as feeling it your bones. What is the *default perspective/paradigm* in which you evalutate new data?
I think what I like most about the Gervais Principle is that it neatly explains why every alternative game that gets big enough turns into another version of the same old game of sex/money/power. You can predict for instance that any Far-Left political movement will be corrupted inevitably once it hits a certain mass.
Why specify Far-Left, instead of just any political movement? All organizations that are large enough to require bureaucracy are vulnerable to being taken over by Sociopaths.
Not really. More find it interesting that something created explicitly created to be non-exploitative gets completely exploited as soon as it's big enough to be worth it. I think that's why Rao's piece resonates for me, it seems to be gesturing at some real and important facet of humanity, a pattern that repeats despite herculean effort to the contrary.
I guess I don't find it interesting because I was raised to accept that everything (save God Almighty) is impermanent and humans are imperfect. Maybe this is more fascinating if you come from a secular background?
Maybe? My dad is a Methodist pastor, so I don't really come from a secular background :) That being said, knowing that humans are imperfect is different than knowing the specific ways in which they tend to be imperfect. The latter is a lot more actionable.
If I had to guess, because one of the primary goals of the Far-Left is to flatten hierarchies and be above all this sociopathic game playing. To escape from it and create a Utopia where everyone wins.
Extreme right does not really try (or claim to try) this. It just promises to knock over the current hierarchies and replace it with a new hierarchy, approved by whoever is angry at "the current system".
The FL's failed flattening game half-fails, and someone rise to the top. The FR failed rotation game half-fails, and people move around the top and middle.
True. Also, societies can potentially become sociopathic in themselves. But this understandably gets lost in the mix when talking about things in terms of psychology.
I immediately thought of the Electric Kool-Aid test reading the second paragraph of your post. I always remember Wolfe saying about Ken Kesey's alternative hippy commune (paraphrasing) - "isn't it odd that the two leaders happen to be two strapping, athletic ex-wrestlers who tower over everyone else?" Of course, officially, there weren't meant to be any leaders at all. But everyone knew who was unofficially in charge/who it would be unwise to directly challenge.
Thanks for the link. I was vaguely thinking "isn't this kinda similar to some subculture dynamics article I read ages ago" and it turns out, the author of that article refers Rao's ideas directly -- see the footnote: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths#fn_1
Pretty similar to my thoughts on the book. His questions and thought-process are better than his answers in a lot of cases. But it's a credit to him that he's clear in his reasoning and takes a shot at providing answers. No typology is perfect, and it's easier to poke holes in one that isn't an enormous, pretentious, convoluted mess (you've been reading Lacaan; you know such things).
Felt like he made a mistake building everything from that one cartoon, but since he was doing the writing in slow chunks, in the form of blog posts, with no intention of making it into a book originally, by the time he'd gotten far enough to write his way out of the typology in the cartoon, he felt like he had to carry it through. It's hard to write something consistent and cohesive through a blog that you don't work on consistently. As I recall, he wrote this over the course of more than a year. Maybe multiple years.
There's a book about blame-avoidance in government bureaucracy (by Chris Hood I think?) that gets at some of what happens when you have a system of blame-avoidance with no stable sociopath class and very little value in getting credit for things. That's not exactly what the book is about, but that's kind of what I got out of it, and one of the things I find most interesting about systems like the federal government.
But the poll would just reveal information about masks on masks on masks, right? A competent sociopath would know the reality without polling their rivals. :)
I think it would depend on whether, or to what degree, the Sociopath's behavior is driven by explicit or 'conscious' thought versus intuition!
If it's more/mostly intuition, I would think a competent Sociopath would be able to _learn_ the reality from the revealed information about the 'masks'.
And if we could convince a 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! And, as I think the 'theory' would reasonably predict, the Clueless refuse to believe any of it :))
I hadn’t read this review before the voting. If I had I would have given it a 10. Fuck all that manipulative status seeking crap. It *is* just bullshit. You’re just a good insightful writer and deserve to recognized as such. Live your own life the way you want.
This happened last year too and I appreciate the independent confirmation that people still like my work even when they're not biased by their previous opinions, thank you!
Got about halfway in and I'm updating my prior on psychoanalysis being total bullshit. I'm going to read the book today, the review really speaks to me.
Also, if anybody is interested in a somewhat darker take on workplace comedy and phycology I strongly recommend "Severance" on apple tv, it's only one season and quite good.
I've read the original series as a teen when it came out and I've recently re-read them. Back then, I was actually very impressed. Upon re-reading them, however, I had the feeling that it derailed a bit in the end. The general idea is sound and the writing is good, as you conclude, but in the end I had the slight feeling that Rao wants to send the message "look how cool of a psychopath I am". This is (truly!) not meant as an insult, but I'm a bit allergic to the edgy-teen-with-bloated-ego-talk and the end tingled my sensors quite a bit in that regard.
Another thing that really opened my eyes was watching the office. I only did so recently and a lot of "impactful" scenes, which I knew were coming due to his partial spoilers, mostly felt like they were just played for laughs. Especially the scene where Jim talks to David sounded extremely impactful in my imagination, but the real thing isn't: https://youtu.be/SWC08MHYp2M?t=44 . It's even less impactful within the context of the epsiode. The Michael-Jan-affair and Ryan as ascending psychopath are other examples.
What I really think makes sense is the group dynamic sidenote. Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but I see quite a lot that people are unhappy in groups where they are clearly at the top or at the bottom or when people within the group are clearly ranked; the theory that people enjoy being in groups where the middle is muddied is something I see in real life (and, although a bit of a sidekick, the fact that all the groups you're (still) in have this dynamic kind of works as evidence for it).
Overall, even though I no longer agree with all points, I still like it and think it's worth a read. Your last sentence about status economics books is probably true :-)
>I only did so recently and a lot of "impactful" scenes, which I knew were coming due to his partial spoilers, mostly felt like they were just played for laughs.
It *was* just played for laughs, The Office is a comedy. When people pull examples from easily recognizable fiction the point is not about how "real" the scene is (the realness has already been discarded given the example is fictional, it is just used for illustrative purposes).
There's definitely a difference between played for laughs and played just for laughs. The whole point of the book is that Rao assumes that Gervais modelling actual company structures in a satirical way. Now, the primary intention is obviously to create a comedy, but that doesn't mean that Gervais (or the other writers) weren't also recreating something from real life, possibly exaggerated for comedic effect.
The pool scene is not "real", obviously, but if it really has no intended subtext (which is what I thought when actually seeing it), then it makes a particularly bad example and does not lend the story credibility, especially since this scene is used as the primary example of power talk.
My personal mental model of office politics is this:
You've got a bunch of people who pretend they are working for the company when in fact they are working for themselves.
There is so much overlap between the two interests that from a macro level economic perspective its a system that works pretty well, and stuff like division of labor is so valuable that it makes up for the lack of incentive alignment and empire building and bad management and whatnot.
On an individual level, if you take company promises as not lies then you will actually be humble and wait to be noticed you will usually be outcompeted by people who talk themselves up. Some people go into spirals and put all their energy into putting in really good work and will never make it far because they take their bs evaluations as gospel truth, change their work quality to address imagined flaws but never build relationships.
Indeed I find it really strange that basically everyone admits to relationships + baseline competence being more important than competence. Like I often watch YouTube videos day in the life of X and they openly say they don't do the best work they do good work and "have good relationships" with their superiors. Vague but that seems like quid pro que nepotism to me. I promote you you support my projects and give me good reviews and such.
As you get higher up in management it seems to be this combination of politics and innovation/profit maximizing staretegies that gets you ahead.
Some executives focus on delivering profit and some focus on playing political games. They all have to deliver a baseline profit and have a baseline political sense. Different organizations have different levels of toxicity depending on which side they lean.
Start ups have to be much more innovation-focused to the point that they seem less toxic on average.
The consequences of which is I feel like I'm being lied to everyday by corporate so I have no moral problem with making up resumes whole cloth. Interestingly only like 20 percent of employers seem bother checking. I also find it easier to be consistent if I'm making up a resume than if I'm using my actual resume, because I dont remember the exact dates I worked.
Most people seem to lie in interviews but also swear they don't lie in interviews. It feels like taking dope for athletes, it's basically required but only some people get caught.
Some people seem really clueless and never get it and just put even more effort into their work product and rarely get promoted and it's sad.
Some people revel in the politics and pioneer new innovative techniques to get promoted without doing anything.
Other people actually try to add value and are political when they have to be.
Most people work to live and kind of just follow the mold of whatever org they are in.
Psychopaths and sociopaths and narcissists are disproportionately represented but they are such a minority they are usually not the majority or the CEO. Sometimes they are and they'll usually ruin a company over time.
The disabled are in a bad position because they have to pretend not to be disabled or not get hired in the first place. ADA protects against being fired but not against not being promoted.
Pretty much agree with all of this. The only people I'd label as narcissistic/sociopathic (even though I'm not a fan of psychiatric labelling as a rule) in business are the people at the lower levels of the organisation. People hired on contract. People who work in new business. Often people who work in fairly meaningless low-level management positions. CEOs in themselves are a strange breed. They can apparently get through an entire day while being constantly harassed and having to think in a dozen different directions. I imagine they score very high in resistance to stress/multi-tasking. Otherwise I've no idea how you'd categorise them. Either way, I don't think I've ever met a CEO who struck me as being particularly intelligent. Many seemed quite stupid.
Sounds like the book has a lot of psychological ruminations that are fascinating to mull over I'm sure but conveniently the Gervais principle is also, as a book of business advice, reducible to a set of clearly falsifiable claims about business:
1) Sociopaths run the company.
2) Overperformers get promoted to middle management.
3) Underperformers get fast tracked to leadership.
4) Clock-punchers keep their jobs as long as long as their minimal productivity is sufficient to justify their job.
As I do not currently run a company, items 2-4 are most relevant to me instrumentally as possible principles that could guide my attempts to achieve my goals. They are also material claims about business, so I can assess how well they conform with my experience of businesses I've been a part of or closely interacted with. In order of reverse controversiality I assess these as follows:
Principle (4) seems obviously true to the point of banality. Perhaps is expressed in a less banal way in the book, but to me it seems like it's self-evident that at a job a minimum performer will be kept on as long as their labor is still profitable and above replacement value. Replacing any worker has significant costs that grow as organizations become more complex, and the kind of businesses Rao is talking about are pretty complicated (I'm assuming he doesn't assert his model applies to "mom and pop" operations). In my own career I've always understood (4) to be true and adjusted my behavior accordingly. If one has found a sufficiently remunerative occupation (4) is a very good place to be.
Principle (2) seems to me to be almost certainly true, perhaps with some variability for industry. I only have some doubts about whether (2) is universally true because I've observed widespread cynicism about whether hard workers get promoted among acquaintances in other fields, but in personal observation of the growth industries I've worked in, the manager and director-level positions are filled with people who excelled at their individual contributor roles, delivered some impressive projects, organized a successful high-profile event, etc. Certainly luck, circumstance, talent, and even (dare-I-say) privilege play a role as well, but for someone like me I'm comfortable concluding that my degree of effort is a significant factor in whether or not I get promoted to director in the next 5 years.
Thus far then the Gervais Principle's advice is mundane and not particularly audacious: if you want to keep your job, you just need to do enough to be worth keeping on. If you want to get promoted (to middle management) you should work hard and excel. I already believe those things and act accordingly, so no new understanding to instrumentalize there.
What then, of principle (3)? If Gervais is right, this is would be novel information that should significantly alter my behavior. After all, I could work hard and try to stand out and make director so I get promotions and more salary and stock options and increase my quality of life (at which point I'd happily settle into "loser" behavior and cash them checks), but that's a sucker's trade if I could just as easily be an under-performer, get selected by the sociopaths at the top, and fast track my way into leadership to massively increase my quality of life. But his assessment just doesn't track with what I observe about leadership positions in personal experience (caveats again that different fields and industries may have dramatically different social norms). I've worked with some of these people, and those I haven't worked with I'm perfectly capable of reviewing the LinkedIn profiles of, and what I can clearly observe is that Silicon Valley c-suites are largely occupied with people who exhibit markers of being lifelong high achievers - some or all of excelling at a rigorous program at a highly selective university, time served at notoriously demanding associate-level positions such as consulting and investment banking, some significant time spent in middle-management positions, during which presumably they continued to over-achieve (notably, time spent at an organization known to be extraordinarily demanding such as Amazon is especially highly prized.)
So either Rao is wrong, or the mechanism by which underperformers are promoted is so devious that it's entirely imperceptible to those outside the star chamber. I imagine Rao would assert the latter, but I have serious doubts. If I note that all the VPs I know got there by first becoming Directors, then it clearly suggests that if I wish to become VP someday I should first be a Director, and it would take extraordinary evidence for me to update that assumption. I note also that if the mechanism by which underperformers get elevated to leadership is indistinguishable from the career path of high-performing middle management up until the final promotion, then I would hardly call it "fast-tracking" at all when up until then you paid the same dues as the overperformers. Perhaps once they reach middle management underperformers have some special qualities that endear them to leadership and open up further career opportunities unavailable to overperformers. Being "strategically lazy" is of course good instrumental advice, certainly at a certain level one's ability to delegate effectively and organize efficiently - ie, to manage - is more important than how hard one works. But if we accept that this is true, then my behavior shouldn't change. First I should attempt to reach middle management, and then I should then endeavor to exhibit the attitudes that would enable my further ascent, should I so wish.
What then for the first of the Gervais principles, that businesses are run by sociopaths. Today this is a sentiment one can commonly find everywhere, and expressing it lends an easy false sophistication to many a reddit or twitter comment. Perhaps this exposure has inoculated me against Rao's argument here, but I also add that strangely I personally and intimately have interacted with more business owners than I have upper management/leadership due to a quirk of my particular social context. I went to a (public) high school whose alumni includes multiple billionaire startup founders and whose millionaire startup founders are too many for me to number.
So from personal experience, the billionaire startup founder is a combination of lucky/talented/smart/hardworking - they all worked harder/got better grades than me in school, invented, assembled, or built a technology/platform that happened to succeed at meeting some unmet and profitable need, and thanks to the magic of capitalism were compensated with a significant share of that realized and potential profitability. (I note that this model holds true even for the CEOs of companies I worked for, older people that I did not personally grow up with.) Now perhaps we can take the weaker form of the assertion and simply say the ambition and drive necessary to achieve these things requires a certain degree of DGAF attitude, which I might agree with, but as Scott points out at point we've muddled the definitions to the point where the model is useless as a instrumental tool. Is working 100-hour-weeks at an entry level I-Bank position in pursuit of your will to power a sign of a sociopath? I would say in some sense yes, but I don't think that fits Rao's model at all. So if I know that roles like that are part of the journey that got billionaires I know where they are today, what does that say for the model?
Maybe the Gervais principle doesn't apply to growth industries at all, where the social dynamics are just too different, and instead applies to a businesses like a paper company that are trying to carve our fiefdoms of profitability in a established market? I don't know, perhaps my personal experience and context is just too alien to what Rao is describing for his advice to useful? I'd suspect this is the case, but it seems his biographical context is at least adjacent to my own. It's strange because reading this review I kept on thinking that this model might describe a certain kind of older and moribund organization such as we see in The Office, but I can't map it onto, and derive useful instrumental advice for, my context in companies with first-generation leadership.
This is the problem with reading a review and not the book. Rao specifically says that early growth companies do not fit into this mold. This is a description of a fully matured company. The next step is that the sociopaths mine out the value and the productivity falls off often leading to the companies demise.
Useful context, thanks. What's would be his definition of "fully mature" vs "early growth"? Because depending on the definition (if the milestone is "run by first generation leadership," this is a state that can last ~40 years) I think it's plausible that many/most people reading this blog work in growth industries/companies and the model is irrelevant to them. And the model that companies have a innovation-growth-maturity-complacency-death lifecycle is one that is already widely embraced among the disruption/creative destruction set, and a model I've already internalized myself. But if granted that complacent companies are shitholes then I won't devote a lot of cycles to thinking about how to thrive in that environment when the easier path available to me would be to avoid those environments entirely.
As an employed physician I’ve only worked in pretty mature (ossified even) systems so honestly have no experience with growth systems. I think they would map well onto the known cycle that you mention. I also heartily agree with your avoidance strategy and generally wish I had chosen a speciality that would allow me to be in private practice.
Wouldn't then Zvi's Moral Mazes be more of a useful set of writing?
Or when reading Rao's work is there any actionable information?
And if Rao is from growth industries, how does he know this about mature companies? Using pop culture references such as The Office may make it easier to comprehend from the audience's side, but there is nothing necessarily true about The Office and it isn't trying to be a piece of anthropology or organizational psychology.
I mean, if that's what you actually meant, it's a perfectly good thing to recommend, but you should phrase it in a way that won't make the reader think you're conflating different things! E.g., "Zvi's Moral Mazes sequence", or "Zvi's posts on Moral Mazes", or "Zvi's Immoral Mazes", since that's what he actually titled many of the posts. Basically, readers can't assume you know what you're talking about and selected every word deliberately, because such an assumption fails for so many writers; better to communicate more robustly.
I mean, if I really wanted to spend more time on it I could have linked https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/23/mazes-sequence-summary/ instead of relying on someone typing "Zvi's Moral Mazes" into google and seeing that post as link 2 (link 1 being "quotes from"), but instead I opted for the underperforming course of events to allow me to display my sociopathy and execute on my terminal value of punning.
With respect to point 3, it’s important to note that the Gervais principle predicts that underperformers are either fast tracked to leadership OR fired/leaves the company. The idea is that the sociopath quickly rejects the ‘loser bargain’ and schemes to ascend or bails entirely.
As someone who fits well into 3, and has seen a lot of success (mostly through starting my own tuning), I really don’t see his account of 3 as remotely plausible as a common path to leadership.
I currently work in one of these corporate hellscapes, and at entry level, sociopaths job hop a lot. A lot of underperformance is only obvious in retrospect (in 3 - 5 years) and under this timeframe + strategy most sociopaths are long gone.
There's a dude in my industry who my managers bitch about. He's a "promising young engineer - promises this, promises that, then doesn't deliver". For some reason not apparent to me, upper management really likes him.
I do find that most people within my org are happy being "clueless" or "loser". Most "clueless" won't quit because of attachment to the work itself, "loser" won't quit because all their friends work here. I also find this typology most useful when you envision that everyone has changed between these archetypes at some point or another - a toxic enough workplace turns most losers into sociopaths at least temporarily, and when said sociopaths find a friendly enough workplace they'll promptly revert into losers.
The weirdness is that the sociopath, in this context, underperform in so far as they are not willing to give out asymmetric promotions and rewards, and therefore is not worth his time. These are the "aspiring founders" to quote Michael O Church's three ladders. If he is not a prestige person, and is unwilling to put up with either grunt work or "dancing with the stars" he is screwed.
I think "underperforming" is misleading people. It sounds like the minimum-effort clockwatcher, but clearly it's not. I think what Rao means is not "just show up and put in the bare minimum" but rather "on your talents and ability you could be doing a lot more in this particular role, but instead you choose the path to get you promoted".
Things like "a highly selective university, time served at notoriously demanding associate-level positions such as consulting and investment banking, some significant time spent in middle-management positions, during which presumably they continued to over-achieve (notably, time spent at an organization known to be extraordinarily demanding such as Amazon is especially highly prized.)" *are* the 'underperformance'. The Sociopath knows that working for Amazon is going to stand out on his CV more than 'worked for greyly respectable company' so he makes sure he gets into Amazon. It doesn't matter if he does a mediocre job there, what he wants is to be able to put down "worked as X for Amazon for three years".
What the Sociopath underperforms at is "being the best darned sales manager for Burton's Buttons ever!", he leaves that for the Clueless. What the Sociopath wants out of Burton's Buttons is being able to put down "significant time in middle-management". So the Sociopath does work hard, it's that he works hard at promoting *himself*, advancing *himself* and not in the interests of the business. He wants to be the leader and the policy-maker, so he maps out the best path to getting on that track and works on that. Burton's Buttons can go bankrupt and crash into ruin ten minutes after he walks out the door, he doesn't care about that. All he cares about is being able to use that position there as a rung on the ladder of advancement.
Everyone knows that job-hopping is the way to grow your career now so the behavior you describe as "Sociopath" to me reads as "rational and unexceptional career-building." In my professional circles it's astounding to hear of people willingly staying at one job for more than 4+ years, it's conventional wisdom that you grow your career/compensation by job-hopping, and if someone doesn't job-hop its either because (1) there's some serious self-interest compelling them to stay such as stock prices that have ascended so consistently that vesting RSUs have become lucrative golden handcuffs, or (2) they're (perceived to be) unambitious plodders. Like seriously, if you are stuck in one job for 7 years and it's not something like Google or a hot startup with serious upside potential on IPO or an over-compensated leadership position people will wonder what's wrong with you. The notion that people stay out where they are out of a sense of "loyalty" or "friendship" and not self-interest is completely alien. It's a given that your relationship with your employer is supposed to be one of mutual self-interest.
I do think that the culture is one that's pretty good at understanding the importance of aligning employee self-interest with employer self-interest, in part with equity grants but also just a culture that accepts people will pursue their own career goals and not expecting anyone to stick around for extraordinarily long. Every time I've left a job to advance my career I never got a sense of betrayal from my managers/coworkers, and vice versa when coworkers left. If anything, it's in all of our interests for our professional networks to grow and for us to have former coworkers throughout the industry, and if some of them find their careers flourish elsewhere, all the better for us to have friends in high places. It's additionally in my interest to be known in this broad professional network as someone who can be trusted to get things done, so this model isn't exactly incompatible with me being incentivized to excel at my job in the time that I am there. IE, from your example, the "sociopath" strategy of putting in time at Amazon still incentivizes the sociopath to impress his peers at Amazon (remember, we're all likely expected to leave Amazon with supercharged resumes and these are my future internal references). Thus are virtuous positive-sum interactions born. Again, the point is if the sociopath strategy is indistinguishable from conventional over-achiever strategy then what is the novel insight of Rao's business model.
Noting also that in all of the places I've worked of course the business would prefer to retain their employees, but most of the strategies they pursue to that end operate in the logic of employee self interest - equity grants, growth opportunities within the org, compensation tangible and intangible, perks, etc I've never worked at a place that expected me to stay out of "loyalty." They understood that their job was to make the most persuasive case that my staying would be in my interest.
If clever underperformers are preferentially promoted, it's probably somehow in the boss' interest, e.g. the underperformers are smart and mean enough to sabotage the company and lower its profits, so the boss promotes them give them a personal stake in the companies' success.
This regresses toward the Dilbert Principle (akin to Peter Principle and the partially incompetent). The issue is that skills are not uniform, finders vs binders vs grinders logic.
A decent contingent of people vibrate between assessment and judgement without even realizing it.
It'd probably be good if we looked at models like this as assessments and kick judgements to the curb. There's no objective measurement of which type (presuming the types actually represent reality) gets more or less out of life. Or out of work.
Each organizational archetype clearly gets something (and misses something) different out of life. Given the nature of personalities, it's probably best when the personality type aligns with the organizational archetype. No shame in being any type as long as being that type works for you.
The labels for the archetypes of course are a hybrid of judgement and assessment labels which serve to conflate assessment with judgement. This is probably intentional but it's not helpful for comprehension in my view.
This is actually a pretty worldwide thing. It's been considered a necessary evil given that the many empires of conquest throughout history have needed a steady supply of sociopaths to fill their ranks. Apparently this maps fairly well onto corporate politics.
I also don't see myself as one type only in the context of my whole life, and I probably wouldn't say that most people I know well in multiple contexts are a pure Rao-ian type either. I do think it's plausible that most people slot into one of these roles at each job or social institution they participate in, though. I can definitely name jobs where I did the Clueless thing and others where I took the Loser bargain, and do something similar for informal social groups and hobbies.
I don't know about the "dark enlightenment mind games" aspect of Sociopaths, but I think "would rather succeed than be liked" is key. I would actually change it to "would rather succeed than have friends or solve interesting problems". This makes it practically self-evident that Sociopaths would end up on top, since focusing on success would let you out-compete people splitting their focus. But I think this also causes self-selection among non-Sociopaths into lower-tier positions.
A view from computer science academia: According to everyone I know and all the stereotypes, the fanciest professors/advisors are almost always terrible to work for. Their grad students can either barely get their time or are hounded to constantly produce. Some professors won't let you collaborate outside their lab. Although they are sometimes still thought leaders in their fields, more often than not they don't really do research anymore. And yet they are highly respected in their fields, their labs produce a lot of good research, and maybe they even have a startup or two.
But of course working for these people is difficult! They have an aggressive research agenda which necessitates an aggressive enforcement of work ethic among their students. They also have minimal time to spend on most individual students -- they'd rather have their lab do 100 things they're tangentially involved in than 5 things they worked on deeply. And the student is on the hook for delivering, or else *their* career fails, so more often than not the student will figure out how to be successful with minimum involvement from the professor (and if they don't, whatever, there are 99 other things going on). I'm making it sound like these professors are skimming credit, but that's not even necessarily the case -- their involvement in those 100 things might still be highly influential and valuable, even if they put in a small number of work-hours on an individual project compared to their underlings. Like I said, it turns out optimizing for success makes you pretty successful.
But it's not just competition. It's self-selection. Right now I'm personally struggling to choose what I actually want as I'm in the process of becoming a professor. For a while I thought I wanted to be a great prestigious researcher, you know, really change the field and all that. But now I realize that in order to produce at the scale that other professors at the cutting edge do, I would have to basically turn into a glorified CEO/manager with a huge lab, where I have minimal contact with my students, get as many people to do free work for me as humanly possible, unabashedly take all the credit, and generally view the world more as assets and obstacles rather than people.
And I don't want to do that. I would rather have meaningful relationships with a grad student lab and colleagues, and continue personally working on interesting research problems. (And if any of those brings me success, all the better.) But that means I'll be out-competed by people not doing that. So I'm deliberately excluding a couple of prestigious universities from my job search, because I know the culture at those places would make me miserable. The less prestigious route where I actually, you know, *advise*, sounds way more fun. But a Sociopath would take that trade in a second.
Hmm, while I think your priorities are in the right place, I don't think deliberately excluding prestigious universities is necessarily the way to go. I think at most top universities, you basically get to choose the number of PhD students you want and how closely you advise them, so you can really pick the management style works for you, if you are deliberate about it. And if you want to work closely with only 1-2 students at a time, you probably want a place where they will be as smart as possible. There are many ways to succeed, and you don't necessarily have to imitate the flaws of others. The flashiest faculty aren't always the ones doing the best work.
Wow, the fake Green-Blue-Red typology described some of the closest members of my friend group surprisingly well, better than the Sociopath-Clueless-Loser typology.
Maybe there is just a class 'business books' are merely psychoanalytical exercises meant to scaffold something attractive to those {publishers, readers} who know there is endless churn around 'management philosophies' that can be exploited. Gin up a simplified horoscope and you're on the path... Something about Tajfel?
I would not be surprised if that's more-or-less how publishers see their contradictory titles on management philosophies (or education).
However, the way you phrase it might undersell the value of Rao's tripartite schema, Freud's version, or any other semi-arbitrary simplified horoscope. These schemas encourage the reader to think about patterns among the personalities of people they know, and then check whether there are important things that correlate with those patterns. For example, status within a corporation.
Without being exposed to an endless cycle of such schemas, it's easy to put all your eggs in one or both of the baskets 'We're all alike'* and 'We're all unique.' Instead, we should also place some eggs in a third basket, 'We're divided into groups,' and rearrange the eggs within it depending on the context.
I remember reading these posts a few years ago and generally agreeing with the thrust of this review -- that they have a handful of interesting insights on human behavior but the top-level categories are not very convincing.
On a meta level, I think we should have a high level of suspicion for systems that seek to break people down into Type I Suckers, Type II Suckers, and Super Cool Badasses Who Don't Take Shit From Anyone. Partly this is because the Badass category tends to just end up as a flattering description of the author; as others have commented here, this book sometimes feels like Rao justifying/explaining his own personality and behavior. But I also think these categories often amount to a psychological trick; the natural reaction from the reader is "ooh, I want to be in the Badass category!" and to start looking for Badass traits in oneself, and at that point you've already bought what the author is selling regardless of whether it reflects reality in a useful way. I think you also see this reflected in the supposed "sigma male" archetype which was popular on the internet for a minute, although thankfully that's been mostly memed into oblivion since then.
Actually, I think Rao's Sociopath category is mostly indistinguishable from the sigma male thing, except that it's framed in a way that targets adults instead of teenagers.
I dunno, my reaction was that being in the Badass category sounded like the worst possible thing, even if the reward is absolute freedom from invented social structures. It precludes ever being an authentic, whole person, and you get to stand on your pedestal and pull the strings of your puppets below, while your strings are cut and there is nothing that moves you.
"the natural reaction from the reader is "ooh, I want to be in the Badass category!"
Well, some people do. Some people, like me, are "Badass? Oh come on, I'm not fourteen any more and this is real life not a blockbuster movie" 😁 I'm always some what suspicious of people asking me "But don't you want to be COOL?" Well, no, actually?
In reality, "badasses" are more often "pains in the ass" for other people to have to deal with, and clean up after them.
It seems that Rao only had 'Office' esque wage-slavery in mind when writing this. I'm studying VFX, and I actually see a lot of utility in joining a company hierarchy for the sake of mentor-ship. I'd be more than willing to play the role of 'clueless' at the right company, not because I like working myself to the bone, but because it could give me the opportunity to develop my skills FASTER than I'd be able to alone. The ability to accelerate a learning curve is incredibly valuable in a field that might take decades to master.
It's almost like Rao completely neglects the idea that people actually enjoy things, and might like to develop themselves. It's strange that a self identified sociopath doesn't notice fast routes to power(here 'power' = 'skill').
Wouldn't you just be a sociopath (under Rao's framework) here? I don't think Rao suggested anyone likes working themselves to the bone for what that's worth.
For the moment, no. They want to focus on learning VFX skills and the fastest way to gain those skills is to allow someone else to abstract away all the other secondary skills that a VFX artist needs.
For example they might appreciate that their employer is handling cash flow (give them the same amount of money at regular intervals), taxes (those are way simpler for wage slaves than for self-employed people), health insurance (if they are American it's customary for employers to handle that), project management, customer acquisition and so on.
This is what Rao calls "mediated reality". You get other people to handle the parts of the world that don't interest you so you can focus on doing what you like or what you are good at.
"You get other people to handle the parts of the world that don't interest you so you can focus on doing what you like or what you are good at."
Precisely. I think the examples you provided illustrate exactly what I'm talking about.
I think there is a viable symbiosis to be had in many of these hierarchies.
Another example within the VFX industry is access to hardware. Large VFX houses have massive render/sim farms that enable artists to reach heights unreachable on their own. In exchange, the management types get to make some easy money off the backs of artists. Everyone wins here. Obviously this balance can sometimes become corrupted; but I think it works fairly well for many people.
I can see why one would view this as mutual sociopathy, but I don't know enough about Rao's framework to make a statement on his version of the word.
I worked for a large VFX studio that hired two young aspiring artists at the bottom rung of the ladder - One Clueless, one Sociopath.
The deal was: do ~6 months of menial labour as a PA runner: non-artist work doing odd jobs around the office, and when a junior artist spot opens up, the company would promote them.
The Clueless gave the company 110%. She was the best PA runner the studio had ever had. Everything ran better when she was around. People noticed it too. She'd frequently get compliments on her work, and took pride in it. The company never promoted her. She quit after 2 years of never being seriously considered for an artist spot.
The Sociopath gave the company nothing. He spent most of his time making friends with department leads, and angling to help out with artist work rather than do his assigned runner tasks. Coworkers would frequently complain that he never did his job, but evidently, he did enough not to get fired. After a few months, one of his friends pulled some strings to get him promoted to a show.
This sort of thing is definitely a problem in the industry(especially this past couple of years it seems). I think however, that this Clueless PA is exceptionally clueless. She is not in symbiosis with the company in this example, because she allowed herself to be hired for wage-slave-labor. I'm perhaps being extremely optimistic when looking at actual industry job availability. Perhaps this was the only path she had as an option.
(Obviously, this is still the company being a bad actor and exploiting her.)
What I was thinking of was more like, a skilled Houdini artists getting access to massive particle sims that otherwise would be unusable. You don't learn a tool like Houdini and become a runner(if you have any sense of self worth).
The trouble is the mismatch. The 'Clueless' person wanted to be an artist, but her work as PA was more valuable to the company, so they didn't promote her. From their point of view, why would they? She was creating more value doing what she did than hiring her on as an artist.
The 'Sociopath' stuck to his aim: be an artist. He did everything to make that happen. Of course he did the bare minimum as PA, that wasn't what he wanted to do, and being valuable in that role was no good to his desired career. So the company keeping its end of the bargain and hiring him on as an artist was fulfilling the agreement: do the 6 months grunt work and we'll give you a slot.
In this instance, I don't think sociopath is a useful description. He wanted to be an artist and he did what he could to make sure the company didn't exploit him and renege on the deal. That's not being cold-blooded user of others. The 'clueless' person didn't understand the real terms: by being more useful as a PA, she didn't demonstrate that the company would benefit by making her an artist. That was naive on her part, but now she has the experience to understand for her next job what she *should* be doing, which is "if I want to be an accountant, I need to concentrate on getting into the accountancy department, not being a stellar employee in the post room".
The company wasn't looking for "can you work hard?" and that was her mistake. It was looking for "how badly do you want to be an artist, can you figure out the path to becoming one here?"
You can rent a massive render/sim farm by the hour from Amazon Web Services. If you're using it 24/7, it might cost you 10x what it would cost to build and run your own, but if you're only doing a big render a few times a month, it might actually be cheaper, even before you deduct the vigorish extracted by management and shareholders.
The other examples, cashflow and health plans and mentorship and stuff, are valid though.
You might be right, but are you sure the average person can afford the same size render farm services a large studio can provide? I have a feeling that big studio's like ILM and Weta are willing to throw huge budgets at theirs. That's just an intuition though. Also, I think some studios are using cloud solutions like AWS, but again, I'm willing to bet that they are a throwing an un-matchable amount of money at this.
Maybe I'll ask at the VFX reddit to see if I can get a clear answer. Or celluloid_dream might know the answer.
See this video for an example where personal render farm renting becomes an issue.
According to the artist in the video, most of that avalanche is one sim. Sure, you might be able to afford a single take, but what happens when you need to iterate? Sounds expensive to me.
It's not totally black and white, seeing as we can't easily calculate the amount of computation time that an individual in a studio is getting access to. Nor can we easily calculate the cost of a shot like this, because pipelines might have totally different setups for render passes and compositing. However, the answers are showing that rendering even a single frame can be extremely expensive. Iterating on a personal budget would probably be impossible for the vast majority of people(assuming you are looking to match AAA render quality).
Here is the thread if you are interested. More people might comment in the future, so keep an eye on it if you are interested.
Is this entire book based on *The Office* ? If so, then is it applicable to the real, non-fictional world -- at least, more so than any other literary criticism ?
I think it is just using well known caricatures of what he is describing to illustrate the point. Not in an "it is true because it appeared in fiction" sense which is always ridiculous and I think is what you're referring to, but in a "this is the kind of thing I'm talking about" sense where mapping that to real world experience (or failing to) is left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, among other fictional works, but he emphasizes at every turn that The Office itself is an uncannily accurate (funhouse) mirror of the real, non-fictional world. Whether he's right, well, I would suggest to read it and decide for yourself.
I read this years ago and it was life changing. It made me realize I’d been clueless, and so I tried my best to become a sociopath. I disagree with some of the claims Rao makes and would summarize my disagreement as “the mic in my head is a panoply of all these different voices but is ultimately controlled by a singly concept, which most classical philosophers would say is “ The Good” and which I would say is a hardware-specific approximation of the good.”
I followed my own, modified understanding of this theory and it worked out for me. I found a sociopath at Google (director of an org with ~350 people) and got on his good side by selling people on bitcoin as best I could. He never got into bitcoin, but I succeeded at selling him on me. He took me under his wing, showed me some tips and ultimately connected me with a mentor who then showed me the real goods: yes we are all controlled by stories, but we can choose which stories we tell ourselves, and feeling good ends up making you perform better. So true super saiyan abilities come from cultivating love and decency in yourself, while having zero doubt that you will ever be anything but Ok.
The key for me was to reject dark enlightenment, and go for the real deal. Rao sees a world run by storytellers with no intrinsic meaning or purpose, and what I see is someone buying into just another story. “It’s constructed narratives all the way down,” is ALSO a constructed narrative.
I want, and still want, to accomplish goals with unbounded scope. I want to do things that move the world in ways big enough that that I will be historically relevant. My goal isn't to be relevant or to matter, mind you, it's to do some phenomenal amount of good in the world.
You could call it 'will to power' and i don't think this is wrong, except i'd phrase it differently: i think there have been instances of a few people who really did have tremendous positive impact on the world, and i want to be one of them. That's the narrative that convinced me: that people with massive outsized impact on the world aren't smarter or more capable than i am - they just a specific kind of path and followed it.
I'm not interested in power over others; i think that kind of power ultimately limits your ability to impact the world. I want the social influence of joe rogan, the technological acumen of elon musk, and the spiritual bearing of a mixture of Sadghuru, Jordan Petersen, with the AI framing of Josha Bach.
You might argue that i want these things primarily because it's the only way to maintain order in my head. I'm a politician in here, there are many many of us inside, and keeping order seems to require a constant focus on some ridiculous outsized mission.
First off, thanks for asking. You are giving the gift of understanding and i very much appreciate it.
Maybe the word 'goals' is the wrong way of putting it here. I am _absolutely_ interested in being a good person. If anything, that is the simplest way of putting the goal. I just want to be good. I want to live a good life. That is more important to me than anything else. So THAT really is the goal. Global impact and success are only plausibly instrumental there.
One of the things i've come to learn from my coach, and come to see experientially, is that everyone is different and 'living a good life' means, to a large degree, being who you really are. When you're pissed off, angry, tired, frustrated, or afraid, that isn't the real you, nearly as much as who you are when you're calm, well fed, feeling connected and loved.
And who i am in those states is expansive, intensely loving, wanting to sacrifice himself for the good of the world, wanting to help, to create, but also to play, to love, to laugh at a global scale with much of the whole world laughing along in joy, not because i want to be popular but because i so see so much suffering in the world and what to do whatever i can to alleviate it.
I have tried to make the change you're describing - to alter myself so that i can maintain order without unachievable goals - and i would say that those things aren't even goals so much as... milestones that seem to appear on the road ahead.
How do you feel about the following self story:
"If I act in accordance with the principles of my environment, the area of the environment accessible to me will grow. The new areas will have more complex, subtle principles, meaning alignment will be a more computationally difficult challenge. Once I learn and master those principles, the area accessible to me will grow still further. There is no end to this process, and there may be no end to the extent to which i am interested in exploring. I suspect that i will go further than anyone else before me, in part due to sheer hubris, in part because of the weird place in history where i grew up, specifically details about my family background, and a period in late adolescence where i blew up my worldview from scratch to recreate something from first principles. I suspect that once you reach a certain size/scale of operation, changing your worldview becomes insanely risky, and this explains why nobody seems to be able to approach Elon Musk in terms of world impact: his worldview was based heavily on physics and first principles, which allows him to process this extremely wide environment in a way that most people around him cannot. Others at his scale of operation are stuck with whatever mindsets they cobbled together on their way up, and they cannot possibly risk undoing deep contradictions in the foundations of their world models, because that would imperil their day to day operations. There is most certainly an element of arrogance in here, but that fellow and the rest of us have made our peace; he is not simply 'along for the ride', nor is he in the driver's seat, but rather one out of a constellation of virtues, a somewhat-cancerous-confidence, we virtues are all at odds with one another, all jostling for the lead and then relinquishing it, in the service of what our ancestors would call almighty God, and i would say is maximizing the number of possible future states accessible to the physical universe, as modeled in the mind of the hardware upon which this network of virtues conducts its intercourse."
And what successes do i imagine where fame would be instrumental?
- i want to heal the schism in Christianity so that the protestant reformation no longer smoulders as it has for the past few hundred years, so that evangalists will see evolution as being part of god's plan and even find support for it in scripture and the catholic church will come alive again, vibrate with joy, just as the god or worships rose from the dead
- i want to convince the world that AI risk is poorly understood and that in reality, the orthogonality thesis only holds over vanishingly short timeframes, that for sufficiently large, complex organism, there is no meaningful difference between "self" and "other", the boundary is a moebius strip, and buddhahood is the only plausible survival strategy over long enough time frames
- that turing completeness is the mathematical basis for human equality, that the world is a turing tape and we are merely finite state automata traversing it, and that only when we identify as the world itself, we become turing complete and thus capable of simulating our own determinism to such a degree that we can break free of it and become self-authoring
- the world peace is entirely possible so long as the econonomics of violence mean that invasion, theft, and robbery are net-negative ROI, at which point peace wins not for any reason other than greed suggests it's better to get along with your neighbors
- to build an alliance of abrahamic faiths to fulfill god's promise to abraham and settle human beings upon every star system in the galaxy
- to convince staunch materialists that moral realism is an approximation hueristic, that valence realism is more or less equivalent for human purposes, and that valence is just a compression of the long-run consequences of our decision making
all this stuff jostles in my head all the time, i am under tremendous tension and pressure, but i have learned that satisfying goals never makes a person happy, instead this comes from appreciating things in your day to day life, in other words you've got to use your seretonergenic system to make yourself content with life; goals are just one kind of activity that's ideally only about 505 of your time, last night me kids were climbing trees in the front yard as i pulled weeds and said thank you god for htis life, thank you god for this life
i have been consistently hypomanic the last ~6 months due to family circumstances on top of the plague/war/famine/geopolitical instability but i'm holding on to reality most of the time
Oh, you're totally right. Thank you for the concern. Normally i just try to stay focused on day to day tasks, but the act of communicating this caused a flare up of emotion, consider it like the flare gas at an oil rig. Normally i engage in proof of work (i.e. doing my day job) to stay sane.
I get that the likelihood of any of this happening is largely zero, and that in reality my greatest contributions to the world are likely to be 'just' being a good dad, a good son, a good friend, a good brother. But i'm ok with that. And maybe i'll do more writing. Something tells me Don Quixote was maybe a little bit autobiographical.
I read this a number of years ago back when it was just 6 blog posts, and came away reasonably impressed. I think the core insight of "when you look around an office, what you'll see is people trading their labor for 1) Money, 2) Power, 3) Something else." I'm less convinced by assertions that most people only want one of those, and that there are enough people who want "something else" to the exclusion of money and power to be economically significant.
>there are enough people who want "something else" to the exclusion of money and power to be economically significant.
Hard to really explain the continued existence of caring jobs that get paid dogshit (public school teacher, nurse, etc) without them. People can pay these critical jobs less because people actively want to do them, and not for the thrill of holding power over the weak and helpless.
The majority of people are working in jobs because you need a job to live. If you're lucky, you get to work at something you really love doing, or at the very least find the job meaningful. That's how you get people who are "I always dreamed of being a teacher/nurse/electrician/bakery owner". As you say, because there are some people for whom it is a vocation and not just a job, you can get them to take lower-paid, lower-status jobs.
Some people have an entire career plan mapped out where they are going to climb the ladder and get the position of Big Cheese and have all the money and power and so on.
But for most of us, it's a way to earn the money to pay our bills. You do or don't put in more effort, over-perform, depending on how engaged you are or if you really do think you will get raises and promotions and praise for it. And there's a lot of work that is routine, that is in the middle, that isn't going to get you higher up the ladder, but it still has to be done. I do think some entities have way too many layers of management and could shed many of those jobs, but you can't simply say "well all those middle-managers are doing nothing in particular, get rid of them all".
The sociopath thing doesn't make much sense to me, apart from the very ambitious types who are out for themselves alone and want to climb the ladder as fast as possible, so they do push off routine work on others, take on the work that gets them credit (or lets them take the credit from others) so they can impress the higher-ups, do the networking and ass-kissing to move on up, and switch jobs to always be moving up and getting better and better opportunities until they reach the level they're aiming at. They don't care if the business is making biscuits or drugs to treat cancer, they do care about being CEO or Global President or a seat on the board. But I don't think that means sociopaths 'know' what reality really is, or have a better view than the rest of us; they know the games to play beneath the veneer of mission statements, but that's only part of the reality. You make drugs to treat cancer because there's a lot of money to be made out of those, but you also make them to heal the sick. The 'clueless' who think they are doing good work and helping humanity are not deluded or don't know reality as it really is; that is as much part of reality as 'look guy, this is a business to make money, they're not going to give away drugs for free so forget all that nonsense about helping the sick'. As we can see from Martin Shkreli, a Sociopath often comes a cropper against Reality.
The book also discusses how people transition from one type to the other. When a Clueless person is betrayed they sometimes realize they can't rely on others to mediate reality for them, so they become Sociopaths. They need some time to focus their strength and gather some resources before they can pull off their new sociopath plans, and during this time they can't afford to spend all their energy at their day job so they do the bare minimum (i.e. they act as Losers for a while).
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to perceive Scott as following this path. He was working as a Clueless high performing employee for an hospital, and he was happy because his employer abstracted away all sorts of stuff that are annoying to deal with. All he had to do was help the patients his employer assigned to him and he would get money and respect. He didn't have to worry about customer acquisition, marketing, and even some details about tax payments and insurance deductibles would be abstracted away by the Sociopaths of the healthcare industry.
When his employer could not hold its end of the bargain, that is when it looked like being a good psychiatrist wouldn't be enough to keep his job anymore, he quit. He's probably not the type to harm his employer or patients by working the bare minimum like Rao says a Loser would do in that situation, but I think putting his blog on hiatus served the same function, allowing him to focus on creating his own company.
I wasn't able to get much out of it, which is why I didn't include it here. I just kind of felt "well, that's a claim" without being able to think of good examples.
I found "Babytalk" – like the kind of bullshit that's spouted at company meetings – to be particularly irksome. Company-wide memos also seem like great examples, tho they're spectacularly unremarkable, which may be why they're hard to remember.
Someone was telling me about how, at their office job, "At a meeting with the higher-ups, I try to explain why this business strategy is what we should be going for, but no matter how clear and convincing I make my case, they always just gloss over what I said. Their responses don't even make any logical sense, it's like they literally didn't even hear me." This struck me as a perfect example of failed Gametalk: the person doing the explaining was under the assumption that he and them were engaged in the shared goal of running a successful business, but he was wrong. His bosses were more engaged with status games, which forbade them from taking any of his suggestions no matter how good they were, because they could not allow him to take credit for them and rise in status relative to them. They were speaking entirely different languages, which is why he thought their responses made no sense.
Oh, I see. That framing doesn't match what Rao describes, though. I actually find his examples much more sensible, particularly power talk as information bartering under plausible deniability. The person who was telling me about management not listening to him was apparently not aware of these types of communication, hence he futilely kept trying to engage with his superiors as if they were equals.
Charitably, I think this kind of thing makes a lot of sense. "higher-ups" are 'playing a different game' – their 'object level reality' (or the parts of it that are important to them) is just very different. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." captures a part of that.
I remember reading this when the first series of blog posts appeared in, like, 2009 or 2010. I've seen it pop up here and there since then and I do find it interesting.
Basically, I think The Gervais Principle is is very, very good - as a piece of television criticism. Like, it explains what happens in the American version of "The Office" and the interactions between the characters *perfectly* from what I can remember (granted, it's been awhile since I've watched the show). So if you want to read a book that does an excellent job of explaining what happens on "The Office," read it, it's great.
As for its ability to make sense of human interaction, or organizations, or psychology, I'm pretty much with Scott. It's interesting, and contains some nuggets of actual insight, but is way overdetermined. I think it's probably better than the average dev-psych-inflicted-internet-pop-psychology theory (is there a phrase for this sort of stuff? I feel like there should be one), but you can't take it too seriously. The world is just far messier than the "principle" implies - though, in fairness, I suspect Rao might admit this if asked.
> Venkatesh’s analysis is wonderful .. But I have three main problems with using the archetypes, as described, to elaborate on my own theories of corporate politics:
- The names themselves
- The assertion that over-performing middle managers are generally idiots
- And the placing of corporate citizens into one of three buckets on the basis of assigning them serious shortcomings.
Instead, I think of them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has *done to them:*
- Broken the losers
- Tricked the clueless
- And forced the sociopaths into ethical conundrums.
I propose that we name the losers, clueless and sociopaths to “pragmatists, idealists and opportunists.”
- Pragmatists are line-level employees who find value in life outside of work, mainly because the hope of any meaningful advancement and enjoyment of their profession has been taken from them.
- Idealists believe heartily in the meritocratic company (and organizational superiors) as a benevolent steward of their careers because perspective has been taken from them.
- Opportunists refuse to yield hope or perspective and recognize that the only way to win the corporate game is to play by their own rules. In this realization, they give up ethical certainty and human connection – opportunists play a lonely, sad game to get what they get.
I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of different organizations of different sizes and domains, and I just don’t run across cartoonish people like Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute.
By and large, the people in these organizations, at all levels, are relatively well-intentioned, reasonably intelligent and doing the best that they can on the micro, day-to-day level. Corporate structures are, however, substantially less than the sum of their parts, so good faith efforts in the small are perverted into rampant dysfunction writ large across the face of industry. Organizations are pathological, as Venkatesh points out, and they are pathological in a way that corrupts their components.
I don't think Rao would disagree with much of that.
I've spent a good bit of time now in various organizations of differing sizes (and domains) too and I have frequently run into extremely cartoonish people – their writing just isn't as good as the Office's is.
This criticism tracks, but I'd add one thing: in my experience a large portion of middle managers are people who generally enjoy their work and are good at it, and want to enjoy a secure upper-middle-class lifestyle without the constant, workaholic stress that comes with being in upper management. Which isn't to say that there is no stress in middle-management, but I think those roles strike a reasonable balance between stress, money/prestige, and maintaining a connection to the actual work that is appealing to a lot of people.
Also, I've literally never in my entire life encountered a person who wholeheartedly believed in a corporate mission statement. Sometimes people may find certain things to like in them, but I think everyone knows they are mostly bullshit at the end of the day. At least I assume that's the case.
As a former middle manager, this sounds right. I liked what I did and the rewards were reasonable.
I had a CEO ask if I wanted to be a CEO. I said no as I never wanted the demands of being an executive - interrupted downtime & holidays, perpetual jet lag from travel, crazy amount of email/calls/meetings/issues, responsibility for keeping the business growing, difficult customers, hyper-competitive peers etc.
I've found over the years that I'm less averse to 'stepping up' and filling the gap in a team/group with respect to, e.g. coordination and 'executive decision making'. I've found over time that almost any 'project' works much better when there's a clear 'dictator' that can, as needed, 'just pick one' (option).
I learned to appreciate bosses that would make a decision at all, even if it wasn't (what I thought was) the 'right' one.
Generally, quite a LOT of people seem to _fantastically_ underestimate and under-appreciate the value of _any_ management, let alone 'good' management.
I have known a _few_ people who seemed to take 'corporate mission statements' at face value. Most people seemed to have at least a _little_ skepticism tho.
Love this analysis - I'd supplement it with the observations that while Opportunists might be overrepresented in the upper echelons of a corporate structure, (a) their success rate may be higher on the margins but most Opportunists fail just like everyone else does, and (b) overrepresentation does not mean the space is exclusively composed of Opportunists.
In fact, lots of this "dark triad" and "psychopath CEOs" literature seems pretty specifically targeted to unsuccessful sociopaths/opportunists, since it affords them a fiction that despite their lack of success they are part of a special successful class.
I just wanted to comment briefly to say that this matches my experience, and I think it's actually a fairly important insight to have to realise just how often opportunists/Sociopaths fail. Thank you for posting this.
Manipulators (the Andy flavor of Clueless) and Opportunists ("sociopath" in the most anti-clinical sense) seems to be different breeds but with similar characteristics.
By extension, Dwight and the Believers would be tuned into conforming to both Idealist/Clueless and Pragmatic Losers. It gives the illusion of meritocracy.
See: Alex Danco and Michael Scott's Theory of Class.
I think my comment here is going be less blind rage than my previous comments on Lacan and "Sadly, Porn", and that's because A) I've actually read this book and B) It isn't Obscuritan. Scott has summed up much of the more incoherent criticisms and things I liked about the book (blog posts, actually) pretty well here.
I'd add that there were a few sections not covered, such as the section on money not being a real thing, or being treated as similar in value to monopoly money. No wonder the self-identifying sociopath Rao thinks his sociopathy is a real difference between him and the "Losers" (not so much the "Clueless"), when threats to his status don't similarly translate into a threat to livelihood. If you're already rich, and being hated isn't dangerous for you, you have a lot less reason to care about status (and status-illegibility, and the support network that is group belonging) because those things aren't important for staying alive. It seems like he doesn't understand the whole "caring about other human beings as a goal in-of-itself" thing in addition to focusing a bit too far up that hierarchy of needs.
I'll say I at least appreciate that I can pick out ideas from what he's written and criticize them or praise them independently without the ever-present dodge of "well you don't know that's what they *really* mean" that comes from the obscurantists. It's possible to actually find useful insights in the book, as opposed to staring feverishly at it and hallucinating.
What do you think about his claims to being a sociopath in itself? I find Mark Fisher's argument that most self-identifying sociopaths are simply overestimating the extent to which most people are being authentic or 'real' in social situations. The self-styled sociopath thinks "Oh, that person is being so polite to that server! I could never force myself to care about someone like that." Not realising that, in most of these interactions, most of us are just going through the motions too.
I suspect you're right; that he's in the category of people with no particular surplus of empathy, but not a sociopath regardless, at least not in the sense most people mean. I'm not familiar with Mark Fisher's argument, though, could you link that?
I would think that a self-styled sociopath would pick up on the fact that most social interactions are just grease, and think of themself the way they do when they see more genuine interactions and realize they don't have those, but I'm not living inside their head.
Hey. Thanks for the reply. :) I don't have a direct link to the Mark Fisher point, and I can't remember 100% which book it featured in, but I'm pretty sure it was in his book "Ghosts of my Life". Well worth checking if you like odd/eccentric takes on contemporary culture and politics. Great writer as well.
Rao's "sociopathic" ideal is those that can un-cancel the future if they tried, those that can exit if they were to not try to climb and preserve the system, and make their own alternate reality. The clinical sociopaths are noted in the book as extreme clueless in this regard, who tries to be "cool" but always fail.
That sounds really interesting. Can you remember at all which part of his book that argument features in? I'm assuming you're paraphrasing some part of it. No worries either way, I'll definitely get around to reading the whole thing at some point!
I suspect many sociopath's are playing to a parent's voice in their head as well. If your dad said things like "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." You might spend your life trying to win your dad's approval and behave as a monster to get it. Not all parents put pro-social messages into their children's heads.
It's not institutional success and wealth, performative/dramatic fame, or affiliative prestige. It's power. Alex Danco noted the difference between real power and prestige ("detachment from reality") and it is worth checking.
P.S. And then you got the loser class which is "dad went out to smoke" scenario.
I don't think David Wallace and Charles Miner are good examples of sociopaths. There is no evidence that they were initially lazy employees of the company who schemed their way to the top. Jan is probably a better archetype of a sociopath.
IMO, the three archetypes in the Gervais Principle are only relevant to large bureaucratic organisations and the people within them. Anyone who has spent too much time within such organisations (like me) can relate to a lot of what Venkatesh is talking about.
"Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit."
This is absolutely correct and explains why so many large bureaucratic organisations appear to be so over-staffed with middle managers. I especially recommend part 5 of the essays 'Heads I Win, Tails You Lose' https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/10/14/the-gervais-principle-v-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose/ which anyone in a large bureaucratic organisation should read, if for no other reason just to avoid being the unwitting fall-guy for senior management.
I don't think the framework fits the real world (but will refrain from rehashing comments making those arguments in my own words). That said, because playing "fit the square peg in round hole" is a surprisingly fun game in general, let me try and fit myself in:
By Rao's definition I was once a Sociopath and deliberately chose to switch to Loser, because I knew it would make me more successful on pretty much all desirable axes. "But, Neike, if you choose it intellectually, you're still a Sociopath by Rao's definition!" The problem with that framing is that I made this rational decision approximately twenty years ago. It's long since become an instinctive and emotional setup and that was the plan all along. Rao's "Loser" category is my cherished default. I can still step outside it (in fact, recently did so on a particular subject), but it takes (1) remembering there is an outside, (2) wanting to step outside, (3) a bit of non-zero emotional labour to make the transition (again, very intentional).
I feel like the categories would be more useful if the author didn't insist on trying to hammer it into a cynical frame. He could start with the names: "Strategist" / "Loyalist" / "Idealist", as one possible substitution triad (not trying to suggest this matches perfectly well or is even unambiguously positively framed, they're just the first three that came to mind). Might make the whole thing more digestible/accessible and might make it easier to fit his ideas onto the wider real world.
Agreed. I thought the same thing. He's an exceptional writer. But his book is never going to achieve acceptance purely on the basis that the categories are too arch and cynical for mass approval.
>I can see bits of myself in the Clueless archetype. I like legible systems. I’m the person who did really well on standardized tests, really badly at networking, and ended up in medical school because it was the highest you could go on test scores alone
>But I’m bad at listening to authority figures,and quit my last job to start my own company. Also, Clueless people are supposed to be bad at using language in original ways, and I’m a professional writer.
Clearly Scott does not fit into any of the categories Venkatesh spells out. What's also important is that he does not have a corporate job. Venkatesh was writing about the kind of people who choose to work corporate jobs for extended periods of time.
Weird how people switched from not "choosing" to work corporate jobs to "choosing" to work corporate jobs just as capitalism started getting big. Maybe working at a company brain-fries you to think this way, but that doesn't really seem to be the way these categories are framed.
Not choosing to work corporate jobs has always been a thing, regardless of the influence of Capitalism. Scott is an independent psychiatrist, for instance. Those have always been around.
I am self-employed too. Corporations sound fuckawful. Also I applied to a bunch of corporate jobs in the (largely evil) American insurance industry before finding I could make a living wage from my hobby and just doing that instead.
People are not "choosing" corporate jobs. Those are the jobs available to them. When given the choice, they are choosing almost anything else.
Expend this scale, and we get Alex Danco and Michael O Church. The gig economy on professional labor is already a sign that it is clueless circa 2020, which goes with the bloated mid management and professional deluge (see also Peter Turchin's "Elite Overproduction"). The cottagecore and etsy-fied life is for cool losers, and the ones who can naturally LARP "grindset" and surmise Great Reset is for future sociopath/elite/opportunists.
The idea that Sociopaths identify and promote other Sociopaths, particularly when they are defined as underperformers is implausible under the book's own definition of the groups. Why would a Sociopath want to help another Sociopath? By definition they are disinterested in social approval. Clueless are supposed to be better at object-level work, so promoting a suspected Sociopath is to intentionally seek lower object level performance. On top of that, since there are layers and layers of Clueless between the established Sociopaths at the top of the company, an entry-level Sociopath is going to have almost no chance of getting noticed by high-level ones.
The only way this could make sense is if Sociopaths commonly found personal enjoyment in a master-apprentice type arrangement (And before you post it: yes, I thought of Sith Lords too). But for entry-level Sociopaths this would mean that a still-climbing Sociopath in middle management (the only people that routinely interact with entry-level folk) would need to risk their own career growth by spending time and opportunities on a Sociopath instead of an object level performer. I admit that master-apprentice might occur, if both Sociopaths can reliably cooperate to advance together. "Riding a manager up the ladder" is a concept I've heard of more than once. But it doesn't seem like it could be *the* way things work, because unless there are continuous chains of Sociopaths from bottom to top, which would be *really* obvious as the only way anyone gets promoted to upper management, the Sociopaths at the head of each chain are rising under their own power.
Regardless, I don't think looking for early underperformance among executives is likely to work out as a validation of the theory. If nothing else (and there's a lot else) object-level performance and management are *by definition* different activities that should exercise different skill sets. You can show that Managers promote those that exhibit Manager aptitude even if they're not a great object-level performer, but that is exactly what you'd expect an actually good Manager to do. It doesn't by itself attribute any of the Sociopath characteristics to the Manager class.
Building a patronage network? Master/apprentice isn't just for fun, it's a conduit for the sort of illegible power that can only work through bilateral arrangements or small cliques.
So the motivation for a ranking Sociopath to patronize a budding young Sociopath is to enable collusion at a level of open selfishness that would be impossible to have with the Clueless, who would be appalled/disillusioned at "corrupt" behavior? Seems reasonable, but isn't it just trading off the work of manipulating the Clueless for the work of protecting oneself from sudden yet inevitable betrayal by the junior Sociopath? Perhaps it's nice for the ranking Sociopath to have a little of each to break up the monotony of running the world.
Splitting of senior management and C-suite work, and making middle management easier to handle? Also that layer is not doing small labor, medium craft, but big "action" (mobilization games).
Consider the iron law of oligarchy, in view of Rao's description of sociopaths.
"Underperformers" is both right and wrong; somebody who grasps the social realities of a business, and has the ambition to be promoted, is not going to pour most of their effort into the work they are assigned, but rather the work that gets them noticed. Any given institution will tend to eventually be run by those who are interested in running the institution, rather than in implementing the institution's actual goals. Rao's sociopaths are just doing that thing.
However, the three things should to some extent be regarded as strategies, rather than archetypes of people, strictly speaking; something like "near thinking" and "far thinking", rather than "phlegmatic" and "choleric". Sociopathy is "Meaning-making", Loserdom is "Making do", Clueless is "Doing". Sociopathy is also "big picture", Clueless is also "detail oriented".
Do Rao's terms carve reality at a useful joint? Well, I'll just observe that a lot of people have carved reality at similar joints; I think so. Do his terms add any kind of meaning?
Well - here's the thing. Literally, no. You can come up with other, similar terms for what he is describing, and make the entire thing seem kind of like a fantastical structure built out of nothing; okay, if "sociopathy" and "wise man" boil down to the same kind of thing, what the hell is he talking about?
But even though you didn't actually learn anything new reading his stuff - and if you stop and think about it, you weren't introduced to anything new, you already know all of that stuff - you still somehow understand some other set of ideas better.
Imagine a generalization of this as a trifactor model of human behavior is best. Unfortunately common sense is becoming less common and cannot be sensed directly.
I'm pretty sure the way actual sociopaths get promoted up the corporate ladder is they spend all day toadying up to their bosses instead of working, and eventually after stealing from the company for four years straight/having literally no qualifications whatsoever for a field which requires accreditation/spending all day on petty sadism with their underlings rather than doing anything useful/etc, they get found out and fired. This is just astrology for annoying cynics.
This is more clueless than sociopathic TBH, e.g. Andy, Scott, and other Yuppies. The "sociopaths" in this context are expected to be entrepreneurial and C-suite smart in nature.
Torn between disliking the Gervais ideas generally for being a bit self indulgently grimdark (things are true in proportion to the intensity of your desire to find them repellant, instead of true because when you try them out you say “huh, that worked”) and trying to map it to my own “modules” way of thinking.
I did laugh out loud over the correct change anecdote. I have a lot of grandiose thoughts about how government should be restructured and two weeks ago I passed out in the nursery rocking chair after putting my son in his crib. I woke up having tipped completely backward and was stuck in the corner of the room with my feet in the air and a really neat neck cramp. It took the better part of ten minutes to quietly escape. My first thought when I realized what the hell was going on was: “this is a very unbecoming set of circumstances for someone who thinks himself to be correct about major policy issues.”
As Scott mentioned in the article I think enough of this is true to be interesting but when you take it down to the individual level it sort of falls apart. I tend to think these are all just modules that exist inside people that get brought out depending on their own nature and the environment they find themselves in and often working at the same time. Work in c level corporate America but it doesn’t seem you get promoted without doing a good job. I call my similar modules for loser the player module (ie you want to play a game and bring value to your team, you get feedback from teammates and think at the task level) the coach module (you want to command a team and get feedback from wins and losses and think at the tactical level) and the game maker module (you think strategically, realize there is a degree of arbitrariness to games, but hopefully understand it’s not totally arbitrary because only some games repeat and propagate). I think I’ve been all three of these in the corporate world at various points, sometimes all at once, and so has everyone else I know.
I will grant when I was just quietly stewing over the fact I knew answers to questions my bosses didn’t know I felt a lot more bitter about management, before I self reflected enough to realize that unless they knew I knew the answer it was sort of my fault for not speaking up more. Once I did I managed to advance pretty quickly. I also tended to think of self-promotion and networking as really gross Machiavellian things instead of just practical “people can only work with you if they know who you are and what you can do” before I actually had to lead things. Then it became a lot less cute for people to play humble/be shy about what they could do when we were trying to meet deadlines. I do get where the grim dark stuff comes from. I guess I sort of had just had a very stupid prior belief that everyone should just be able to see what was in my head without having to be told. Anything to actually deal with that externally felt like bullshit work that was selfishly done just for my benefit. I mentor people a lot now and it is amazing how many others also see that as some kind of gross evil thing, instead of just the practical work of helping your organization build a mental modem of itself, especially other millenials.
It's funny that Rao puts Michael Scott among the losers, since I've long felt he was one of the most realistic depictions of a sociopath in popular culture. He's not some sort of ruthless, calculating machine, but a walking embarrassment, because he lacks the capacity for embarrassment or any other number of compunctions that might allow him to form a useful theory of mind
Rao noted how he is the antipathy of corporate sociopaths ("Alpha" and "Grindset" peoples who are do not fit the clinical definition), and instead are clinical sociopaths who turns the office into a psych ward. The entrepreneurial personality (cognitive psychopathy, rational theory of mind) and the corporate parasite (affective psychopathy, lack of intuitive theory of mind) seems to be different.
This is the third installment I'd say? For Sadly Porn, Lacan and this one, I was kind of expecting a punchline, an explanation that the books might seem to contain useless nonsense whereas in fact... But no.
Scott, what was the unusually good undergrad psych textbook you read? And since I don't expect Scott to respond here, did anyone here have a great UG intro psych textbook?
I'd probably be more open to this analysis if the classes were normies, competents and leaders. One of the things I didn't like about The Office (American one 2 epidsodes seen) was the contempt for average people.
I was thinking about it a bit more and thought of Thomas Kuhn's "Normal Scientists" as the Competents/Autists/Clueless class. Perhaps instead of Normies - the Lumpens. I was also thinking that the Competents divide based on their ability to interact with Normals or Leaders or Both. Competents generally have trouble coping with those internally unmotivated and with people who don't follow the rules but those who can deal with one or the other can prosper. Those who can deal with both may very well outperform the natural leaders.
Try American Manifesto by Christopher Chantrill, or Michael.O Church's MacLeod, or maybe L Dean Webb's Counterelite Theory, or more abstract, Samo Burja's Empire Theory.
Fun-time activity: Take a taxonomy that claims its author is in the only group of clear-thinking people, hypothesize that it's broadly correct about everything EXCEPT that group, then complete the pattern.
If Losers crave validation from their peers, and Clueless crave validation from on high (systems/authorities/ideals), it seems to me that the third group completing the pattern should be people who crave validation "from below"; i.e. people who want to be venerated by the masses.
This might motivate them to, say, seek prestigious titles (like "president" or "CEO"), manipulate blame and credit, hoard wealth and influence, and spread narratives that paint themselves as virtuous.
(If you were a sith lord whose power comes from manipulating the social masks that other people mistakenly think are real, would YOU publish a book explaining that?)
That is the problem with these kind of grand overarching categories; you don't know what the other categories *really* think/believe.
Rao is a self-described Sociopath, so he's giving *his* view of "this is what the Losers think and what motivates them; this is what the Clueless think and what motivates them". But of course he can't *know*, he can only observe from the outside and put his Sociopath spin on it - those chuckleheads really believe all that bullshit! If he's motivated by "what's in it for me?" then he can't understand "I want to do a really good job on this for the pride of the work" or "My job is not my life".
1. People identified that the best IQ difference betwee leaders and employees should be 18IQ (~ 5 years of extra experience), which matches up with Rao's rule of thumb
2. Those that are stereotyped to have IQ of 110-125 (10 points higher than the crowd) are often branded as "midwits" who wants to self-promote, whilst not knowing better, whilst those with 125+ IQ (20+ points higher than the crowd) often knows a greater truth that closely match with the crowd. this matches up with 'Curse of Development'.
3. Rao also identified in his tweet that collaboration with 10x differnce in wealth (equivalent to 9IQ) is unworkable and antagonistic in nature, whilst 100x in wealth (equivalent to 18 IQ) is merely awkward but not plausible as patron-client relationships or sociopath-like self-humbling.
4. We can also observe that Senpai-Kouhai (colleague seniority) culture has a bit of inversion of dynamic of Sensei-Gakusei (mentor) culture, the former more likely to happen as Clueless-Loser or Sociopath-Clueless posturing and ego inflation of high-performing losers and clueless, whilst the latter is more Sociopath-Loser "real talk" as mentor is beyond correct, whilst trainee should accept in full humility.
I've had the same thought about all of these Lacanean posts, with each article increasing my confidence.
Based on the idea of the selfish gene, we would expect most people to believe in and support society (because otherwise it would collapse) but also some number of defectors will exploit this idea for their own gain. But what is it like inside the head of a defector? Probably something like: "society is a lie and cooperators are deluded or manipulated sheep". Both groups assume their own cognitive processes are "normal" and that the other group must have been traumatized or developmentally stunted in some way. Lacan seems like a defector psychologist trying to "understand" cooperators.
I don't have the data to answer the question of whether defectors or cooperators are somehow developmentally "superior" to the other, but I can say that I sure am glad most people are cooperators. And as a cooperator I am fine with defectors being treated like the viruses that cooperators perceive they are. (Note: not a call to violence, just an endorsement of things like laws and social norms.)
I think most of us cooperate to some degree and defect to some degree depending on the exact situation. (And that we've each constructed an internal narrative in which our particular choices on this matter were the right ones.)
I know this isn't really the point. But the use of the word sociopath and loser and the like really speaks to a kind of insecure social weirdness. Like the whole alpha/sigma thing. It really does seem like astrology for guys to me.
It seems like a tool meant to deny the humanity of the majority of people and to create some kind of elite. You're a sociopath so YOU negotiate your role with society and try to push it into being what you want. Don't feel like you're succeeding? Well, you're one of the Clueless! Don't worry, just read this book and get a clue. (Alternatively, buy my course for the low, low price of $999.) But still you're not like all those awful normie losers who definitely don't get it.
And I'm not making this as a moral comment. If you think that you're modeling the world wrong because you understand people with alternative goals not as having those goals but as failing at having the goal you have objectively decided as being correct..
It reminds me of all those corporate samurai books that were population a few generations back. Yes, other people are just ordinary office drones. But YOU are a samurai slicing your way through deals! It's a way to self-glorify. But it also has an underlying ethos of overwork being good and corporate competition in a specific career as the ultimate good.
Imagine if it turns out Sigma (Open and Stable free thinker exiting the system), Beta (Conscientious and Extraverted to climb the system), and Delta (Agreeable to survive) as psychometrically different lol. (/s)
But seriously, this is just estates or class theory reapplied in the modern times for small groups. Whether you want to exit, climb, or "make a difference" are all clearly marked out.
Keep in mind that this is inside the narrow context of an established corporation, where motivations are totally predictable and the guy who wins is usually the least scrupulous. It's also describing the way that things *are*, not the way things *should be*, and it's a dynamic that, e.g., Congress could disrupt or destroy entirely if it ever felt a need to do so.
I know that when Scott reviews a book he always tries to get inside it and understand it on its own terms. But in this case, that sounds like way too much of a stretch. Using a sitcom as the main source of examples for an analysis of real life creates a credibility canyon, and it seems like that needs to be addressed somehow. I suppose I'm supposed to have heard of Rao and be very impressed by him and believe that his experience intrinsically means he knows how The World works better than me... but isn't the point of writing a book that he has to demonstrate his knowledge?
Why should anyone not just throw the book away, saying, business insights from The Office is a stupid idea?
>Also, a few weeks ago I got in an argument with a clerk over the right amount of change, after double-checking it turned out I was wrong and the clerk was right, and even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it. Doesn’t really feel very ubermensch-ish or transcended-the-need-for-other-people’s-good-opinion-y.
There are two ways this can cause embarrassment, one signifying an internal locus of control and one signifying an external one. Here's a test:
If the clerk had agreed with you on the amount of change, and you'd only realised *later* that you were actually wrong, would you still feel embarrassed?
If not, then you're definitely working in shame mode and want others' respect.
If you would still feel embarrassed, then this is an internal guilt thing and not related to others' opinions of you.
Granting that the idea is right or even semi-right, I still don't get it. If the only way to become a CEO is to forswear all value systems then what's even the point?
I absolutely believe most people are "special in their own way" and consent completely to judging people's value to a group on their strengths. That seems like a better use of my limited lifetime than truly reckoning with the godless nature of reality or whatever. You stare into the void, it's Katy's birthday and we're going to have cake.
Also, I know n=1 but when I underperformed at my jobs I got fired.
I think by "underperforming" he means "just enough to keep the job but not going above and beyond".
When I was in my salad days, I swallowed the line about work hard, be enthusiastic, do more than you're asked, and you'll reap the rewards. I learned fairly soon that companies love that kind of worker, because if you do extra work for no money, they don't have to pay or promote you, so it's free labour. I did start my working life at a bad time (Ireland during the 80s economic recession) but advice for getting jobs was "volunteer to work for nothing and if you do a good job, they'll offer you a permanent position".
Need I say this didn't happen like that? When I was willing to do the job for nothing the company was happy with my work and would let me stay there as long as I liked. When I asked "so any chance of a permanent job?" suddenly there was nothing to be done and I could leave. There was also the job for which I had the relevant qualifications and experience, I applied, was told "Sorry, we're not hiring at the moment, not even for temporary summer work". Later on I found out - let's call her Jane Doe - got a job the same as I applied for. "I didn't know Jane was qualified in that field", I said innocently. "Oh she's not, but it's a summer job for her to earn money until she goes back to university", was the answer. So how did Jane get a job when the business wasn't hiring even for summer work? Well it just so happened that Jane was the daughter of the Managing Director...
So yes, since then it's been (a) if I really like the work and the job is interesting and/or (b) they really do badly need extra input for a short haul, then I'll go above and beyond. Outside of that? If I get my day's work done and then it's just messing around on the Internet while I clock-watch until it's time to go, that's the way the day goes.
Does that make me a Loser? Okay, I'm a Loser. I don't care. I've done the eager Clueless bit and it got me nowhere. I'm not Sociopath enough to want to climb the ladder and be the one giving orders and setting policy.
Exactly. But there's a category for people who do exactly what is asked of them too in the above analysis. It clearly separates out "underperformance" from "barely adequate performance."
Tbf it also separates out "underperformance because you think this job is beneath you and you're scheming to get promoted" from "underperformance because you suck" but if I'm really honest with myself, even though I think the latter is more acceptable, it was probably the former with me. With that said I've also never stood on a mountain in a thunderstorm and realized that the people in the valley below and the ants beneath my feet are of equal moral weight or whatever, so I clearly am missing some trait this author would think I should have.
If you're standing on a mountain top during a thunderstorm, the next thing through your mind after "the people in the valley and the ants beneath my feet are of equal moral weight" will be a bolt of lightning, because making yourself the highest point in a storm is an excellent way to give the gods a target to aim at and get yourself fried 😀
after reading my backwards through most of ribbonfarm a year or so ago (thus getting to gervais only after digesting most of his later posts), most of venkat's posts seem like elaborations/studies on the theme "all losers/clueless are alike, but every sociopath is sociopathic in his/her own way". on the surface, the whole sociopath category as he describes it does seems really crude and status-gamey, especially a decade+ since, but i feel like the entire series was all a setup for what he went on to explore - in other words it created a sort of negative space to explore.
probably the best lineage of posts (reverse-chronological) i can come up with off the top of my head that feels like may prove this:
I always think of TLP's point that everything in a system happens on autopilot. The sociopaths aren't promoting underachievers by whatever measure gets people promoted. The system gives sociopaths an overachiever ranking (to justify the promotion). The system set up a bad measure completely deniably from the people it benefits. How many people do you know who claim to be doing excellent work who don't get promoted? I know a lot who complain about this, and I think the implication is that they are clueless.
Isn’t this kind of a reformulation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Losers and Clueless are stuck at belongingness/esteem, and Sociopaths are at self actualization.
The business claims are obviously just ridiculous; does anyone really think that someone like Bezos would have underperformed as an entry level engineer?
It seems like the useful ideas boil down to: 1. Be an independent thinker. 2. Don’t confuse the esteem of others for your self esteem. Which is well… kind of obvious even without the dark enlightenment schtick.
Bezos isn't really an engineer, though, is he? Even though that's what he gained his degrees in, really he's a salesman, and that's how he succeeded. Getting an entry-level job was to pay the bills while he worked on his real passion:
" He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.
In late 1993, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore. He and his then-wife, MacKenzie, left their jobs at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle. With Bezos at the helm and Scott taking an integral role in its operation—writing checks, keeping track of the books, and negotiating the company's first freight contracts—the foundation was laid for this garage-run operation to grow exponentially."
So he started off in an engineering role, shifted gears to customer service, moved into banking and then hedge funds, and was promoted upwards until he decided he had enough seed cash to leave and start what he really wanted to do.
'Underperforming as an entry-level engineer' may not be quite the right description, but it's clear he wasn't really interested in the engineering side and he got out of that and out of working for other people as fast as he could. So you could say that, relevant to his ability, he did 'underperform' as a engineer because he wasn't sinking all his effort into that job.
I think he has an engineers mind - must have to create the logistitics network he did. For example the famous "API dictat" was something an only engineer with a ton of vision could have pulled off and it was absolutely central to amazons success
Now try the updated 8-layer hierarchy, there is a difference between Dwight (guild belonging), Mike (social self-esteem and cognitive), and Andy (aestheic self-making) in there too.
It's obviously powerful to be able to position oneself as the Other who creates meaning for alleged 'normies' who cannot act without the validating presence of such meaning-structures. (The old expression 'making the weather' comes to mind.) People who make a grail of this stand-apart power do write about it quite seductively and poetically.
Often, though, those people undervalue the concreteness of the 'masks'. Statements like "The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious." is where they kind of lose me. The more likely outcome of a 'dark nirvana' is profound nihilism and inability to engage with the required but meaningless rituals.
That's what it takes to get on in business? I dunno, but it does seem like "if you want to succeed in business, all you must care about is making money and getting power so you can make even more money" and as the saying goes, "if you want to see what God thinks of wealth, look at the people He gives it to".
> I might try Be Slightly Evil next and see if it enlightens me further.
I was disappointed by this, and most other stuff written by Rao. I used to follow him in his Quora days and liked him a lot, but at some point he either didn't have anything interesting left to say or (more charitably and probably more likely) he felt he had to put out more volume, at the expense of the density of good ideas.
It feels as he is trying to be really clear and get into the heads of masses. It is only bad if you are a middle-of-the-world rationalist and you want a cliff's note.
The Gervais Principle IS the work that introduced me to status economics many years ago, earning said special place in my heart, but your critiques are right.
Reflecting on it again, I think the office culture examples kind of hamstring its ability to say what it really wants to say about human nature. The categories are a mess when you try to apply them outside of the corporate atmosphere (or even inside some corporations (or even inside most corporations)). But his thoughts on so-called sociopaths have been most insightful to me and reflect my own experiences coming around to moral anti-realism / materialism, and the subsequent challenge of finding meaning there.
In my understanding, the "real" categorization scheme, from which the Gervais categories are borrowing alpha, is just the spectrum between symbolic thinkers and physical thinkers. Symbolic = buys into social realities and one's own manufactured realities. Physical = everything is quarks and forces, and humans lying to themselves. The Clueless and Losers are two kinds of symbolic thinkers, the former a bit further down the spectrum. Gervais categories say more about office-specific behavior, but if you want to distill out the parts about psychology - the real fundamental difference between Michael/Dwight and David/Charles, *as people* - it's their different positions on the axis of symbolic vs physical understandings of reality.
When I read the Gervaise Principle on the blog, I would have assumed it was too cynical, but there were a number of people who said it explained what happened in their jobs.
One thing missing in the review (maybe it wasn't in the book) is that the theory is about how businesses (perhaps also governments and non-profits?) evolve. They can start out making some sort of business sense, and then they get taken over by sociopaths (they're very focused on taking things over) and the dynamics from the book become dominant.
Seconded this as Peter Turchin's Elite Overproduction in corporate setting, too many people made to be fired in case something happens, but not enough useful men to deliver value in the organization, so no potential firings.
So Elon Musk is a genius, and was successful in being admitted to a pHd program, where I am sure he could have been very successful.
But rather than let this success hold him back, through the lens of the Gervais principle, and bind him to this graduate role, he had the courage to drop out after 2 days, and then self-actualize himself into a billionaire who might land earth on the moon.
"Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit."
This is a pretty big part of the thesis of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes, which I would highly recommend. For me personally it made a lot of my workplace more legible. Based on your review here of the Gervais Principle, I personally find Moral Mazes to make far more sense as a fundamental explanation of the function of the firm.
The framing is pretty problematic here. It borders on excusing sociopathic behavior by assigning almost equally derogatory terms to the alternatives. If you're not a sociopath winner you gonna be a clueless loser?
Yes corruption is everywhere including being very present in corporate structures, but it doesn't mean it's a good thing to make excuses for sociopaths. That's how you turn society into a corrupted despotic banana republic. And yes it's a constant battle that everyone should be waging. It's one of the most common theme in epic narratives. What's the point of this apologia for the dark side.
There's a kind of cynical dark aesthetic to Rao's work, but ultimately he doesn't seem to actually glamourize the darkside. If you actually read the gervais principle in its entirety, the sociopath does not sound at all appealing (though maybe as a loser I would say that). "Loser" and "clueless" apply to success seen through the lens of power, whose methods are inherently dark, but ultimately empty
As I read the summary (and especially as I read the comments that seem to buy into the book’s framing), this increasingly looked less to me like “a functional theory of corporate structure” and more to me like red pill/incel literature reskinned for careers.
Like incel literature, the core of its appeal isn’t in its accuracy as a model, so much as the emotional needs it can fulfil for its target audience(s):
- Providing the unsuccessful and hopeless with go-to excuses/comfort (“I didn’t fail because of anything I did, I just have too few millimeters of bone in my jaw/not tall enough/not enough of a sociopath so success was always impossible”)
- Providing a fantasy which merges a path to success with vengeance. A "forbidden" path where the incel/loser is told he can succeed by becoming a sociopath/Chad/alpha and treating other people as less than human. On this "dark" path, “getting back at them all” is not just a benefit, but a necessary step all successful people must take. This affords the fantasy of cruelty which, instead of just making me cruel, makes me both cooler for practicing the forbidden arts and morally defensible because it’s really the only way anyone succeeds.
- Bringing the whole thing together with a status-framework in which the incel can, in his mind, elevate himself above others and associate with the successful class despite his lack of actual success, and insulate himself from critics of his mental model (“I may live with my mom, but I’m a sociopath like Elon Musk,” “all you guys online telling me this theory is nonsense are just losers/betas who aren’t smart like me and don’t see the system for what it is”)
So the appeal of the model is only tangentially related to its accuracy, and ultimately the model tells you more about its most fervent believers than it tells you about the corporate structure itself.
No wonder we end up with dysfunctional corporations that can’t see past next quarter the same way alpha male jerks land pretty girls with too many issues to hold down a healthy relationship.
From his taxonomy, the losers are basically the smartest group; they're the people who pursue their own personal happiness, and achieve social success, and live internally meaningful lives. If you grok who the losers are, they should be the group you aspire to be part of, because society is basically organized around them, and the stuff they think is the Good Stuff.
The clueless exist in an orthogonal reality to everybody else; it's basically meaningless to compare them to anybody else, because they don't care about the things other people care about; basically, the clueless are everybody who isn't "normal". If any of the categories fit me, it's the clueless; like, ultimately, I prefer when I'm working hard, because I enjoy working. I've had to work pretty hard to avoid getting promoted to middle management over the years; people keep trying to rope me into it, but being responsible for other people gets in the way of the shit I care about. And I basically don't care about money. From the perspective of the corporate-ladder-climber, sure, I'm clueless. I want to be exploited, in a sense; give me shit to do, keep me busy, I'm the most satisfied that way.
The sociopaths are broken Losers, and it's necessary they begin as Losers, for whom the only happiness available is experienced entirely indirectly, in trying to help other people experience a little bit of happiness; alternatively they may choose other forms of emotional satisfaction, having both had, and lost, the capacity for happiness itself. It's not a literal sociopath; literal sociopaths are going to be in the clueless category. The sociopaths in Rao's categorization have to follow a particular trajectory to get where they end up, and part of that trajectory involves something like a crisis of faith in humanity which a literal sociopath wouldn't be capable of.
That's part of the point, though. If that were really what he meant, why not be clear and recategorize "Losers," "Clueless," and "Sociopath" into "Smart People," "Confused People," and "Broken Losers?" If you're trying to sell people on an accurate model of corporate culture because the model is accurate and useful, you want (ideally) to communicate the model clearly so that your audience can understand it, appreciate its value, and then buy into it. Using some reverse-polarity description system where you refer to all your most successful cases as "the failures" wouldn't make any sense.
But it's fine for Rao's model, because he's not selling an accurate model based on the virtue of its accuracy and usefulness, he's selling an emotional sop dressed up with just enough defensibility as a model for his audience to buy it without having to acknowledge to themselves they are buying a sop. And "succeed by becoming a broken loser" doesn't achieve his emotional sop objectives the way "be a little evil" or "succeed by embracing your inner sociopath" does.
Thus the fudging is necessary, because more accurately he described his model, the more clearly his audience would see its deficiencies and recognize it for what it is. In the real-world corporate context the kind of category based success/failure framework he's arguing for doesn't occur. Examples of all 3 categories can be found among the successes and most individuals fail regardless of category. Which leaves the model no more accurate than something like Enneagram or Strengths-Finder, but way more toxic to its audience.
I think this implicitly accepts his framing of himself as a Mover-and-Shaker, a person who is manipulating his audience into doing what he wants, a powerful and charismatic cult leader, a reality-creating Sociopath.
Whereas I'm pretty sure he's just a guy who wrote a description of the world around him as he sees it.
I'd read it more as identifying his product being the fantasy (for himself and the reader) of being a member of/becoming a member of/the existence of a reality-creating sociopath class, instead of the product being an accurate and useful model of human interaction.
Alternately, you could write what you think I'm saying here and why you think it's wrong? That would probably be an easier way to figure out whether I've mis-stepped somewhere or if you're just misunderstanding me.
I'm sure "you are wrong for these hundred very good reasons which I swear I totally have but which I will co-incidentally keep behind this curtain" feels good to write on the internet, but it's not particularly persuasive.
Rao seems to claim that 80% of the population see themselves as the most beautiful, special person ever - I always thought that was a middle-class thing? Although if he's studied organisations where you have to be middle-class to get in, it might well be true within the sample.
Working class rank-and-file "we are just wholesome citizens" vs middle class "we are the righteous"? IDK but the "special" thing is more America's Got Talent type of uniqueness, not the "man with a purpose".
That's not what I was aiming at. The bit about "Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live." sounds to me much more like what you'd find in university-going circles and less in the kind of school where most people know early on that getting a stable job in a shop is a more realistic outcome (and the sooner they get out of this education thing, the better). Of course these people can watch AGT and dream of becoming a superstar, but I don't think each of them grows up convinced that they're destined for it - reality has its way of intervening in that thought process early on.
Rao is tone-deaf in that regard, but the gist is: the stable job minded people will always have hopes and dreams that are aspirational, virtures that are internal and self-oriented (everyone has unique talents at their trade, everyone should be respected as a human beings, everyone is equal under the law); the university class of people will have grand-scheme ideals that are completely detatched from reality, often detremental to themselves and/or others, and they will force the agenda unto others (opinion leaders with no teeth, political "activists" and their windbag zealotry, Karens obsession with passive-aggressive politeness and authority).
There's some useful stuff in there. In particular, the need for legibility among the 'Clueless,' and tying that to arrested development seems useful. Less as a way to describe a specific type of person, and more as a way to understand behavior that has always struck me as nonsensical, both in myself and in others.
Trying to please the gods of the microphone (as Scott described this bit), is an incredibly useful lens for bizarre decision-making. The gods aren't real. They may be modeled on real people or things (e.g. your parents, the crush that rejected you, The Lord), but the version you're trying to earn approval from is entirely your own creation. Because you need a path to the approval, you'll constantly put objective goals in their mouths that are measurable enough for you to say "yes, I did it" or "no, I didn't." But also since your self-image is entirely defined by seeking their approval, if you meet a goal, you'll just have to give them a new one. (Hey, that's what all that Lacan stuff was about!)
Unfortunately, in real life, that's not... nobody is measuring your objective worth, they're too busy trying to establish their own. So when you try to use your "gain the approval of my private God" methods to gain the approval of peers and coworkers, you come across as deeply out of touch with the social reality around you. Because you are out of touch with the social reality around you.
The second bit though - about social illegibility within groups - seems genuinely unhinged to me. I get that "people have a relatively set amount of social capital/status" is in service to the ultimate thesis is that only money/power/sex *actually* matter and we're making up the rest. But this is never actually justified in the text, and I don't see any reason to assume it's true. Human beings have all kinds of impulses that might be derived from the material/power/sex requirement of life, but now operate independently of it. There are definitely status-affirming clubs out there, a lot of them. And within clubs there's always some status jockeying. But generally speaking I think people join a band if they like to play music? Humans sometimes congregate in groups because groups can do things better than individuals, and it's weird that possibility never even gets discussed.
As for Zarathustra, I'm not buying. I saw the attempt to explain that there's a difference between intellectually understanding The Absent God and viscerally understanding The Absent God. But, like, I'm constantly aware that the words people are saying and the games they are playing are meaningless diversions on the way to the grave. It's a serious issue. I see people parrot the hot take of the week and inwardly roll my eyes at it too. Generally 90% of the things that get discussed in my social circle register to me as "Please like me, please please like me please." I definitely prefer to discuss ideas over events and/or people. And generally I think I mostly march to my own drummer.
But none of this has given me some kind of supernatural ability to manipulate the social or spiritual realities of others. Mostly it just makes me very tired all the time. Is there some version of this taxonomy where "sociopaths" are replaced with "people who are tired of being at this party and would like a nap?" Because honestly that seems the more likely outcome of being hyper-aware of the motivations behind all the social dynamics occurring around you.
If you read the original, Rao talks about promoting Sociopaths out of Losers, and when you grasp what he's talking about, it's pretty obvious the Sociopaths -have- to come from the Losers (although he doesn't seem to necessarily agree, I think he is confusing himself with his own terminology); his description of their "final form", when they have fully matured as a Sociopath is, basically, yes, "Tired of being at this party and would like a nap", except the party is life.
Want to know the magic trick to manipulate the social or spiritual reality of others? When they say "Please like me, please please like me please" - tell them you like them. That's it. That's the magic trick of Rao's sociopath. It is also, and not by any coincidence, entirely the core of Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. You can then assert control over other people's behavior basically by withholding that same affirmation.
(There is a dark mirror version of that, of course, once you notice there's a core of people who are actually saying "Please hate me, please please hate me please")
Now, as for status illegibility - he's basically right, at least as regards the interactions of Losers, who are also sometimes called "Neurotypical" people. (Most of us neurodivergent fit somewhere in Clueless land; what, you think the guy who is obsessed with airplanes isn't going to work really hard when he becomes a pilot? He's in a private utopia, of course he's going to work hard, and of course he'll have absolutely zero problem with other people exploiting his hard work, because then they're incentivized to make sure he gets to keep doing what he loves doing)
Status illegibility is primary about not having a pecking order. The wrongheadedness is by trying to assign a number to status, because that's not how status works, that's an attempt to create legible rules to try to make sense of status. (I'm amused that Rao thinks that he is a Sociopath)
This is status illegibility: You're not better than me. I'm not better than you. In a social dynamic, if somebody starts acting like they're better than everybody else, everybody else gets kind of annoyed with them and takes them down a peg or two, or just stops hanging out with that person.
Also, the person at the "top" of the social hierarchy is, basically, whoever is getting everybody together; the person organizing the social event, often, but it can be somebody else if, say, somebody else organizes a social event with a group of people who are basically a group of people because they're all friends with some other person.
The top-ranked person is basically whoever would win a popularity contest in a given group; observe that the most popular person in a group can be the least popular person in a subset of the same group. Status isn't a number, it's more like a graph.
Rao's bottom-ranked person is completely wrong, though. The bottom ranked person is not, in fact, the lowest-status person; status doesn't exist like that, it's a graph; you have to actually be popular in a group in order to achieve the kind of status Rao describes. Indeed, the bottom-ranked person, in Rao's terms, can actually be the most popular person - ever been in a group where the most popular person, everybody's favorite person, was also the most likely to be the butt of the jokes? (Oh, you mean most groups?)
The thing is, I kind of knew that was the trick and didn't care. Rao's article made it sound like knowing *how* social structures work automatically leads to manipulating them, and I don't see any reason why that would be true.
As for the rest, I agree completely with your take on the illegibility thing. If my friend group is running a role playing game, I'm the highest-status person for the duration of that game. If we're going out to a bar, I'm definitely the lowest-status. And this status swaparoo is fractal. At role playing night, maybe during a break, someone brings up unique LGBT issues. Suddenly I have no social credibility, since the whole thing doesn't apply to me. Then we get back to the game and my credibility is restored.
But it's this very dynamic that makes me feel like the whole taxonomy is dumb. I'm neither the highest-status nor lowest-status person. I'm "the most role play-y person." Rao would say that this is the exceptionalism myth at work. I need to believe I'm above-average but I'm a massively average person, so everyone agrees to judge me on my DMing skills, while they judge our nightclub friend on his sociability. That way we never know our explicit pecking order and so we can't determine whether we're over-valuing or undervaluing ourselves by associating with this group.
But, uh, what kind of deranged lunatic picks their friends by mentally evaluating comparative social statuses? There are plenty of examples in Rao's articles of the Clueless trying to join groups and messing up their application by trying to value their status too explicitly. But Occam's Razor suggests a more...sane?...option: People don't think in those terms either consciously or unconsciously, they instinctively dislike and avoid people who do, and the Marx Principle is silly. Maybe the point of groups is mostly to share experiences and ideas with other people because humans have drives besides the will to power, material wealth, and sex.
My personal guess was that a younger Rao tried to join a group he thought was high-status (They're so cool), got pushed off (imagine hanging out with somebody whose reason for being there is because they think the people are just so cool), and interpreted that as a statement about his status (I'm not cool).
Later, when he stopped trying so hard, he found he effortlessly fit in with the high-status people (possibly in college), interpreted this in turn as a judgment about his relative status, and tied all this into a narrative story about how his newfound nihilism made him part of the cool club. Which in a sense is true, if my little story is correct. Maybe he noticed that the "social ranking" of the group seemed to shift depending on context, but rather than updating the strict linear model of social status, tacked on an additional bit about how people can be "the best in the group at X", thereby explaining the shifts in social status without eliminating the numeric ranking system.
But also, then, later, he realized that said nihilism made hanging out with the Losers in the cool club was kind of tedious; they cared about a bunch of meaningless nonsense; maybe he only interacted with that group of people in a context in which the organizer of the group was always the same person, so never saw a shift in the "top dog" of the group; it was always the same person.
Mind that this is a just-so story, and the point isn't so much to be accurate so much as to demonstrate how somebody can sensibly come to a particular set of conclusions about the way social interactions work; I'm just custom-designing some evidence that would lead somebody to a set of beliefs. I definitely do not endorse that this is actually true, and apologies to Rao if he happens to be reading this, particularly if I accidentally got it right.
Best to generalize these functions, such that the descriptive can be well rounded. I for one hated Michael O Church and Christopher Chantrill for being partisan hacks, but their logic are weirdly similar.
If "hacking it" is impossible, it becomes Alex Danco's theory of social class, and being good at top dogging is more or less genetic or socially stratified.
The three-pronged classification rings false to me, but what rings true is the part where everybody works hard to construct a particular set of values which allows them, personally, to be high status according to those values.
Instead of values causing behaviour, behaviour causes values. You do what you're naturally inclined to do anyway, and then construct a system of values in which your behaviour puts you right up the top. Naturally inclined towards chastity? Then chastity is a virtue. Naturally inclined towards sluttiness? Great, then you're a brave sex-positive feminist who is fighting the dark forces of et cetera.
Then so many conflicts in society arise when people who have carefully constructed one sort of value system rub up against people who have constructed another sort of value system.
It was an epiphany when I realized that what I wanted, and what most people want, is a world that rewards their natural tendencies. I’ve tried to stop awarding myself points for just following my default settings and overvaluing my aptitudes.
Some things that came up for me. 1. Does the author define "sociopathy"? As I understand it, "anti-social" is the prefered term in psychology now. 2. As I see it, the kind of sociopathy the author is taking about is more the kind of personalities who tend to prosper when society is on the brink of collapse/going through a economic crisis or depression. I don't personally see any of the characteristics he cites in upper managment in a western, business-as-usual democracy. 3. I agree with Scott's counter-argument vis a vis the problem with psycological labeling. I've often thought it would be useful to run a meta study where you randomly aggregate personality traits into personality disorders, and then see how many people identify with those disorders vs disorders which are non-randomly generated. I've a feeling there probably wouldn't be much of a difference. I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of any study like that that's been performed.
The author describes the Sociopath at length, but it is fair to say that "Nihilist" is a better description than "Sociopath"; the steps to get there involve realizing that none of the things you cared about actually matter, there is no objective truth to anything, that experience and reality are entirely subject, so on and so forth.
But you have to kind of care about those things in the first place to be positioned to behave like Rao's Sociopath. Why would an actual sociopath care about climbing the corporate ladder? What's up there for them? Money is the shit you want when you don't know what you want. Power to do what? And the more you climb that latter, the greater you fall under scrutiny from other people, the more other people pay attention to you. Better to be a clown, or a truck driver. If you're smarter, you could be a surgeon. If you want to get paid to kill people - do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life - there's the military, or police. Like, what are your actual goals?
Climbing the corporate ladder is for somebody who wants to "win" at middle class values, who wants to be seen in a particular way, who has, basically, normal-people dreams, motivations, goals.
I had the same thought- why would a sociopath want all this power or money or status? Maybe this is in the book, and it’s all just masks the sociopath wears until the last mask falls away revealing the internal abyss. And then the sociopath…what? Maybe they’re left with a choice between suicide or picking a lane and becoming a Loser.
I’m pretty sure I’m some kind of sociopath and that I’ve done this myself. I never had the follow-through to capitalize on my sociopathic tendencies anyway, and after a prolonged period of hopeless nihilism I’ve chosen a set of beliefs and a quiet life. Maybe if I was better at being a sociopath picking one of the masks back up off the floor would be an option?
@Scott in a previous post you wrote on whether introverts make less money than extroverts, you closed with a question on what introvert's experiences were like. I responded on that post, but after having read this post, I have a few more insights. I think I was conflating "introvert" with "analytical" -- the two correlating, but being technically distinct things.
> Clueless people [...] may be brain surgeons or rocket scientists. But they are fundamentally incapable of grasping the shifting, illegible nature of social reality. They retreat to objective reality - over-performing at their object-level job - and taking the official legible rules really seriously.
This resonates with me as an introverted (and perhaps more importantly, analytical) person, and might be one of the reasons I don't get promoted (into a sociopath) and thus don't make as much money as the extroverts (who perhaps correlate with being sociopaths in Rao's meaning of the term???) do.
Does anybody else feel eerily reminded of Fussell's classes? The main difference being Fussell's Elites are only pretending to be above it all while Sociopaths have true insight they use to be above it all.
Fussell's description tracks better/seems more plausible though. I believe the reason is that Fussell was looking for actual classifications with as detailed indicators as possible (and his point being that since this succeed, class is real) while Rao seems to describe much more how these categories interact. Maybe better terms would simple be "Rule makers", "Rule abusers", "Rule aceptors"
But since both describe practically the same observation, I am very confident they saw "something real". Or Human Brain Like Three.
The only real question left seems to be whether there is an alternative. Fussell describes a class X, I believe one point of Sadly Porn is to demand action independent of Rules.
I'm surprised you didn't mention anywhere in your review the meta-nature of the Gervais principle itself. Rao is offering a categorical schema, the quintessential sociopath move. The people who accept it uncritically are marking themselves as Clueless, the people who mostly ignore it are Losers, meanwhile any potential sociopaths reading it will naturally use it as a heuristic for manipulation and success, but only until they develop their own internalized, more dynamic system, which they will then presumably dumb down and foist upon others in a bid for greater control of an organization.
Interestingly, this creates an ironic scenario where the only people to OPENLY embrace the book and declare themselves committed to the sociopathic way of life are the clueless. The sociopaths would presumably know better than to put their cards on the table like that.
I think he was fairly successful at his goal of turning his Ribbonfarm blog into a business/lifestyle brand that a small but very impassioned group of people followed religiously and sunk money into. Sort of like what Scott did, but a lot more deliberate and a lot more ruthlessly capitalistic. Depending on who you ask Ribbonfarm was either a pretty successful business blog or a pyramid scheme with Rao at the top.
As an aside, I remember going to dinner with a friend who was a Silicon Valley attorney and her casually mentioning how much she absolutely hated that her clients wouldn't shut up about him, which was when I first realized how deep his penetration a targeted segment of the market really was.
My impression 100%. Rao is a salesman, not a deep thinker. He's well read and smart enough to produce essays which are vaguely insightful or "hinting at something true", but nothing more. He's in the business of sounding like a "heresiarch intellectual", not in the business of figuring things out. Ironically, he basically gives his game away in one of the posts (title "premium mediocrity" if I recall correctly), where he sort of confesses to being a rather mediocre thinker who's good at projecting a certain status. In some other (old) post he lays out his strategy of turning his posts into a web of "illegible canon", which provides little intellectual value but is a good marketing move.
All in all, if you want real intellectual content and stimulation, forget about Rao. He's marginally interesting at best.
Personally, I'll readily admit to being in Rao's Clueless classification. I'll just observe that Rao himself is in here with me. A Sociopath wouldn't create a schema, but would instead assign that work to somebody else.
Now, is this response a Sociopath response, or a Clueless response? And how does the fact that I have asked that question, change the answer to that question?
Hold up, I've gone off script. Let me check the notes. Ahem.
The idea that the schema of the book is self-referential is fundamentally Clueless; it is literally following the rules to their logical conclusion, treating them as inherently Meaningful. The very idea that there is a deeper meaning to the schema, that the rules are deeply and inherently meaningful in and of itself, requires that you are looking for Meaning; a Sociopath already knows that Meaning doesn't exist, and it's all just paths to power.
OPENLY embracing the book is textbook Sociopathy; you don't have to believe in the Meaning. A Sociopathic priest isn't going to openly question the Bible; the only course of action is to openly embrace it. Openly embracing the book is only putting your cards on the table if you actually believe what it says.
Yeah, I can't track the levels of irony, but I think you're off if you genuinely think that a sociopath doesn't develop his own vision. That's basically ALL a sociopath does, is "Envision" with a capital E. Mostly what they are envisioning is their own success and the destruction of anything that stands in their way. According to a normal interpretation of success, the reason this kind of thing is tolerated is because these people tend to be very brilliant and innovative and good at their jobs, so the things that they envision really are valuable to other people. But according to Rao, this is all a side-effect. The REAL reason organizations embrace sociopaths is that they can't function without some sort of hierarchal schema in place, and sociopaths readily provide an infinite supply of that (with them always at the top).
Its essentially Seeing Like a State, only instead of a group of government engineers and surveyors, you have a handful of mad Game-of-Thrones characters Will-To-Powering their entire operation into something that can function as an entity whose drive roughly mirrors that of whoever comes out on top, which is the only way it can exist productively at all.
A vision, sure. A detailed schema? No, that's Clueless work. Which is kind of implied by the Seeing Like a State bit; legibility is the domain of the Clueless.
I think Scott gets at the primary value of the book (albeit a little obliquely) towards the end of the review: this is not a typological system for understanding one's self or others in general, it is really meant to be be a business book. Meaning it's about organizational psychology: how we behave in relation to others within a group that has a a shared goal and a hierarchy. As such, I think it gets at something that is real; I've certainly seen these kinds of dynamics at play in the hospitals I've worked at, and I would place myself pretty firmly in the "loser" category. That said, that doesn't make me a loser in my personal life, it's just who I am within the hospital ecosystem.
"Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here."
Clueless can be top executives too; sociopath is more of a reality mediating role, and it's independent of title.
I think this is only the second time you reviewed a book I'd already read. I enjoyed the review, but it was especially interesting that the stuff you seemed to not agree with was the stuff I found the most Obviously True. Automatic knowledge of highest and lowest status within loser groups, etc.
Sociopaths control "Loser Spirituality" by providing positive and negative feedback in order to force status updates.
Your attempts to fit Rao's types into other writers types is missing a key fact about systems: systems are observer created, and where the delineation occurs is entirely arbitrary. Picture a radial graph of personality types; Rao's 3 buckets cover the same people as other authors' 3 buckets, but the radial lines are in completely different places. I suggest "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" by Weinberg if you haven't already read it.
Interestingly, it does seem to me that Rao's buckets are almost exactly 60 degrees offset from Lacan's.
"They can be found carefully studying the Mission Statement, trying to figure out how best to embody its values. Or putting up inspirational posters in the hallways. Or trying to win the hokey competition for Best Office Morale so they can get the first prize pizza party or whatever."
The Apple TV+ series 'Severance' plays with this idea quite well. It imagines everyone in an office mentally "raised" to be Clueless as a means of control.
I am very conflicted because on the one hand it sounds like weapons grade bullshit (and I read the whole thing back in the day), on the other...
My current "boss" is completely Clueless, and he was literally promoted because everyone else was more competent than him. I was offered his position back in the day, and I refused because it sounded tiring and I had better things to do as an individual contributor. So the poor guy constantly attempts to herd cats (= myself and my colleagues, all cynical Losers) which we find somewhat cute, and if he ever steps out of line his boss - who I'd consider an enlightened Loser or a Sociopath with too much conscience - yanks on his leash.
So yeah, Rao's series is growing on me with more experience in the trenches.
I think the Garvis principle might just be from peoples dependence on certain emotions. [Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plutchik) theorizes that there are 8 basic emotions each pushing for an opposite response given a certain context (Prediction - Anticipation and Surprise, Threat - Anger and Fear, Affect - Joy and Sadness, Morality- Veneration and Disgust). The Morality axis is where Clueless, Sociopaths, and Losers differ. Associated with prosocial behavior it, we get an emotional reward when we receive words of praise and when we punish defectors.
Clueless prioritize the Morality emotional rewards above all others emotions. They are extremally high in conscientiousness, and as Adam Smith would say the desire "to be loved and to be lovely". Part of their salary is actually that warm fuzzy feeling of being part of the tribe.
Sociopaths, people capable of completely ignoring the Morality axis of emotions, have a tool that others lack. They are willing to be hated, and do the disgusting things that would be beneath the others dignity. They also are immune to the moral arguments that others put forward, and trade in longer lasting currency than "attaboys", and headpats.
The Losers, are people who are either getting their emotional payout elsewhere, or lack the skills to get it at work. If they do get it from work, it is from their coworkers, in the standard normie way. While in a work setting, they are probably prioritizing Joy, or responding to threat (anger and fear).
Appetitive motivation (Sociopath/Elite/Opportunist/Executives Powertalk) - High Arousal and Pleasure
Neutral motivation (Loser/Labor/Pragmatist/Employees Gametalk) - Low Arousal and Mid Pleasure
Defensive motivation (Clueless/Gentry/Idealist/Management Posturetalk) - High Arousal but Low Pleasure
Appetitive shift feels like a description to the "velvet rope" plan, whilst defensive shift feels like the "employee of the month club" (to borrow from the MacLeod model).
Edit: I tried to convert my model into yours to see if I would get the same results, and failed. Rather than delete this madness I'm leaving it. I found your hypothesis interesting or I wouldn't have attempted this. I have no idea what model of emotion is better. I like the 8 factor one because it feels more right to me, but brains are black boxes, and who knows if it makes sense to abstract a certain number of agents out of them.
I really need to look up the Boomerang model. Off the top of my head I do think it might be possible to flatten the 8 factor model into it. Prediction and Threat are high arousal states. I hesitate to flatten Morality, but I would guess that Veneration would be positive and Disgust would be negative. Pleasurable states would be: Anger, Veneration, Joy; Painful states would be: Fear, Sadness, and Disgust.
Management would tend to be in the business of predicting the outcome of work, so both the Sociopath and the Clueless would get a bump in arousal from that. Sociopaths would be likely to engage in more anger than fear which would probably boost their pleasure relative to the others. I can't really predict who is in more fear, the middle management or low level employees. I think the clueless and sociopaths are likely to feel joy at work. But the clueless who aren't able to make their underlings happy might feel sadness (IDK). Also depending on the work environment the fear might far outweigh the affect axis (to the point it might be disregarded).
On second thought I can't really predict what jobs are more pleasurable. My instinct is that the Losers would be Low Pleasure and that the Clueless would be Mid Pleasure, unless the more invested middle management are more afraid. They do have more stress so that could be true. Having to include fear in the predictive model does add some complexity... I am going to be chewing on this for a bit.
I guess that is probably why I prefer the more factor models of emotion to the fewer factor ones. It is easier to make predictions by ignore sections of the problem.
Side note- My prediction converted into this model would be that Middle management would get a boost to Pleasure and Pain at work, while the sociopaths are operating without morality, and the losers probably getting more disgust (so pain).
I respect your opinion, but mind if I ask, can an 8-factor model be further condensed into 4 or 2 higher factors? Then it might be possible? Alternatively, maybe there is a correlation between stimuli-response rather than pure emotions? IDK
TLDR- I think stimuli-response and emotions are the same thing. People are just breaking it down differently. The number of factors needed probably differs for the context it is used.
I think Utilitarianism condenses the multifactor response systems into just just 1 axis (pleasure and pain). The other axis that the boomrang model adds is "prioritization". The more Aroused a situation, the faster we need to act. You probably can get a ton of milage into breaking down human action into these two systems. This might be a more accurate model. And for some people it might "feel" more right. We are biological ML systems and the wiring between different humans probably varies quite a bit.
The reason I like the 8 factor system is it feels more intuitive to me. My actions will differ wildly when I am in the different states; sometimes I feel like 8 different people are fighting inside me. I am extremely high in neuroticism and agreeableness, so maybe that might contribute?
I think people without much "spirituality" might have very weak "veneration", and so when disgust fires it just gets lumped into "Threat". This version has three axis -> https://www.psychologicabelgica.com/articles/10.5334/pb.340/ . The Threat Axis is called Domination.
The Big 5 personality Traits OCEAN might just breakdown what emotions or "meta pleasure-pain optimizers" dominate peoples decisions. Openness Axis is "Do you find the world threatening". Extraversion Axis is "Do you find people threatening". Conscientiousness is "Do you act as someone who feel strongly about the tribe would (Outwardly Moral)". Agreeableness is "Are you willing to subvert your will for the tribe (Inwardly Moral?)". Neuroticism is "Are you prone to being paralyzed or overwhelmed by Sadness, Fear and Disgust".
I think your observation that these posts were a lot of people's introductions to status economies and that's why it has the power to change lives.
I think its big claim is that there are people who aren't playing status games, for reasons not explained by any acknowledgement that neurodivegence exists. I would like to see this claim evidenced, and so far have not, but I won't dismiss it out of hand.
(I'm neurodivergent and find status play a necessary nuisance.)
"You try it, and instead of getting praise/reward/validation all the time, you get those things rarely or not at all. If you can, maybe you go back to school (ie get a PhD), a strategy with problems of its own."
For purely practical purposes, I'd like to point out that if praise/reward/validation is what you are looking for, doing a PhD is not a very good idea.
Man, first Teach tells me I’m a narcissist, then Rao tells me I’m a Loser. Who will stand up for people who just want a paycheck, a free weekend and a good bowl of ramen?
3. Perhaps "sociopaths" have internal legibility (see also Jock humble brags), but not external rationalist and "publicized" legibility, whilst "clueless" desire open legibility (see also nerd rage), which is inherently instable in larger Dunbar scales?
This post had the effect on me that could be described as "assuming the worst", "overreacting", "blaming", "paranoia". It made me think that maybe I had been suckered into a position at work I don't want to be in as Clueless (middle management) in an occupation I don't enjoy, made me question my merits to run the unit as a meek pushover for the Socipaths (upper management), made me wonder whether I'd be happier as a Loser (worker) instead, not losing sleep over managerial responsibilities.
Meh, for me the theory seems conducive to a self-biased and suspicious outlook on my colleagues, and I really prefer to have a balanced and charitable view, where evidence about performance outweighs my personal intuition. To say "Hah, that's typical Clueless" sort of misses the point, because it disregards more objective measures of work dynamics. Maybe the theory seduces by tickling the suspicious part of your subconscious that desperately tries to look out for you, starting an inner monologue that goes something like "these other people are somehow bad, I dislike the way they talk to me getting me to do stupid bullshit I don't want to do, I do all the work while they just fart around". I immediately framed my own boss as a psychopath, but when I really think about it, she's a perfectly decent person who often has a different opinion than me but she's reasonable about our differences of opinion and we end up getting along well after a little bit of conflict. I immediately framed myself as a clueless, because it's a sort of a victim position to take, "I am reasonable, ethical, do my work well, and carry the heaviest load, woe is me!"
I think the categories wrap several dimensions into one.
like motivation and understanding
for example - someone could be out for himself, without great understandong how to pull things off. "whoever tries to get me killed is my enemy, no matter on which side he is on" - catch22.
someone could have great understanding of the organization, but do have some higher goal on mind, like God, country, Socialism, etc. These guys are clueless psychopath, and are really dangerous/effective.
"They identify underperforming entry-level workers as potential new Sociopaths. [...] Leadership puts these people on a track to upper management."
Why would Sociopaths promote other Sociopaths? Aren't they more likely to be a threat? Is using a Clueless or a Loser (with above average competence) in upper management management somehow bad compared to using another Sociopath?
I think sociopath are willing to make tradeoffs the others won't or can't. You need people willing to make ruthless decisions up top. Sociopaths are the only people willing to be hated. It is the untalked about skill in upper management. Also, the only way to stop your sociopath underling to work with you is to trade with them in a currency they will accept, and warm fuzzys will not work on sociopaths.
I believe Scott has linked "The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial" before, where Rao wrote:
> Yes, ribbonfarm is totally premium mediocre. We are a cut above the new media mediocrityfests that are Vox and Buzzfeed, and we eschew low-class memeing and listicles. But face it: actually enlightened elite blog readers read Tyler Cowen and Slatestarcodex.
I suspect that Rao confuses laziness and underperformance on the part of the "Sociopaths" with what the Italian philosopher Castiglione called "sprezzatura." From Wikipedia:
"Sprezzatura is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it"."
The Book of the Courtier is a fantastic read, with both real substance and all sorts of weird details that paint a vivid picture of court life in Renaissance Italy. Its central concept is sprezzatura, the courtier's highest virtue (at least according to Castiglione); as the quote suggests, it involves concealing effort to achieve "grace." Sprezzatura is definitely somewhat deceptive, but can also be viewed as a costly signal of real talent (because only the truly competent can afford to expend effort concealing effort).
I find it easier to believe that Rao mistook sprezzatura for laziness and underperformance than that laziness and underperformance are Sociopathic virtues. This is partly because I don't exactly admire laziness but I do admire what I take to be sprezzatura when I notice it, just as I enjoy stage magic (not that I'd claim to be one of Rao's Sociopaths; I don't love the categories). It is also because I tend to defer to old books that sustained popularity throughout many ages and changing fashions.
I think he internally knows about this, just that "sprezzatura" itself is not as layman. There are a lot of nuances between managed expectation, and inability to perform.
"1. Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses."
"2. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction."
This is the philosophy of Lauren Faust's "My Little Pony, Generation 4" (the one bronies like). Western literature has long used a Christian dogma of character, according to which characters are individualized only by the ways they fall short of perfection, and therefore authors create characters by giving them *flaws*. In MLP G4, by contrast, characters are individualized by having particular hyper-developed *strengths*, and their personal problems and social dysfunctions are caused by relying too heavily on their strengths. In Western fiction, each character must overcome his or her own flaw; in MLP G4, the entire group helps each character learn when to rely on their strength and when to do things someone else's way. Rather than each character individually seeking perfection, each character must learn how to integrate their strength into the group.
Has the "higher managerial echelon correlates strongly with extreme social skill and a good headstart" been found wanting that we need resort to more complex typologies such as this?
I read this post, enjoyed it and forgot about it, and then went to watch Julius Caesar at The Globe. Fascinatingly similar, character constructs and strata; I’d encourage one (Scott?) to read JC now, having read TGP
Love the audio versions of newsletters, but was frustrated that it wasn't an option for everything on substack. I find I'm pretty inconsistent with keeping up with Astral Codex Ten, and wanted to be able to listen to past versions. If you forward the newsletter to narrate@ad-auris.com it sends an audio version of the newsletter back! I've been using to keep up with everything.
>Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance.
I suspect that this is mere rhetoric, meant to make the book seem significant.
But if it actually meant something, what would that be? Why would all 'writing of any substance' carry these risks?
Is it a banal identification of 'writing of any substance' with 'writing based on reality'? Or would Rao say that lesser sorts of writing can be connected to reality, too, just without being 'of any substance'?
> Somewhere in your head there is a microphone. It produces a little voice inside of you, whose approval you desperately crave. You would do anything for the voice to like you. Ghosts, mental models, and personified abstract concepts fight each other for a turn at the mike and the right to implicitly control your actions. Who wins?
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this too literally, or whether this is an example of "What universal experiences are you missing?", but this does not match my experience at all.
> Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.
This is the kind of thing that took me right past rationality and into nihilism when I was younger.
Surprisingly few people state the antidote clearly: suffering is bad, and human flourishing is good. If you can accept those things and reject the idea that everyone should just give up and die, then that's enough to build a satisfying and beneficial ethical system upon.
This framework feels accurate, but incomplete. Compassion, for example, feels like it ought to have a place somewhere in there. I think you're right in pointing out that it's basically a random collection of traits sorted into three groups, where the traits could in theory be mix and matched freely, except that the frame presented here forms a stable status economy of sorts where the three groups reinforce each other's identities. By contrast, if you stuck an Effective Altruist, a crystal-wearing hippie, and a literal nazi in a room, their interactions would be entirely destructive and they would drive each other away. Rao's framework isn't the only possible option, just a successful example.
This framework mainly address how any within-tribe (of sufficient size) interactions of EA, hippie, and fashies would interact, not the interaction between-tribe interactions. Ring Leaders vs Useful Idiots vs "Sheeple". If we need to include out-group behavior, Samo Burja might have a better way with Empire Theory.
"Underperforming" Sociopaths are promoted to managers not because of low performance but because middle Management is a totally different job with totally different skills. A person who can't stand out as individual contributor (IC) but shows capacity to manage up can contribute to company in better ways than as IC. A person that stands out as IC will only go to management if they need to to get higher salary (and most of them are bad managers). A not good IC that does not show capacity to manage up will be soon dismissed.
Progressing in your career ladder inside a company usually means having to switch to a very diffeennt job with verydifferent skills from the ones you showed being good at , and companies want to make this inefficiency as painless for the company as possible. If all companies could have good parallel tracks for ICs and managers, all the rancor caused by having not brilliant IC performers being promoted would be greatly decreased.
A silly hypothesis: People respond to the idea of AI differently because they imagine that AI will be exactly like them, based on their place in this typology.
Sociopaths assume that AI will be a powerful and dangerous threat, obsessively fixated on a single goal and using any means—however harmful, however byzantine—to achieve it.
Clueless people assume that AI will simply be a complicated tool that mindlessly performs whatever tasks it is given, with no particular goals or agency.
Losers assume that AI will never happen, because humans are too special to be replicated. Or, if it does, it will look pretty much like humans do and we'll have no problem coexisting with it, as long as humans and robots both recognize and respect their own respective specialness.
Sociopaths does not believe in AGI, they just call it "AI" and solidifies goalposts like humor, irony, contextual understanding, and deep knowledge. They don't see it as a threat, as goal alignment has been a human-complete problem (similar to bureaucratic bloat and "cancel culture"). "There is no existential AI risk".
Clueless believes in AGI, it being a threat, and are scared of the moral implications. They will constantly mill over such idea in theory, but lacks backing in those deployed in the real world. They also cannot reconcile the difference between "AI bias" and "biological essentialism having merit".
Losers will see "AI" as an overhyped product akin to the toaster and freezer, or maybe a digital pet. If it behaves like a human, it can be handled like a human. They see that it can be easily fixed by data management ("don't give them data") and model interpretability regulation ("we need to see the algorithm").
This comment section is a mess. Half the people are using the book's definition of "sociopath" and the other half are using the popular psychological definition.
"So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. "
No such realm exists. Performance is *always* impossible to measure. If it was measurable, the Sociopath game wouldn't work.
I think it's really difficult to appreciate The Gervais Principle if you haven't spent a lot of time in the corporate world, which (to my understanding) Scott hasn't.
they will take the social ladder at face value and climb it for all it's worth
autists live in the abstract, physical reality
we do not see status.
it is arbitrary and nonsensical.
and allistic neurodiverse people basically sit in between.
they are seen as normal people, as they see and exist within the social reality, but they have difficulties fully understanding it, as they also see the abstract/physical reality, and assume those around them do too.
I thought at first one could map autists to clueless (we are, after all, clueless) but then I realized not living in the social reality is more a sociopath thing.
though, even that requires them initially living in the social reality.
I suppose it's unsurprising that a book on categorizing people in the framing of business doesn't include autistic people.
one can assume, then, that autists do not fit this trinary, and that the other two do.
the allistic NDs are a dead ringer for the clueless, existing in the social but distracted by the real.
which brings us to the neurotypicals.
strangely enough, the neuroypical is characterized as a status-seeker in a way that lends itself to both loser and sociopath interpretations.
perhaps this is the correct view?
both start out as status-seeking, but end up in different places.
so now we have a four-way model, with the neurotypicals being split up into losers and sociopaths, autists getting externally tacked on, and the "sees social reality but confounded by real world" group remining unchanged.
I don't know lacann's trinary, but you could likely pull a similar extention trick to make it fit.
it is worth noting that there are more than three (or even four) people in the world, and understand these are useful models at best.
if you ask two different people to divide people into three groups based entirely whatever criteria make sense to them, and the groups likely will not match up one to one.
these thing are abstract models.
they generalize and simplify to make stuff understandable.
atoms are not letters surronded by dots and lines, but that's what they teach in chemistry class.
I'm inherently suspicious of any books that classify sociopaths as the pinnacle of (social?) evolution. It's not the first time I've seen it, and somehow the idea is always explored by self-professed sociopaths. "Dark Enlightenment" is also a common motive, sometimes to the point of hilarity, as one blog I've read suggested that such enlightenment most often comes with a disrespect for highway speed limits (though it's only one of the first steps to the real sociopathic godhood, but such persons are already head-and-shoulders above various normies). Oh, and derisive names for everybody who's not a sociopath is also common with these books/blogs. But I can hardly believe these highly enlighted people would share their wisdom with us Clueless Losers. Unless... They maybe want our approval? And money. But also approval, or at least hate. Doesn't it makes them Losers, though? They might pretend they don't care one way or another, but I think anyone who takes up writing is seeking some form of external validation (I'd prefer you all to agree with this comment).
To your question about upper management and under/over-performance: I've never worked at a huge corporation, and suspect that it's distinctly different once a company reaches a certain size (aka - even management level employees are larger than Dunbar's Number). That said, I've worked in senior management for several organizations, and the top managers were mostly over-achievers, even the clearly sociopathic ones. Those that weren't clearly overachievers, I would label as highly productive anyway - they were just smart enough to get more done with less time and effort.
Separately, I think Rao puts too much stake into clear lines between groups. As with most people, I can see aspects of myself that fall into each of the three groups. At work, I'm probably more of a Sociopath - but I'm having trouble distinguishing the traits from the basic things a higher level manager would need. You can't be in awe of the rules when you're the person who writes and then changes them! I also have to regularly make decisions that result in significant negative affects (positive too, but those are easier) for other people. I'm not the owner from the 5th Element who callously fires thousands of people, but I've still fired a lot of people when it was needed, and it was often emotionally jarring to do. I've known too many high level managers who were upset at closing down an unprofitable business unit to think that they don't have feelings about it, but they still knew it needed to be done. In my home life, I'm probably Clueless - I overachieve and follow the rules. Socially (with other adults outside of my family), I'm more of a Loser, playing illegible status games so that everyone feels included.
What Rao shared does seem to be true to some extents and relevant. That different people approach questions in life and work with completely different outlooks is an important lesson. I realized it on my own when I would go from working with a group of management employees to working with a group of similarly intelligent and capable people who eschewed any management responsibility. I found it quite eye-opening to have coworkers who were 10-30 years older than me, who clearly knew far more of the relevant information to resolve an issue, who would come to me wringing their hands and looking for me to make a decision. At first I felt really awkward asking them for the information, past precedent, and then telling them to do the thing that they surely saw as obvious.
> Those that weren't clearly overachievers, I would label as highly productive anyway - they were just smart enough to get more done with less time and effort.
Clueless as Graeber's BS Jobs, or "Small-Souled Bugmen"/"Midwit", or the "Educated Gentry", those that does fake work and PR to maintain the status quo.
> I think Rao puts too much stake into clear lines between groups.
Imagine if there is a table for something similar to Ruby K Payne's class model, where one can be descriptive but flexible, then we can see if they are empirically valid.
> even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it.
Do you feel bad because of this clerk's opinion of you, or because of how it changed your view of *yourself*?
> Whatever, Rao said (in one sentence) that everyone has multiple types. But then what’s the use of this categorization system?
Each of these categories are probably themselves masks that we add and remove contextually. It scenarios in which I'm comfortable or knowledgeable I might be more sociopathic, in contexts in which I'm less knowledgeable I might be more clueless. Or maybe that's just how a sociopath would approach it since they seem less beholden to one modality of action.
> For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least.
Maybe it depends on what you view as "development". If you slice it by assuming social order is valuable, then neurotics are developed. If you slice by assuming that freedom to act is valuable, then they are clearly less developed, being bound to existing structures, modes of thought and action.
Maybe a (neuro)plasticity vs (emotional)stability personality distinction? Losers = low plasticity, Permanent Clueless = high in stability, Sociopaths = high plasticity, the "aspiring" = low in plasticity. The road to cluelessness = increasing stability and ignoring plasticity, becoming fragile to structural change. The road of getting on top = increasing plasticity first, then increasing stability.
Thank you for this wonderful review. I did immediately find myself in the "You read Nietzsche in freshman philosophy, and for a few weeks you vaguely feel like you ought to be the ubermensch" camp after reading just your summary of the book, so that last bit is definitely a mental bypass to avoid uncritically identifying with the content.
About this section:
"Most people have a special place in their heart for the book that first made them understand the idea of status economics. Gervais Principle does a good enough job with this that I’m sure it had a profound effect on some people. For me, that role was already taken by an unusually good college psych textbook, plus Robin Hanson’s blogging as remedial lessons, so I feel less transformed."
Which college psych textbook are you referring to?
Ehhhhhh. There's an implicit assumption that power and status are the only thing that matters. They do matter, but there's always someone with more. I try to have enough to sustain dignity without turning me into an asshole (because it pleases me not to be one). My demand for power is inelastic. There's nothing about objective reality that says maximizing personal power and status is optimal. It's subjective. Why should more powerful people get to choose what's important to me?
If you want to go full nihilism, no matter how sociopathic you are, it still doesn't matter, and you still die. So, what's the point? Any set of values you choose will result in the same meaningless fate. What's better about being powerful? You still suffer and die. Maximizing power only makes sense if you get something you want while you are alive. Desire is subjective, so why is anyone's desires more or less valid than anyone else's?
It seems to me that it's important to care less about others' opinions the weaker the relationship to yourself becomes. Total strangers on the internet (like you!) shouldn't matter at all. Sorry! Acquaintances matter more, friends a lot, and family the most. I've had good results. As internet platforms grow larger, the influence individuals have shrinks. The larger the potential audience, the less likely any of them will care what you think. You have more aggregate influence over a close friend than over a potential audience of thousands. The rational thing to do is to spend your time with your friends and family. This is all very obvious, but people don't act like it.
My father died right after he retired. That happens a lot! So, it seems to me, I should enjoy my job because the payoff for delayed gratification isn't certain. I also find that I am unhappy when I'm not working. Retirement doesn't hold much appeal. I will try to avoid it.
Money only exists to be spent in the limited time I have. Too much left over will only make my heirs miserable. Yeah, I want to be paid what I earn, but I'd rather buy less crap than waste time on pointless labor. I like my job and go to work happy.
Materialism is empty. Yeah, poverty sucks in absolute terms up to a point, but past that it's purely relative. It's up to me whether I care. I don't. Oddly, other people want me to. Even more oddly, I meet poor people wearing clothes that cost several times more than those I'm wearing.
Loser thinking? Shrug. What am I losing? If we're nihilists, I get to choose the game I'm playing because we all lose and none of this matters anyway. My worldview is as valid as anyone else's, so far as it's based on my subjective experience and not objective reality. Humor me.
I'll die. If I have any warning, I'll reflect back on a happy life. In the meantime, I don't worry about it.
Don't try to use these ideas (or any ideas in any book of this sort) to understand/measure against yourself. Yes, everyone is unique but you extra double-plus unique along every dimension...
Rather, consider something like Twitter. Of course different people have different Twitter feeds, but at least in mind there are clearly three groups:
- there are the normies (who aren't actually in my feed, but apparently care about and generate the nonsense on the side, whether it's "Celebrity does thing" or "News that you're supposed to care about"
- there are the people I follow because they communicate about technical material I am interested in. It's very clear from the way these people feel the need to retweet politics that they basically match every point in the Clueless handbook. They are obsessed with legibility and rules (and all their political "zingers" are based on this, eg that supposed killer argument about abortion vs death penalty). They are mid-level book smart, but care much more about credentials than actual demonstrated smartness. They can only communicate, and in fact only think, in cliches.
- finally there are the few people who could actually provide a decent answer to the Peter Thiel question “what is a heretical view you have?”. These are the Venkatesh Rao's, the Scott Alexanders, the Kevin Simler's.
The point is not that these people are actually sociopaths, or care about manipulating others, it's that they prioritize truth over personal comfort (losers) or socially constructed reality (clueless). The book puts this in a business context partially as a joke and partially as a "this is what's going on at the highest levels of power"; but this three-way dichotomy can be viewed from many different angles. My version as "prioritizing truth" works for me, others might immediately jump on as saying "sociopaths will lie to get what they want" (ie ignoring the point that genuine sociopaths are in fact well aware of the truth, they just don't care about lying).
The goal is to understand people, and a good framework is one that works for you. But of course, this can only be achieved (so I would say...) if you're in the sociopath camp.
If you're a loser, this all just seems like silly nonsense compared to family and having a good time.
If you're in the clueless camp, you will never get past your addiction to socially constructed reality to be willing to accept anything else.
Which camp are you in?
Well, do you have multiple (not just one) good answers to the Peter Thiel question?
Do you look at the political landscape and think "OMG, both sides and everyone who claims to speak for them are pathetic" or do you think "sure, they're both pathetic, but my team is RIGHT, it just happens to have a few pathetic members, and their team is WRONG"?
I don't think many people reading ACT are normies, but I do think a large fraction are clueless fantasizing that they are sociopaths.
Didn't Lacan say something about the psychotics being unable to imagine things or something like that? I remember you noted it was a very strong claim. Does it somehow map onto this book's view?
Pretty late to the party here, but there's something interesting in your comparison to Lacan and Rao's typologies.
First, consider that they are pretty incompatible with something like Erikson's development stages or Maslow's hierarchy or Kegan's moral development, while these models are quite compatible with each other (if shifting the emphasis somewhat).
Second, I find it really easy to imagine an 19th century version of Rao coming up with an tripartite division of "Worker, Petit Bourgeoise, Capitalist". Or a 12 century version discussing the differences between "Heathen, Heretic, Christian".
That is to say I think Rao (and Lacan) are identifying important aspects of the human psyche, but interpreting them through a particular historical experience. My read is that Rao's audience can probably find some comfort in the existence of his "sociopath" group (either as an aspirational objective or emotional backstop), but as you point out most CEOs/Founders are not existentially empowered manipulative ubermesnches. They are "just" the children of rich parents with talent, education and a network, but I suspect that gen-x'ers who faced the absurdity of late 90s/early 2000s corporate culture feel differently.
This is because the dynamics Rao observes clearly do exist to some extent (if you can't see yourself as clueless/loser/sociopath, I bet you can reflexively identify which are which in your workplace). Ditto with Lacan (to an earlier generation/context). But the archetypes presented are useful models for understanding a particular social environment, not an accurate description of human social psychology as a whole. Considering the latter depends on the former and vice versa, it's about as good as we're going to get, but we do have to keep in mind the limitations implicit in our construct.
Simply applying this model to yourself & the people you know in life seems a bit thick---the point is it's an organizational analysis and therefore mainly applicable to people's roles during the 9 to 5.
I think you misunderstand underperformance. It doesn't mean doing less than most people, or even acting like Victor Tugelbend in Pratchett's 'Moving Pictures'. Underperforming means convincing people that you can do more, if only...
This ties neatly into the concept of a sociopath as a person who creates social reality. If I can convince my boss that I'm holding back, then I demonstratably have some skill at manipulating social perceptions. It is the impression of underperformance that best signals my skills at manipulating others.
The Pax Americana is Opportunistic lead, whilst the BRICS are clueless posturing (but they are wising up).
Opportunists: Zeroth World and First World, Highly Developed Nations, Core Nations
Cluelesss: Second World, Emerging Economies, Semi-Peripheral Nations
Pragmatists: Third and Fourth World, Developing Nations, Peripheral Nations
Will need summaries on these similar books, thanks. Rationalism is Clueless/Idealistic, Heuristics is Opportunistic.
Presumption of guilt, probably. The Patrick Bateman charicature of affect. But then this book is basically churning loser to realize that they should know their place, for fight to the top if they dared.
I was thinking much the same thing but wasn't sure how to put it into words. I see a bit of all three types in myself, but most of the time I don't really give a damn about social status or "fitting in" because I'm a loner weirdo. All this jockeying for social status and manipulating people just sounds so exhausting. Would Rao respond that people like you (and me) are just putting on a show of "look how much I don't care" in order to gain status?
In this system if you work for someone else and have no desire or possibility of achieving a position where other peoples’ work makes you more money you are a “loser” whether or not you are happy. He specifies that he means economic loser in a capitalist sense and not a loser at life. Among the ways Losers differ from the Clueless in that they find their meaning outside of work and can be perfectly content. That doesn’t mean you have to play status games but if you do they will be a different pattern than the other groups.
There's a more prosocial version where someone sees through the bullshit, and explains it to other people, but doesn't attempt to benefit personally.
If I remember correctly, this is similar to how the original blog posts describe Toby: he’s a Sociopath by nature who tries to align himself with the common man (i.e. Losers) instead, but can’t do so completely because the Sociopath bell can’t be unrung. Something like that.
I’m not autistic myself, but I think I’d be a “hermit” too: I’m a Loser because I’d rather just be a W-2 employee and pursue my passions on the side (I’m too risk-averse to do otherwise), but I care more about my own personal pleasure than the approval of society.
Hermit is a loser. Doesn’t matter if youre deluded or not, you take the deal of a safe pay check for minimal work. Stanley from the show is a perfect example.
The uncharitable take is:
What you describe as "the Hermit" is the primary audience of the Gervais Principle: self-describedly highly analytical people who like cynical essays, they really know what is going on behind all the masks, it is only for X or Y or Z they are not the smooth successful operators in their social world.
Only good theory of reality is the one that has practical utility, so what good is a theory of social relations one can't put into practical use because it didn't come with the manual of interpersonal skills?
If rationality is defined as winning, then the people into polyamory are winning as much as they like the "only the strings I like until I don't" attached sex.
It's a decent source, but it would be great if Scott could name the psych textbook that served as his epiphany in this respect.
Yes I wondered about that. Surely Status is always contextual and provisional, in my experience a snare and a delusion.
Try anything by Robin Hanson on status signaling, say https://www.overcomingbias.com/2021/10/status-explains-lots.html
(Picked at random from a Google search against Hanson's blog: https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.overcomingbias.com+status)
Try picking up Impro by Keith Johnstone. Excellent introduction to status games.
Thanks for linking to this! Very interesting way of looking at it.
"Examples from The Office include David Wallace and Charles Miner."
The American Office, which is a pale imitation of The Office. But still quite good.
How could a book be called 'The Gervais Principle' and then be entirely about the american version of the office?!
Because either way, Gervais gets credit as the show's creator?
He should. He was executive producer in the American version.
I hear people say, "The American Version ripped off the British version and was total crap." I guess Ricky ripped himself off. Love it.
I know. It should really be the Brent principle, and there should be an extra category of Boss called COE (Chilled Out Entertainer)
And right away we start off with perfectly crafted Clueless comments; all about pseudo-legal niceties and one-upsmanship while utterly ignoring the interesting aspects (which are difficult, and so impossible to place within the simplified, legible, world-view of the Clueless).
Ha ha
The pedant store called, and they're running out of you
What can I say, I'm a popular pedant :)
As the audience, I approve of both sentiments. ;)
Yes, but you were their best seller.
What can I say, once they get a taste of me they keep coming back for more.
The American office is far better.
It's not the real quiz.
> postrationalist
Can someone tell me what "postrationalist" is? I keep hearing people talking about it and I'm just not clued in enough to internet subcultures to know what it means in practice. My exposure to "rationalism" itself is pretty much just limited to SSC/ACX; like I know who Yudkowsky is and I've read a less wrong post or two but that's about it. What does it mean to "post-" the movement?
LessWrong defines it as "A post-rationalist is someone who believes the rationalist project is misguided or impossible, but who likes to use some of the tools and concepts developed by the rationalists" and I think that definitely applies to Venkatesh based on reading his blog posts and twitter. It's about accepting that the rationalism movement provides value and makes some good points, but deliberately stepping away from the goals and structure of the community.
So what's the difference between a "post-rationalist" and someone like me who has kind of lurked in these spaces for a while but never made the whole thing part of their own identity? Or is there not one?
"Post-" kind of has this sort of framing that whatever is being "posted" is being judged as obsolete.
Honestly I don't think there is a real post-rationalist community, so it's currently just a descriptor for lurkers (like me as well) who don't feel at home on LessWrong and the SSC-derived subreddits. If anyone knows of a good post-rationalist community let me know. I would not count SneerClub as post-rationalist, that's closer to anti-rationalist most of the time
It's moreso on twitter, vgr is a good jumping off point.
Since Rao’s also self-describing as a sociopath, then by his own definitions I would not expect there to be a club or a community.
He’s just shifting blame/credit for the outputs of the rationalists to further his own goals.
The community is definitely there! See @vgr, @eigenrobot, and @roon on Twitter, for example. The community often refers to itself as "TPOT," This Part of Twitter. There was even "Vibecamp" (@tpotvibecamp) a sort of postrationalist Woodstock organized by @gptbrooke a few months ago.
As I understand the lingo, you're rat-adjacent (because you percieve yourself as having related beliefs, some subcommunity overlap, but not a member of the community.) Post-rat is someone in a similar position, but who explicitly concieves of themself as rejecting the rationality community while keeping some kernel of their beliefs which are actually true (often the general model of people's minds and epistomology.)
I’m happy to identify as rat-adjacent, after all you’re never more than x feet from a rat 🐀
Well, unless you live in Alberta
Where they are always inches away?
I think the rejection-part is not necessary. Though some writers do that, too.
There's not one, except what they choose to label themselves.
There's also not a difference between a "post-rationalist" and a "rationalist" except what they choose to label themselves (since every rationalist has plenty of critiques of the "rationalist movement").
I generally think of it like Fugazi is Post-Punk: Ian and Guy were big time punks in Hardcore bands, then moved past the limited Hardcore genre and developed something new, which contained recognizable elements of the genre but expanded beyond its borders.
A post rationalist is someone who read, consumed, believed Rationalist doctrines; then moved on to other stuff that is outside the boundaries of Rationalism.
If you never made it part of your identity, maybe you're a pre-rationalist.
Both rationalists and post-rationalists agree in the technical machinery of science -- deduction, induction, experiments, blah blah.
But rationalists believe (explicitly or implicitly) that the axioms upon which this machinery should operate are "obvious" and "common sense". Think Newton or Kant.
Post-rationalists are willing to accept that the axioms are far from obvious, and that when a set of deductions appears to go off the rails or to conflict with reality, rather than continue to insist on the deduced result, we should reconsider the axioms.
Math were the first to get there with people like Cantor in the 19th C.
Physics got there with Relativity and QM in the 20th C.
Of course like anything, this is a live issue not in the hard sciences but in Social Science and Philosophy. Now what are the axioms of Social Science? Well, opinions differ but you can think of some that might correspond to "mainstream social science in America right now".
And you can imagine that some people in this space would be very upset if you were to argue that, if deductions from those axioms repeatedly reach results that violate common sense or empirical experience, then maybe the axioms should be re-thought. Hence the anger behind the labels...
David Chapman discusses this in (OMG, so much!) detail at meaningness.com.
I identify rationality with what he calls "the systematic mode", postrationality with "the fluid mode".
A short intro is here:
https://meaningness.com/collapse-of-rational-certainty
Another way to look at it is:
Rationality is believing that a "scientific method" exists, and that the actual history of science somehow was built upon it.
Post-rationality is accepting that real science was built on superior pattern recognition skills, that many can look at a pattern of facts and numbers and see nothing (losers), a few know the *standard* *formulaic* means by which to extract data from the facts and numbers (clueless), and a very few possess the pattern recognition skills to see something truly different (your Newton's, Einstein's, Gell-Mann's).
Of course saying that science is an intrinsically aristocratic activity, that very few have the "scientific taste" to genuinely advance a field, does not match the tenor of our times. And so we get nonsense, like "the Scientific Method" to keep the clueless happy while the rare genuine geniuses operate on post-rational "scientific taste".
Very thorough, thanks for this.
Illegibility is central to postrationalism. You're welcome.
Well, I guess that's me. Rational evaluation generally takes so long that the choice is past before it can be completed. So I tend to evaluate mock-ups ahead of time, and then pick the one that seems closest to applicable (and only trust it if several of the closer mock-ups give the same answer). But to me that looks like rationalism in a situation with constrained resources.
I wonder, wouldn't Yudkowsky himself qualify these days? Certainly he doesn't seem to think that the sanity waterline would rise quickly enough for the world to not be destroyed.
That's quite bemusing to me. I've got a degree in philosophy/been reading phil for approx. 15 years and I've never once heard of the "rationalist project". That's not to attack the concept, I just find it odd/interesting that the internet runs according to ideas that seem to have nothing to do with academia, and vice versa.
Have you read the old le#wrong discussions of academic philosophy between Yudkowsky and (I think) Lukeprog? There is not much interest in either side, with some exceptions.
No. But going to check those names out now! :)
https://www.lesswrong.com/s/yFvZa9wkv5JoqhM8F
Among several amusing things about the poorly chosen name 'rationalism' is that Hume would have shown more interest in the 'rationalist' wariness of cognitive bias, and the Bayesian approach to truth, than Descartes. In other words, 'rationalism' (at its best, at least) seems to me to be more in the tradition of empiricism and skepticism. It seems less in sympathy with the methodology of actual rationalism.
That said, I think Descartes would have been more likely to worry about hostile AI, and to embrace utilitarianism.
Do rationalists embrace utilitarianism, or consequentialism, or dissolve the distinction between deontology and consequentialism?
I don't understand. What does dissolving that distinction mean? Some guesses:
Is it the claim that deontology is the rationalization of (natural) emotions, while consequentialism comes from reasoning? (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/62p74DvwNHgQXCXcH/are-deontological-moral-judgments-rationalizations) I understand this as part of the argument for not acting according to deontology. I don't see it as part of an argument for why deontology is not really distinct from consequentialism.
Is it the sociological claim that most deontologists are probably consequentialists deep down? (With enough people tied to the trolley tracks, will most self-identified deontologists push Fat Man to stop the trolley?)
Is it the observation that deontologists sometimes/often justify deontology in terms of consequences? (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yppdL4EXLWda5Wthn/deontology-for-consequentialists?commentId=nZ76T3RPbrQXe4Gvq)
Is it an evolutionary psychology claim about deontological intuitions being the consequence of natural selection?
Yudkowsky used that phrase in a couple of places in the sequences, IIR. I interpreted it as another way of saying “they’re not really talking about the same thing,” or “this question needs reframing.”
Your guesses seem worth thinking about, but what I had in mind was, people use heuristics and legal systems that look sort of deontological, and create budgets for hospitals that look sort of utilitarian.
There is some deeper trade-off going on, that depends on how narrow the goal is and how difficult it is to get useful estimates of the relevant variables. Nothing is pure heuristics, because we live in a relatively stable society where estimating some variables is costless, because they are static enough to not require much thought. Nothing is pure consequentialism, because our calculations depend on a preference ranking that is not constructed by explicit calculation. And to some degree, one solution can be translated into the terms of the other.
Or we could think of society as a self-modifying system. Has it solved the alignment problem? Sort of. Maybe. It hasn’t killed everyone yet. The ancient Greeks might not think so.
Deontology or consequentialism is not really the immediate problem we face, ordinarily.
And what sorts of deontology and consequentialism are we talking about? Does deontology require us to articulate an absolute rule, or a philosophical system like Kant's, or is it the overlap of the system I intuitions of highly trained persons, or something else?
Is it even relevant? Are there deontologists who really make no exceptions? I guess they make lots of revisions and end up with epicycles? Are there consequentialists who break the law or violate social expectations frequently for the greater good? Or do they act like it doesn’t really make much difference?
Maybe we can think of rules and calculations as yin and yang, or tools in our toolbox.
This does not dissolve the problem, or we would feel more confident that some synthesis has been reached. Maybe someone else could take a better stab at it.
The Clueless have their badges and diplomas, and the Losers have their own illegible social club that cares little about those kinds of achievements.
My interpretation is that it's a group of people that have been active members of or lurked in the rationalist community for a few years but then decided to take whatever they consider to be "the good bits" and distance themselves from the rest.
The stuff they consider to be the 'good bits' is often the rationalist epistemology / method of reasoning and the stuff they want to distance themselves from can be everything from AI risk to atheism.
So, likes to hang out with rationalists, but also considers them lower-status.
Also pretty likely to be into pretty wooey meditation / psychadelic / spiritualist stuff from a quick skim over their twitter accounts. Frankly I haven't been super impressed by the community.
Same. I remember people suggesting Chapman's Meaningness blog when I expressed an appreciation for spiritual woo (despite not really "believing in" it — it just appeals); went ahead and read it, and then thought "well, this is a bunch of nonsense."
That might be a slightly-harsh evaluation, because I have a big pet peeve re: people talking authoritatively about Buddhism while presenting a skewed or outright incorrect version of doctrine; but still. Nothing else from the community I've seen since has really changed my mind about that.
The Buddhist stuff is meh, but I think that his observation that the LW-sphere fetishizes Bayesianism too much is on point.
Well, I have no idea about Chapman, but I have to assert that "Spiritualism" is, indeed, worthy of consideration...if properly understood, which is difficult, as very few practitioners bother with understanding. I suspect part of the problem is with translation, but also often the metaphors used aren't those that would be picked in current forms of expression.
E.g. it seems to me that Zen's "break the back of reason" is basically about developing an awareness of the parallel processing nature of the mind's apprehension of sensory information as opposed to languages more serial nature. Whether this is actually do-able may be a different question, but it's certainly possible to partially do it for short periods of time.
I saw that word and immediately felt I knew what it meant. Especially taken in context with this quote from Rao:
“There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before.”
I believe postrationalist refers to someone who sees past what Jon Haidt describes as the “rationalist delusion”. That is, the idea many hold that the conscious mind, rather than the subconscious mind, is responsible for their decision making.
I really relate to what Rao is saying. Once I truly understood Haidt’s work and stopped seeing politics as a matter or good and evil, but instead just a bunch of different tribes organized around different combinations of fundamental moral values, I started finding it very hard to *be* a member of any tribe. I became deaf to the “raw, unintelligible” sound of a language I was once able to experience.
That’s what I belief postrationalist means.
No, "rationalist" there means the overcomingbias/lesswrong/ssc/acx/miri/effectivealtruism culture of rationalists specifically.
My recollection is that when Rao first used "post-rationalist" to describe himself, it was in the same sense that Haidt means, and the fact that a different group of people were calling themselves "rationalists" was just a source of playful confusion.
... but that would imply that there are whole other worldviews people employ, outside the rationalist community, and don’t define themselves by it!
*clutches pearls*
Okay, I stand corrected!
I often saw him mentioned among lesswrong-adjacent people and never by anyone else, so I assumed he was so close to the community that that is what he must have meant.
Well, the words are used differently different communities.
Yes the tribal "bay area rationalists vs other places post-rationalists" feud is one version; but there is also a separate, parallel, much more interesting discussion going on about the limits to rationality and how to get beyond it WITHOUT going backwards to the world of woo or a kinds of solipsism.
To be glib, a post-rationalist is someone who's seen that question asked too many times.
Less glibly, afaict there was a collection of ex-rationalists, and people who looked at rationalism but never really accepted it, and to this accreted various people who agreed with these ex-or-not-quite rationalists on various things, usually more on a meta or vibe level.
I'm less familiar with the particulars of why various people left (or disagreed with) rationalism; I think there's been a fairly wide variety.
I say this as neither a rat nor a post-rat, merely an observer
Rationalists are people who think too much about Bayesian probability, forecasting, altruism, and AI.
Postrationalists are people who think too much about the difference between postrationalists and rationalists.
(sorry, cheap shot, but it's true. I guess that means we're both postrats for the duration of this comment thread)
I’ve noticed what I call “radical Consequentialism” in a lot of political ideas, primarily stemming from the far-Left.
It’s essentially any idea that purports to be based on a certainty that X individual action will cause Y systemic result. For instance, if Bob doesn’t “do the work”, he will uphold “White Supremacy”. Or if Suzy doesn’t use someone’s preferred pronouns, we will move up the “Pyramid of Genocide”.
It’s kind of like that Ashton Kutcher movie, The Butterfly Effect. People not only imagine their actions have more of an influence than they actually do, but also believe that they can predict the first, second, third... nth order effects of other peoples’ actions reliably enough that everyone should forgo their own desires and obey commands.
They don’t predict second and third order events. The wish cast them. This is evident when you look at the complete inability to predict utterly obvious second order events if they don’t fit in with the first order goals of an intervention.
I’m definitely not suggesting that the people who make “radical Consequentialist” claims can accurately predict 2nd, 3rd... nth order consequences of an action. (Nassim Taleb did an nice explanation of how impossible that would be using an example with pool balls in one of his books.) And I agree with you that they can’t even accurately predict the obvious 2nd order effects. However, they sure do believe they have this ability. So great is their belief that they can’t seem to understand why anyone would doubt them, haha.
Would you lump people who spend their careers trying to demonstrate all of the ways humans are not rational actors in with postrationalists? I’m thinking of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Thaler.
Quite the contrary. Humans not being rational actors is central to modern rationalism. Heck, the central original forum was named Less Wrong, because not being wrong isn't concieved of as an option. Through lots of careful work on rationality you can get better at being rational more of the time. You can get less wrong. But in the view of modern rationalists you simply are not built as a rational actor.
This is a common response among rationalists, but it papers over a real difference of emphasis and risks falling into a motte-and-bailey. The key pivot is:
"Through lots of careful work on rationality you can get better at being rational more of the time."
The extent to which / sense in which this is true is the bone of contention. Rationalist often enough take this to mean "so let's get back to Bayesian probability and utility theory and stop worrying about the other complications," whereas postrats are more likely to say "we can get better by learning and using good tools, but it's overselling to call that 'getting more rational.'"
>"we can get better by learning and using good tools, but it's overselling to call that 'getting more rational.'"
Better at what exactly? If it cashes out to more accurate understanding of the world and better predictions, I think this distinction is mostly pure semantics.
Regardless, the question was about Haidt, who has spoken against Cartesian rationality but whose philosophy (Haidt's) is fairly foundational to modern rationalism (which is a very different movement from De Carte.)
If you fully take on board Haidt and related thinkers, what you end up with does not look much like rationalism. Sure, you can say, "Oh, but that just *is* modern rationalism," but it's hard to maintain that without some motte-and-bailey.
In the same way that humans are sinners is central to Christianity. Because being free of original sin is not an option. Through lots of careful good works you can get better at being a good Christian more of the time. You become less sinful. But on the view of the modern clergy, we are all sinners.
I thought baptisms washes off original sin? (But not tendency to sin..)
This (like every doctrine about baptism) varies wildly by denomination.
Baptism might be seen as a Christian updating her priors, a kind of Bayesian approach to salvation.
Not if you still take rationalism as an ideal. A post-rationalist is more likely to think that rationalism is an incoherent or incomplete system. Sometimes this means you have a meta-system, such as David Chapman's reasonable/rational/meta-rational framework.)
Would Robin Hansen be another one?
I don’t know his work well. Based on his Wikipedia, I’d say maybe but only part-time. He also seems to have other interests.
I wouldn't say so? I don't think thaler or haidt have read much less wrong or ssc
Unfortunately the term rationalism identify different movements or ideas
I think lw-centered, bay area movement is the rationalism in post-rationalism
Maybe the real postrationalism was the friends we made along the way
With a small, but non-zero, amount of irony: yes
High five, my friend.
Is worrying about AI rational though? Isn’t that still up for discussion.
Lots of people discuss it for sure. People disagree about lots of important things, though. If you want a chance at making progress on a topic, at some point you have to move away from focusing on whether it's worth looking into and actually study it at the object level.
Imagine if climate scientists refused to start looking into possible solutions until 70% of Americans agreed that anthropogenic climate change was a significant threat...
You’re comparing a definite threat to a highly uncertain threat. I suppose I’m asking whether such certainty about AI, good or bad, is rational.
Oh if you're referring to the "we're 99% certain to be doomed" sentiment that has shown up recently, then personally I'd agree that seems pretty overconfident. I'd put the chances of AI disaster quite a bit lower (maybe like 30%, though I'm not an expert, and I'd put it higher if nobody were concerned about the problem).
Thing is, a lot of people seem to want to act like they're very certain the other way. If a nuclear power plant were 3% likely to go chernobyl, it would have to shut down immediately even if that cost billions. To allow AI with no safeguards of any kind would only make sense if the risk is basically zero.
Is there an audience you’re doing this joke for, Scott?
I've come to think about it this way, which may or may not be how self-identified postrationalists think about it: Postrationalists concede that the foundational ideas of the rationalist project (like Bayesian epistemology) tend to be correct, but have disagreements with conclusions.
For example, the rationalist community can be seen as obsessed over low-probability events such as x-risk. A postrationalist may note that we don't really have a good general theory on how to deal with extreme longtermism (it comes to us intuitively that we should be doing some temporal discounting, but how exactly, and then some utilitarians would say that lives a thousand years from now in fact are exactly as valuable as our lives) or very low-probability events with very big outcomes, and to the extent you can write down utility calculations, they are pretty much useless due to being susceptible to small differences in starting conditions when there in fact are lots of unknowns and unknown unknowns. She might care about longtermism a great deal, but feel that the rationalist way to go about it is misguided and that, if we really care about longtermism, the actually rational thing to do is to throw all (or most of) the utility and probability calculations to the rubbish bin and just focus on building a good and just world right now.
Or, many self-indentified rationalists are polyamorous, supposedly on the grounds that there really can't be anything wrong with that so long as everyone involved is aware of the arrangement and consents to it. A post-rationalist might conclude that IF humans were perfectly rational agents, that reasoning would be perfectly sound and there wouldn't be anything wrong with it, but since humans aren't unfeeling robots capable of perfectly informed consent but are in fact capable of experiencing emotions like jealousy, the actual best strategy to achieve good life-outcomes for yourself, your spouse, and potentially your children, is precommitment to a single relationship. As I recall, Scott discussed similar points in the post following his marriage.
Of course, if you define rationalism as "systematized winning", then these kinds of supposedly postrationalist stances, supposing they are correct, would be rationalist. But then, if the broader rationalist community keeps obsessing over in-practice impossible utility calculations and modeling human behavior under trivially wrong model of agents (when bounded rationality or models that don't talk about agents at all would be more appropriate), or at least you perceive them as doing such (as noted in another comment, bounded rationality has always been central to rationalist ideas), it does make sense to take the stuff you think you can use and then move on.
This comment wins, systematically
imho it primarily was a description given to a variety of people who passed through the LW/rationalist community only to exit on the other side. At the most basic level, it's the philosophy of "rationalism is a tool to be learned and used where appropriate". Until recently, most "postrationalists" were called that only by other people, to gesture at this sort of thing.
In recent years it's become a self-description that some have taken on, and I can't speak to that usage, but the above is relevant to Venkatesh Rao and much of the extended-Ribbonfarm networks.
I read “post-“ as something which could only have existed post the other thing. It can be completely different in character, naive to the original concepts, or frankly oppose them. But yet some crucial aspects are indelibly in the footsteps of.
my interpretation from having read/absorbed loads of rationality + postrationality writing:
"post" in the sense of "going beyond", usually not "getting over it/being done with".
"Rationality" being the vague set of things most people in this fuzzy subculture are familiar with and can discuss with one another without having to explain much. (decision theory basics, LW sequences, HPMOR stuff, some economic terms like marginal utility, pareto-principle, Schelling points...)
I'd say that postrationlists are creative high-concept oddballs who synthesize and "refactor" (that's a Rao-term) various abstract concepts from various disciplines. With some awareness and/or inclusion of rationality ideas, but doesn't have to directly reference or use LW-terminology.
Can be super niche and obtuse, go very weird and have marginal audiences:
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/list-of-blogs
Can be pretty insightful and/or be mental masturbation. The term "insight porn" encapsulates both. Venkatesh Rao fits the label pretty well.
But even this sequence from Yudkowsky himself would fit into the category of postrationality writing, simply because it's beyond what most rationalists would instantly be familiar with:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory-sequence
Tentatively, a post-rationalist has firmly grasped the idea that people aren't very rational and aren't going to be. I'm not sure what they believe.
Nice point, you could also say that a post-rationalist has grasped the limits of rationalism without abandoning it completely, much as a post-Lacanian knows that his work will never form a unified theory but yet offers a valuable model with unique insights
I used to identify as post-rationalist. (My beliefs/preferences about it haven't changed, but Jacob Falkovich convinced me that using the label was unhelpful.) Here's how I'd put it:
Post-rationalists are people who interact with rationalist spaces socially and agree with many of the big rationalist ideas, but tend to disagree on goals and methods in a big picture sense, and prefer social norms and situations that are more normal (or at least weird in a different way from rationalist-preferred social norms). The "post-" is as in "post-modernism": Postmodernists thought that the modernist project of systematic acquisition and application of knowledge was doomed to ultimate failure, and post-rationalists tend to feel the same way about rationalists. Being a post-rationalist is part ideological differences, part social/norm preference difference, and part status game (to "post-" something is to claim higher status than it).
Here are some overly-broad and not-entirely-fair generalizations to give you a better idea (abbreviating to R and PR to save keystrokes):
-Some Rs prefer much of LessWrong's content to Astral Codex Ten's; almost no PR's do.
-Rs and PRs are both mostly atheists; however, Rs see religion as mostly bad or harmful while PRs generally see religions as containing important true insights, or as being good for persons and societies
-Rs are usually liberal, libertarian, or progressive; PRs are more likely (but still unlikely) to be conservative, traditional, or reactionary
-Many Rs hate their "meat-body" and are excited to be uploaded; PRs are more likely to feel at home in their body and are more skeptical of mind-uploading
-Rs skew transgender and autistic, or otherwise neurodivergent. PRs skew neurotypical but just pretty weird.
-PRs seem more excited about drugs for some reason
-Rs tend to like city amenities on net; PRs are more likely to live somewhere remote, or to want to.
-Rs like to build and rely upon explicit systems; PRs like to develop and rely upon intuitive or implicit judgment. (Neither group seems significantly more effective, in my experience)
-Rs dislike status games and are bad at playing them. PRs are mostly okay with status games and are average or good at playing them
-Rs love "Thinking Fast and Slow" and "The Better Angels of our Nature"; PRs love "The Black Swan" and "Seeing Like a State"
-Rs worry more about AI using all the negentropy in the lightcone, and also seem to worry more about things in general; PRs worry more about civilizational collapse.
-Rs think David Chapman is talking nonsense or pointing out the obvious; PRs think he is getting at something true, difficult, and important, and which is fundamental to the "post-" in "post-rationalist"
-PRs are always going on about Chesterton's Fence
-Rs are more often directly earnest; PRs are more often ironic or postironic.
-Rs mostly think that "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing with made up statistics" and are optimistic about the ability to measure things and apply systems to them. PRs are deeply concerned that [Availability Bias/The Streetlight Effect/McNamara's Fallacy] means your system is optimizing for the wrong thing and probably increasing misery.
-Rs are nearly all Utilitarians of some flavor; many PRs are not Utilitarians.
Post-rationalist thought leaders include Venkat Rao and some guy called "Eigenrobot". Maybe also the Weird Sun group if they're still around. I'm not on Twitter so I'm not terribly current with the scene, but it seems like most of the discourse is happening there.
Pardon a bit of irony but:
> Rs dislike status games and are bad at playing them. PRs are mostly okay with status games and are average or good at playing them
So PR are nerd culture appropriators
Is this a joke? In the Rao sense?
The irony is over my head. Rao has an essay about geek culture appropriators, right? Geeks/Mops/Sociopaths or something like that? I'm afraid I don't follow Rao very closely.
To take your comment seriously, I'd say post-rationalists are nerds, in terms of what content they consume and produce, what topics and hobbies they are interested in, etc. But in terms of social behaviors and competence they are more "normie".
IIRC Rao distinguishes true geeks from appropriators by motivation and content generation--nerds generate content out of interest; appropriators do so to seek social status (if at all). Since post-rationalists generate geek content out of sincere interest in the topic, that would make them geeks in that framework, not appropriators. (albeit, that they are perhaps geeks with more social options than the typical rationalist)
I don't know if that holds though. It's been a long time since I read any of those writings.
You're thinking of David Chapman, not Rao: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Otherwise your points all hold w/r/t the thrust of the essay. (Although, you might say that post-rationalists are a little more mops-y when it comes to some rationalist-core topics [Bayes, AI risk, effective altruism, or similar...])
From my perspective this is bang on - kudos. Guess I should go check out this eigenrobot chap. Assuming I can sufficiently collapse his wavefunction to locate him, that is.
Also, have you tried drugs? They’re delicious.
Personally, as someone who grew up highly nerdy and socially awkward, a major inflection point in my own shift towards empathy, increased social wellness, and greater understanding of my past situation was when I tried LSD at fifteen.
I really do think there are parts of the brain that unlock, can only unlock for some, when psychedelic substances are applied.
So, as an example of another low percentage chance, very outsized impact phenomenon, I would exhort all rationalists to try a controlled experiment at least once.
> a major inflection point in my own shift towards empathy, increased social wellness, and greater understanding of my past situation was when I tried LSD at fifteen
A close friend of mine has the same story, except it was mushrooms instead. I'm pretty happy with my life, and pretty good at socializing, emspathizing, etc, so I'm not sure how helpful it would be for me long-term. But if a lot of people are in your situation, that would explain the popularity of drugs.
The potential long-term benefits:
1. Psychedelics are non-addictive and do not cause withdrawal. So, you get to enjoy having your brain and your life, as you're accustomed to, for the indefinite future after the episode. (I've only had the one experience, myself.) https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/67918/why-do-classic-psychedelics-not-cause-withdrawal-despite-high-tolerance
2. You will unlock perspectives and subjective experiences you literally cannot have any other way, and that could not exist for any other person. It's maybe akin to getting VIP seats to an exclusive, once-in-a-lifetime performance art exhibit.
3. If you find a good group of friends, you'll all have some marvelous stories to share and an adventure you can bond over going through together.
Basically, to me, it was worth finding out at least what all the hullabaloo was about, and discovering exactly that, as well as corners and subconscious aspects of my mind I literally was not aware of and was unable to use prior.
Bay Area rationality has always had a lot of tension between openness and closure, between the approach where you should believe in whatever conclusion the best epistemology leads you to .... and the approach where things are mostly settled, and in fact, more settled than scientists believe.
Thats pretty standard. Most organisations do. Objectivism is even officially split into two organisations that differ on closure/completion versus openness/ evolution.
Bay area rationalism has a sort of unofficial divide with the Yudkowskians representing the the closed tendency and the Codexians the more open tendency. The postrationalists could be considered an even more open tendency, since they have actually abandoned the various forms of one club golf -- Bayes is the only epistemology, and so on -- whereas the Codexians are only willing to consider the possibility.
So postrationalism has a difference.of.approach to rationalism. Rationalists sometimes say that postrationalism isn't fundamentally different because it's derivable from rationality, in theory... But rationalists aren't using it in practice.
The "post-" is a bit of a misnomer, IMO. The label, as it tends to get used, seems to mainly refer to writers that have audiences who also enjoy rationalist blogs.
The label may have sprung up because people tended to read the rationalist canon *first* (e.g. Less Wrong, Sequences, Overcoming Bias, early SSC).
As far as I can tell, there's three epicentres of post-rationalism: (1) Rao's Ribbonfarm, (2) Chapman's Meaningness, and (3) twitter communities filled with mostly anonymous accounts with cartoon avis who do a lot of shit-posting and "vibing" but are usually fairly familiar with the rationalist canon. The biggest account is probably Eigenrobot.
A potential discernible thread is *illegibility*. Good intros to the concept are the reviews of Seeing Like a State by either SSC or Rao. The twitter community seems to place a lot of value on illegibility. This is mainly done by an implicit agreement to avoid talking about any object-level ideas.
I've seen others refer to post-rats as those who also place value in emotions/spirituality. They may take aspects of rationalism, but realize that cold game theory calculus doesn't give you everything you need out of life.
I've also seen people less sympathetic to post-rats describe them as those who are more concerned with seeming cool and avoiding cringe. (The "rationalist" label is admittedly awkward.
My guess is that anyway who considers themself a post-rat would read Scott. It's also difficult to say why Scott isn't a post-rat writer himself.
I found this essay on the subject incredibly helpful when I was wondering what the difference was between rationalist and postrationalist. Mostly, PRs care more about vibes and just don't like R's vibe.
https://rivalvoices.substack.com/p/fuck-it-we-ball-on-rats-postrats
Cards on the table, my podcast, Fluidity Audio, is nothing but Scott Alexander's UNSONG and David Chapman audiobooks. So, take my opinion with a grain of salt.
I don't know, this seems a little - obvious? Oh, the boss is not your pal? Life is not fair? Work hard for nothing, get nothing? Maybe some people do need to be told this. Maybe I'm just being a Loser.
But I honestly don't see what Sociopaths get out of it, unless they do are deluding themselves. I'm so clever, I know what ultimate reality is? I'm the one making others dance to my tune? Yeah, and so what? It doesn't ultimately mean anything; being President of the multinational global consortium is as meaningless as giving out "Employee of the Month" awards to your Clueless subordinates to keep them running on the treadmill. In the end, it's all just quarks and stuff.
I mean, as a Loser, I'm very happy there's a guy out there plotting and scheming and looking for backs to stab so he can end up CEO of BigCorp plc and spend 80 hour work weeks devising takeovers and mergers and increasing the share price, while I just have to turn up, do my 9-5 for five days a week and draw my pay cheque. The Big Boss means nothing to me, because I have no personal loyalty or investment in who it is; I have to work for someone, and if it isn't him then it will be some other guy. Sociopath is climbing the ladder hard as he can to get to the top, to work for - me, in the end. He's doing all the work of keeping the company going while I do my minimum at the bottom of the ladder, and which of us is happier in the end? Seeing as how it's all meaningless in the great scheme of things, and there is no reality, why not me?
The theory suggests exactly the opposite -- management is mostly clueless, and deeply unselfaware
Social status is valuable but it also ain't what it used to be, at least on the one definitely-real scorecard that we can actually measure. High status males used to have wildly higher rates of reproductive success than any other part of society but in modernity CEOs only have moderately more children.
No harems anymore though. Also no <whatever happened in the Yamnaya expansion>
Well. They are not called harems. https://www.eonline.com/news/422957/leonardo-dicaprio-surrounded-by-hot-women-on-yacht-in-cannes-see-the-pic
That's not a harem. Genghis Khan didn't end up being the ancestor of 0.5%* of all current humans by standing near attractive women.
*Might be Genghis Khan and his close male relatives
Surely this historical disparity has a lot more to do with condoms than actual amounts of sexual activity though.
Probably, but then sociopaths falling into the same short-term hedonic trap as losers and clueless is pretty funny.
Second reply: on reflection this doesn't actually explain it, though. Historically high status men put a lot of time and energy into mate-guarding. The phenomenon of high-status men having lots of sex with women that they aren't monopolizing is still very weird.
There are two strategies for an amoral man with resources seeking to maximise #(surviving offspring):
1) Impregnate n women and help feed them and their children;
2) Impregnate m women, where m > n, and leave them barefoot and pregnant.
Strategy 1 was dominant for most of history due to poor transportation imposing practical limits on m and Malthusian conditions meaning that many of the unacknowledged bastards in strategy 2 would die. But now we have lots of food, social security ensuring that single mothers get access to that food, and fast cars, so strategy 2 is clearly dominant.
Mate-guarding is worthwhile in strategy 1 due to the high paternal investment that can potentially allow for brood parasitism, but in strategy 2 there is no point. It doesn't *matter* whether a woman who has a CEO's kid has somebody else's kid later, as long as she keeps feeding the CEO's kid as well and as long as the CEO isn't paying for the somebody-else's kid.
(This is not an endorsement of being a deadbeat dad, just some game theory.)
It's a decent stab at the hypothetical equilibrium, but the observed equilibrium is that the high-status CEOs are only going after women who are of medium to high status and thus able to consistently use birth control and/or abortion. The players in the game who are successfully using strategy 2 to have reproductive success are mostly not in formal employment and are instead the most successful of a criminal parallel-status subculture.
2b: Run a fertility clinic. I'm surprised that one happens. It's almost as though there are a few men who want descendants without caring that much about sex or power.
This does have the advantage of being reasonably sure that the mothers will have adequate resources.
"Historically high status men put a lot of time and energy into mate-guarding."
Because harems weren't about "oh, she's hot, I'll have her", they were as much or more about political alliances, tribute sent by subjugated/allied kingdoms, trophies of war, and traditional mores.
The real action in harems was the competition amongst the women to be the mother of the next emperor/khan/sultan, because that was where the power lay; first, become the favourite, second, have your son recognised as heir apparent, third, make sure he survives to take the throne, fourth, wield power as mother of the sultan (and sometimes that will bring you into conflict with the new favourite wife/concubine).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Women
"The phenomenon of high-status men having lots of sex with women that they aren't monopolizing is still very weird."
Because the current high-status men are not interested in begetting heirs to succeed to whatever they have; what position does Leonardo diCaprio have for a son to inherit? 'Being an A-list movie star' is not a heritable role. Having a choice of attractive women who want to sleep with you in exchange for fame/money means that you don't need to maintain a harem of your own, while still getting the kudos for being able to have a lot of attractive women making themselves sexually available to you. If you really want to establish a family, you can pick one out to be your wife, and if you want to move on after a while, you can divorce her and have a new trophy wife.
The children of movie stars have a better chance of becoming movie stars than people in general do, but I don't know whether it's enough better to set off similar dynamics.
I would imagine CEOs and other high status people have vastly easier access to sex. And for better or worse, evolution hasn't given humans much of a direct drive to pro-create, but instead opted to make sex (and status) attractive.
Still doesn't fully explain it. The amount of effort required to maintain a well-guarded harem is higher than the effort to maintain a harem that isn't well-guarded, but high-status men in the past who maintained harems almost exclusively maintained well-guarded harems despite the guarding being worth zero or negative marginal sex.
It starts to get a bit circular, but I think the reason they put the effort into guarding those harems was that a khan who didn't guard his harem would be at risk of losing status and thus being killed, so a society that gives status to male reproductive success produces different behaviors than a society that gives status to male sexual success, and modern society is the latter and not the former.
Except there's the example of the Cohens, who actually do appear to be descendants of some one particular male from a very long time ago. They were very high status (descendants of Aaron in direct male line) in the Jewish subculture (at least in Europe), but weren't wealthy enough to have harems or guard their wives against infidelity. The explanation that I heard was that the wives who strayed only wanted to stray with higher status males, and all the higher status males to any Cohen (in that subculture) would also be Cohens.
I would argue that what the Sociopath gets is *freedom*. As a Loser, you are confined to doing what your bosses and social peers want you to do. As a Clueless, you are confined to performing the object-level tasks that the CEO wants you to perform. But a Sociopath can do virtually anything he wants. If he wants social status, he can get it; if he wants to build a spaceship, he can build it -- or rather, he can manipulate society to get it built for him. A Clueless or a Loser can both be happy in their lives, but only the Sociopath gets to choose the life that he leads.
Au contraire. There is no more controlled person than the CEO. I was sitting in a bar, and a CEO now billionaire sat down next to me. A CEO can't even talk with some fool in a bar without risking trouble. Now you and I can sit in a bar and tell all manner of lies, and no one cares.
A high tech CEO can't tell his wife he's flying to Austin, because she might tell her hairdresser, or some friends, and stocks might get traded on this "insider info" and that my friend is insider trading, and people go to prison for it.
All of the forbidden acts you've listed involve status games and social approval. A Sociopath would not want to participate in such things anyway, unless they were instrumental goals in service of his grand design. The CEO does not go to the bar to relax -- he goes to his yacht.
> A CEO can't even talk with some fool in a bar without risking trouble.
Elon Musk does anyway, and gets away with it. That's what makes him king of the sociopaths.
Trump was perhaps even better at breaking many socially accepted rules, and mostly getting away with it.
Elon Musk is the "new money" class of clueless, frolicking before getting corporate raided (again), whilst the "old money" class is always silent. See also: Michael O Church's classification of US Presidents. Raegan is a Loser (deregulate harder?), Nixon is Clueless (EPA is the new communism), Kennedy has a long bloodline and is a slayin' "Sociopath"
Reagan didn't do much deregulation. His administration just did more than his immediate predecessors. But that was en vogue all over the western world. Not sure how much you want to blame the personality of one man for a worldwide fashion?
I think your example CEO would still map to "Clueless". By my read, I think the motivations for the sociopath are some combination of 1) get their physical needs met while exerting as little effort as possible and 2) get some chuckles along the way by making other people jump through hoops
Yes. Elon Musk is a sociopath, and your average CEO is just an unfortunate clueless person who accidentally made it too far.
Doesn't Elon Musk famously work extremely long hours and spends very little money on personal luxuries? He doesn't seem like someone who is trying to "get their physical needs met while exerting as little effort as possible." The people I know who are like that do seem like sociopaths, but they're not CEOs. They're mooches and manipulators who find people they can take advantage of and live parasitically off them for as long as they can before the person wises up and cuts them out of their life.
Yeah. If you want to maximize rewards and minimize costs, find a reasonably-conscientious member of the opposite sex who is financially secure, butter them up with every nice sweet word in the book, then get married/have kids and you're probably set for life as long as you don't do anything completely stupid. Being a CEO is a loooot more work than just making sure your spouse doesn't leave you.
Even for an attractive woman doing this, there are limits on how little effort you can put in before you get dumped/divorced.
Still generally less work than being a CEO, though.
>Even for an attractive woman doing this, there are limits on how little effort you can put in before you get dumped/divorced.
You are overestimating the population as a whole. I don't have to get married to the average person - in fact, I'd rather get married to someone in the bottom few percentiles, in terms of likelihood to divorce/dump me. There are a lot of people for whom "dump him, girl" is not going to be something they consider valid without some clear reason, and even a modicum of effort can keep you out of that area.
> Doesn't Elon Musk famously work extremely long hours
Given his social media activity, I doubt. Maybe in the past. Also, what counts as work for someone like him?
> spends very little money on personal luxuries?
Well, it might be preferences. From my perspective, loads of money don't really buy much (besides freedom from having to earn more). If I was a billionaire I expect I'd spend the time in pretty much the same way as I do now.
You can't really get a meaningfully faster personal computer past a very low ceiling. You can blow money on yachts or multiple houses or whatever - but I don't see the appeal.
Wealth is spread exponentially, but utility of additional dollars for personal stuff goes up logarithmically.
>Well, it might be preferences.
I think this is exactly the point of contention. If I have got his public persona correctly, Musk has a vision of electric cars, conquering Mars and maybe better way to moderate Twitter. They are a set of preferences.
On the other hand, so are "keep with the Joneses", whether Joneses are suburban accountants or multibillionaires you meet at Davos and "do the Right Thing, as codified by legible legitimate authorities" (you may insert either "human rights and equality experts" or "principle of free speech" as legible legitimate authority for your preferred Twitter moderation policy). Both would make you Clueless. Or "be the Wonder Human Being in your mental peer group" sounds totally possible life-path to billionaires, too (which would make you Loser).
Does it make him less of a Clueless if he is driven to work long days (and has a more high-profile job) to feed more unconventional inner demons resulting from different upbringing and life experience than your regular workaholic has?
IIUC, he doesn't spend that little money on personal luxuries, he's just got a non-standard idea of what luxuries are. Taking your own personal jet on a trip isn't not spending some money on personal luxuries, even if the trip is for business purposes.
I always thought Elon is very concerned about whether others like him. A random private citizen criticized his submarine, and it ended up becoming this ridiculous melodrama involving libel cases and pedophilia accusations. It didn't seem like the reaction of a reality-oriented individual.
Isn't being very concerned about whether other people like you the opposite of the Sociopath category that Rao puts forward? That's Clueless behavior.
Yeah, a nerd king CEO like Elon is clearly a Clueless in this taxonomy.
Maybe it's not that he's very concerned with getting people to like him, it's that he doesn't want people to dislike him publicly.
Because sociopaths *don't* promote sociopaths. Why would they?
Because there is no challenge or thrill in being the only Sociopath at the head of a company of Clueless and Losers. It's like an adult playing in the ball pit. Irrespective of their social or financial success, Sociopaths thrive on the status games that are played with real stakes, and where failure has real consequences, as opposed to the status games Losers play where the only stakes are the estimation of your peer group.
Whereas if you promote an obvious sociopath, you can enjoy the thrill of being backstabbed by them.
Not necessarily. Remember how the middle management structure is designed to award credit upwards and shift blame downwards? It's always more difficult to backstab the guy above you than the guy below you.
All the sociopaths just got promoted by magic, right? If sociopaths are at the top of the ladder, by definition they have to promote others for those others to get to the top of the ladder.
Sociopaths get promoted by pretending to be clueless --- hardworking loyal henchmen. What's more sociopathic than pretending to be something you're not for personal gain?
Assuming for the sake of argument that "sociopaths run the company" this seems by far to be the most accurate theory for how they get promoted.
"Sociopaths are just so cool that all they want is the company of other cool sociopaths, because the plebes bore them" sounds more like edgelord-ism designed to appeal to failed self-identified sociopaths from the internet. It makes no sense as a working theory of how organizations operate.
Even assuming "a sociopath in charge," that sociopath doesn't want competition, they want to surround themselves with a mix of: (a) a majority of yes-men/loyalists who will help keep their position secure, and (b) some number of competent or connected individuals who can keep the organization on track and growing.
And it's a lot of hard work to compete for the handful of (b) opportunities, but any aspiring sociopath can pretend to be (a), which helps them climb the ladder.
I see it as sociopaths optimizing for personal gain, while the clueless optimize for group gain and then hope the rising tide lifts their boat with everyone else's. What this ends up meaning is that it can be more personally beneficial for a sociopath to work with other sociopaths to boost the sociopaths up than it is to work with only clueless people to boost everyone.
Imagine you are on the board of a corporation, and the board is making a decision between something that benefits the board members in the short term versus the investors in the long term. A sociopath board member will vote for the one that benefits the board, a clueless person will vote for the one that benefits the investors. A sociopath wants the board filled with other sociopaths.
No, not at all.
In some sense *every type* optimizes for personal gain; they all just use different (or no) measures.
Losers play the popularity contest; the loser board member votes whichever way the they think the group will go.
Cluelackers play meritocracy; the clueless board member votes based on whatever yardstick of principles/values they’ve selected. Most of the time that’ll be “whatever’s best for the shareholders” (scare quotes fully in effect), so that they can feel good about themselves regardless of the actual outcome or how well/badly they understand “shareholder interests.”
(I mean, c’mon - shareholders aren’t some borg-like homogeneous bloc anyway. The point is the simulation of objectivity, to placate one’s ego that they aren’t just voting with the sheep.)
Sociopaths play a game unique to them, with whatever means they have, to accomplish whatever they decide the next best move is. There is no endgame, there is only “more/better.”
So a sociopath board member may be trying to set the company up for a hostile takeover they’re secretly negotiating on the sly, while also, in turns, working all the other board members into a false consensus by the right combination of ego-stroking, gaslighting, shade-throwing, subtlety, rumor, masked behind an overall aura of earnest concern that is a complete facade, so that they implicitly have the subconscious trust of the room and can thus tip the scale just so, letting the dominoes tumble exactly as planned.
Or, maybe yes they perceive that the rest of the board are also sociopathic, or want them to be, to prove to themselves that they are *even better* at the political machinations game than any of these dilettantes, so they can gloat in the glorious destruction of their “peers.” If that’s what’ll currently get their rocks off.
If you want to understand how the sociopath game works, watch umpteen seasons of Survivor, then ask yourself “ok, so the obvious, perfectly rational metastrategy for winning, that all the winners followed, is... what exactly?”
I think your definition of sociopath is different than how the author is using the word, because that directly contradicts what the author says in "the gervais principle" (the actual distilled principle) itself:
"Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves."
As for "why would they" - because they know that they need to cooperate with other sociopaths in order to get anything done.
I think this is where the typology fails. It elevates the "sociopaths" to their own sphere and driven only by the stereotype of evil overlord. Did the author ever ponder what happens on the C-suite level where there should be quite many people who are good at the sociopath level "heads I win, tails you lose" games and they interact quite a lot with each other?
I find it more likely that the social world of "sociopaths" who compete (or collaborate) with other similarly "high level" players would feel recognizably similar to how "losers" experience their social games, only the stakes are more ambitious and being successful demands higher level of perception and gumption.
(Remember it is the Ribbonfarm definition of "sociopath", not the clinical definition.)
This is almost exactly what Rao describes in the book: Sociopaths play the same status games as Losers but with actual stakes, namely their professional reputation and position in the company. Losers are stuck at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy (by choice) and have nothing to lose; the only stakes they have are the estimation of their peers, and they gain from leaving their relative status ambiguous. As a result, Loser status games never really change anything, but Sociopath status games could lead to a change in the CEO of the company, getting or losing a multimillion dollar bonus, or one of your peers ratting you out for large-scale fraud. It's something that this review hasn't really touched on at all.
But then the Sociopaths themselves are psychologically indistinguishable from the Losers. By this logic, if you take a Loser and randomly give him some very high-level position of authority, he'll behave the exact same way as a Sociopath does. For this categorization system to actually mean anything, the Sociopaths would have to have different goals entirely.
Critically, the shift from loser to sociopath seems all about willingness to gamble. Up or out pressure, as Rao puts it.
Why do you think that a man who spends his life working on important long-term projects to improve our lives is a sociopath? This sounds like knee-jerk slander to me.
As people have said multiple times in this thread, we’re using the book’s version of the term sociopath, not the usual definition. I’m just saying that Musk is shooting for big goals and is mostly unconcerned with being graded by an establishment rubric (clueless) or being well liked and fitting in (loser). No particular negative conclusion intended, although Musk certainly has his flaws.
Oh, right. Though I think it's difficult for people outside someone's social circle or peer group to know whether he wants to fit in and be well-liked. Maybe he wants to be well-liked by tech billionaires or scientists. I'd also guess that tweeting is more-correlated with wanting to be liked than with wanting to manipulate people. OTOH Don Trump likes to tweet, too, and I don't think he cares about being liked.
It all gets complicated fast. The archetypes are interesting but don't particularly map to real people. I would guess Trump definitely wants to be liked by people he considers high status or supporters and also enjoys being disliked by his enemies.
1.) It Would produce very different people, I think. If you don't care about the fake reality of status games or other people and want low effort physical needs satisfaction, that should look like FIRE or savvy homelessness, maybe.
Bad phrasing on my part - should have been something more like "material wants" instead of "physical needs".
If you are really good at getting what you need out of a company with small amounts of effort, why would you want to retire early?
Silly example: coasting along as a Google employee with free food and laundry service might be less work for someone who knows enough programming to get started at Google, than to actually do your own cooking (or manage the logistics of getting other people to cook for you).
I think this is an example of the weaknesses of the typology, because the premise that people's positions in society track their places in the typology just isn't borne out in reality. CEOs can be "losers," world leaders can be "clueless," the idea that the people who've actually in charge see through the mask and constructs, I think is really just a cynical flavor of wishful thinking.
Well, one could imagine (and some people do) that some CEOs and world leaders are effectively middle management, so it doesn't necessarily break the model for some of them to be clueless (and maybe losers) if you subscribe to those ideas either in strong or weak form.
More importantly and more generally applicable, a typology doesn't need to be 100% predictively accurate to be true or useful. I haven't thought about it enough to say one way or the other, but that not all types are in their expected roles and vice versa isn't really an argument against the framework*. Especially since he discusses all 3 types can fail to achieve their goals (just because you're a sociopath doesn't mean you're guaranteed to run a company), and that people can change types as well (which would necessitate them being out of place for their type for at least some transitory period of time).
*Not saying that some demonstration of correlation isn't required to support the theory, just that 100% perfect type to role mapping isn't necessary.
I think that's a very important clarification which I didn't click to when reading the article. Thank you
I don't think the sociopath is necessarily supposed to be happier or more enlightened. If anything, like you say the loser could be considered the most enlightened because they've decided the respective grinds of the clueless and the sociopath aren't worth it. I gravitate more to the idea that the sociopath comes up with their own goal, regardless of legibility, the clueless adhere to legible, socially acceptable goals, and the losers care the most about social relationships because they're not doing the other stuff.
You could also argue that part of the structure is that each group considers the others chumps.
Assuming the taxonomy is correct and useful, and then trying to extrapolate wildly from it:
It's quite likely, in fact, that the average Loser is happier than the average Sociopath, since Losers are the closest people in a modern society to a "normal" hunter-gatherer setting with reciprocal social norms and abundant, healthy interaction. Sociopaths scored a real-world-corporate-climbing advantage by nuking several parts of their brain, but those parts of the brain were put there by evolution [or God] and so once they are gone other parts of the brain start sending a disquieting dripfeed of "something is wrong..." signals. This manifests as Sociopaths feeling that "something is missing" and increases the odds that they have extreme mental health crises up to and including suicide when their goals fail (which they can, since Sociopaths are in competition with other Sociopaths). By contrast, Losers as normal humans have a good embedding in a complex web of social interactions.
This might be a stretch, but one could even hypothesize that the rise of mental health problems in the modern day could be partially explained by the increasing complexity of the modern world and ubiquity of gamified digital interaction having a tendency to convert healthy Losers into Clueless.
This is some AndreasHofer72 speculation, bruv, but I LIKE IT. (/s)
> This manifests as Sociopaths feeling that "something is missing" and increases the odds that they have extreme mental health crises up to and including suicide when their goals fail (which they can, since Sociopaths are in competition with other Sociopaths).
My idea, is that Sociopaths has neither affective empathy or agreeableness (ability to love), Clueless has neither cognitive empathy nor openness to new ideas (understanding of others), and Losers have neither impersonality nor extraversion (content at getting played). Thus Sociopath wants true love, and Clueless wants to be understood and cared for.
Sociopath tin man, clueless scarecrow, loser lion ...
How do they correspond to the "sociopath exiting the system" or "clueless barbell strategy" (risky bets mixed with hyper-security, instead of middle of the road)?
> But I honestly don't see what Sociopaths get out of it, unless they do are deluding themselves.
My guess is money and/or power. If all there is is material reality, then earning 10 times more as the Clueless/Losers gives you more leverage in that material reality.
Ah but that's the misframing at the heart of this whole "dark triad"/"sociopath CEO" genre. The sociopath doesn't usually get money and/or power. There are many, many more sociopaths than there are CEOs.
So even taking this taxonomy at face value and assuming that sociopaths are overrepresented in the high status money & power class, most sociopaths are just sociopaths and also unsuccessful - one might even posit that "unsuccessful sociopaths" are the key market for books like this to exist since they revolve around telling unsuccessful sociopaths that their perspective is unique and special and just like the mindset of powerful people.
bingo
Power more than money. Power over personal life of others, to be more explicit. It's the motivation for many CEO or higher management, from what i have observed. Not in my own company, because being part of it makes analysis harder, but looking at my family, especially my father. He was a small scale CEO while there is no chance I become one except by accident... We are are similar physically and mentally: Same amount of laziness, I'm more clever logically (iq) but he's a better actor/orator...i am more psychopathic in the sense i am less sensitive to other jugement and suffering, and more interrested in material goods (and probably sex), but the biggest difference, i think bigger than the academic achievements and technical orientation (which outsiders will immediately mention when comparing my father and me) , is that he was interested in "ruling" much much more than i am. Maintaining formal and informal hierarchical, patron/client relations...
Also far more generous than i am, but analyzing this as objectively as i can, i think it's part of this ruling tendency (automatic and unconscious, i don't think he consciously calculated this as manipulation). Ruling was really a big part of his ultimate goals, while it's not my case (nor is it for my brother): money (material well being and security), sex, status within peers, and freedom (minimize being ruled) yes, but not ruling... Maybe that's indeed arrested development: We (brother and i) stopped at adolescent (band of friends, without unambiguous hierarchy, each having it's expertise/roles), while father went to traditional pater familia, head of family / chief of tribe...
Maybe it's an artifact of typical father/son relation, and i see patterns where none exists, but i don't think so...
Part of why you're you and not your dad, is because you're his son. By this I mean, his CEO role is filling a niche in his life, but also filling the same niche in yours. If he were not filling that niche in your live, you'd feel compelled to fill that vacancy.
About using others ... I don't mean it in a negative way, I don't think you do either. But he is probably more the team captain than the meaning of the term sociopath provides. The team captain needs to define who plays first base, etc. define roles and responsibilities. I liken it to walking in the desert vs riding a horse. When you're walking, you have to watch for every step so that you don't fall on a cactus. When riding a horse, you point the horse in the general direction, and you can look at the scenery, whilst the horse takes care of where to step. I'm sure his company is the same way. People try to do the right thing, but don't know the right thing (their roles), because they don't see the big picture. Someone has to make sure all the roles get filled. And that leader needs to do things that make the workers happy, even sometimes tricking them into doing things that make themselves happy.
But also, you have to realize that without him, they're nothing. The workers probably love the company just as much as, if not more so than your dad. The reason, is the company may be part of his life ... but for many of the workers, its their all. For instance, if (ala Schitz Creek) the company failed today, your dad would be devastated ... but how much so compared to the mid-level manager who has 100% of his portfolio in the company stock? Dad probably has good investment management, and has his investments spread around. He may have to downsize the family house in a financial disaster ... but for a lot of the little people. The vast majority live paycheck to paycheck, they're unlikely to have financial backup, and downsizing for them means moving from the house into a car.
I myself am Clueless at best. I tend to work overtime just because I want to see the job done right, for no additional material reward. I've tried working 9..5, but couldn't really do it -- I could rarely find a better use for my time than fixing some broken code. People like me make useful pawns for the CEOs of this world; I have never had wealth or power, and I never will. Objectively speaking, I've chosen the wrong path in life, but then again, it never felt like a choice to me. I suspect that the predilection for Cluelessness is largely genetic. You rolls your dice, you takes your chances...
"I Became an Ubermensch and all I Got Was This Lousy Empire"
Its possible that some of the 'Sociopaths' realized that all they needed to enjoy life was dental and a decent salary. Maybe they walk among us, as unfirable mid level employees that collect a paycheck while browsing Reddit all day.
This is why I would argue he picked the wrong terms. “Losers” can be happy and fulfilled, they are just “economic losers” in a capitalist world because they don’t leverage other peoples work for their own benefit.
My impression is that the Sociopath has very different motivations than the Loser. You might be happy with your 9-5 of minimum effort for the sake of a paycheck so you can go out and get drunk on Friday's and vacation in Italy for a few weeks per year, but the Sociopath doesn't care about any of that, because he craves power instead. It's Rao's explanation for why middle managers are, more often than not, terrible at their job and only good for yelling at people and making them miserable. This is because they're Sociopaths and yelling at people and making them miserable makes them feel powerful. They got to this position because a Sociopath higher up the ladder recognized them as fellow Sociopaths, and gave them their wish in exchange for being able to exert power over them in turn. And so most Sociopaths make the devil's bargain of having total power to abuse their underlings if they are willing to endure their superior's abuse in turn.
It's been a while since I read The Gervais Principle but that's what I took away from it. I certainly don't recognize this in real life myself, but then I don't have a conventional office job, and it's certainly a better explanation for why everyone hates their boss than any other I've seen.
"It's Rao's explanation for why middle managers are, more often than not, terrible at their job and only good for yelling at people and making them miserable. This is because they're Sociopaths and yelling at people and making them miserable makes them feel powerful. They got to this position because a Sociopath higher up the ladder recognized them as fellow Sociopaths, and gave them their wish in exchange for being able to exert power over them in turn."
Not really. In Rao's formulation, most middle-managers are Clueless.
Hmm, you're right, I remember getting that from the book but it might not be in there at all. Maybe I'm mis-attributing that idea to him.
I think the "sociopath" (NB: not a literal sociopath) gets to have goals that they try and achieve in ways that are actually effective.
Consider lay-offs. The "losers" (NB: not actual losers) act to reassert status illegibility by reassuring themselves that the job never defined them anyway, and by cutting contact with anyone who's hit hard by it. The "clueless" (NB: not always clueless) go through a personal crisis, if they even get fired in the first place, because they were true believers in the company. The sociopaths saw it coming months ahead because they ignored the CEOs bullshit emails, and either shuffled themselves and their favourites into safe positions, or had been interviewing for weeks and have a new job lined up.
Again, they don't seem to be literal sociopaths. I get the impression you could replace the terminology with something like "9to5ers," "believers," and "cynics." I also don't think it's clear that sociopaths are better than the other two, although Venkatesh Rao seemingly does.
Rao Venkatesh would agree with you. I vividly remember the last passage in the Sociopath chapters talking about the sheer emptiness of reaching the last level. It was not a happy place. I guess we're not made to live completely without masks.
He was also pretty emphatic (which the review doesn't mention and probably should) that Losers are the winners in this game. They go to work, put their 8 hours, then spend their live actually living. Family, friends, hobbies.
Also speaking of categories-that-do-not-really-match, meaning psychology talks about treating your work as one of job, career and calling. First is for the paycheck, second is for advancement, third is for passion. They may or may not match with Loser, Sociopath and Clueless, respectively.
Yes. Absolutely agree. The major thing I didn’t like about the book was what I considered to be a poor choice of terms as the term “loser” needlessly slants the meaning.
This is what I'm wondering too. A Sociopath who truly didn't care what others thought about him is far more likely to be a recluse than a leader. If the opinions of other people are absolutely meaningless to them, why bother interacting with them at all? Why care about power or influence or status at all, or even about money beyond the relatively low amount required for them to live comfortably? If the Sociopaths are really supposed to be entirely asocial, you'd expect them to just stay home all day getting drunk/high and watching TV or playing video games, and maybe visit a prostitute whenever porn wasn't enough. (Which ironically fits the stereotypical image of a loser far more than the Losers category does.)
Of course, it could be possible that the Sociopath's nihilism is so all-encompassing that a lifestyle of idle hedonism wouldn't have any appeal either. Maybe they'd realize that wanting lots of sex and drugs and good-tasting food is just a result of evolutionary drives adapted for a vastly different environment than the one they're living in, and thus ultimately pointless like everything else. But at that point, I'd expect them to become even more withdrawn, not less. They wouldn't have any reason to do *anything* beyond the absolute barest necessities of survival like eating, drinking water, and using the bathroom. They'd end up being one of those half-catatonic psych ward patients that just sit in a dark room doing nothing all day.
It's a surprisingly common trope that top business[1] leaders are sociopaths, but so far as I can tell, and I know one or two, this is garbage. Top business leaders are almost always magnetic personalities with an outsize ability to both inspire and empathize with people. They pretty much have to be -- there's no other way to get a very large number of people to enthusiastically devote themselves to your vision, and, unlike politics or the military, in business it is very rare that you have any great ability to command notwithstanding any lack of buy-in from the rank and file. Generally, persuasion and inspiration are the only ways to get your will implemented, and very successful leaders are eerily good at doing both, at least from what I've seen.
Of course, portraying CEOs a sociopaths would naturally be very comforting to the Clueless who have glumly come to suspect they're *not* headed for the corner office, that their climbing has a natural limit well below their ambitions, and are wondering what's gone wrong. "It's because I'm not a sociopath! Oh, OK, that's not so bad...!" Good way to sell business books, eh? Since your fat market segment is naturally among The Clueless, those who can smugly derive additional confidence that they are neither Losers nor Sociopaths. Ka-ching!
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[1] I emphasize 'business' because political leaders usually are sociopaths, I think, since unlike business leaders (who traffic in the achievable of necessity), political leaders necessarily sell lies, indeed things that we all know very well are lies -- that all the children can be above average, that nobody can be poor, that each and every citizen is a noble soul and evil exists in the world solely because of foreign devils, a sprinkling of deviants, or shadowy conspiracies -- and, unlike normal people, they have to have the ability to lie without the slightest compunction.
> Top business leaders are almost always magnetic personalities with an outsize ability to both inspire and empathize with people.
This "job description" is not mutually exclusive with sociopathy; quite the opposite. High-functioning sociopaths are known for being charming and "magnetic", precisely because they are able to approach charisma in a purely detached and rational manner. To them, humans are a complex instrument with a quirky UI that can nevertheless be quite powerful if used correctly -- like Blender, perhaps, or a modern combine harvester.
Yes, I agree the first part -- being magnetic and charming -- is fully consistent with sociopathy. But not the second (empathy). And really good leaders have to have that, because they need to understand the emotional state of those who work for them -- if for no other reason than to know how far they can count on them, and in what direction.
I grant there are some limited areas where sociopaths can be outstanding, but I think they are mostly sole proprietorship kind of things, like being a surgeon or tech evangelist, where the "magnetic" thing comes in very hand for excellent PR and interactions with the public *but* the lack of empathy, which would cripple the ability to lead a large organization, doesn't hold you back.
I've known some business leaders that seemed to be quite good at empathy, but upon more extensive review, I think they were faking the empathy. You can't fake real empathy, but you sure can fake the external signs of empathy.
I overheard the owner of a company that was well known for empathy laughing about cutting more employees than we needed to during a downturn. He was very careful not to do so when I was there, but didn't realize I could still hear. I am aware of lots of signs that he had true empathy, but each and every one of them could easily have been crafted to portray empathy instead of naturally shining through. It didn't help that a lot of the stories emphasizing his empathy came from him or his family members.
It's not that business executives are especially likely to be sociopaths (the vast majority aren't), it's that high-functioning sociopaths are especially likely to be business executives, at least according to a study that was done a few years back. The same study showed that high-functioning sociopaths were also likely to become surgeons and chefs, so people whose takeaway is "being an executive is an evil job suited for evil people" are drawing the wrong conclusion entirely. It's more "these are the few high-status jobs where it's even possible for a high-functioning sociopath to be successful at all, because they don't require a lot of affective empathy" rather than "these are the jobs where sociopaths excel over non-sociopaths because their callousness gives them an edge."
That said, Rao's definition of Sociopath is so far from the actual clinical definition (and even mutually exclusive with it to a degree) that talking about real sociopaths is entirely off-topic here. Real sociopaths would ironically fit best in the Clueless category if they were high-functioning (not because they're naive idealists, but simply because they're more inclined to focus on the work itself rather than status games), and wouldn't fit in any category if they were low-functioning (since they'd likely be unemployed or doing some job that doesn't involve social interaction at all).
Well the reverse correlation is useless for prediction, given the low percentage of genuine sociopathy.
Anyway, I like the parsimony of my explanation for the confusion: if I'm writing a book and want to make millions, I need to appeal to the secret desires of my readers that need sophisticated rationalization. So if I want to make a lot of money writing a book about weight loss, I'm going to write about how it's all totally not your (the fat person's) fault, but rather society's, or your genes, or the food industry's, et cetera, and also that you can lose weight in some easy-peasy way that is (1) totally unlike anything you've tried before, (2) definitely not as simple and painful as eating less and working out m ore, and possibly (3) being suppressed by a shadowy conspiracy of people whose ill-gotten gains depend on keeping you a fatty. Success!
And if I write a management book[1], I'm going to say you totally deserve to be a CEO with a private jet, because you're smart as heck and people like you, and the only reason you're having a hard time with it is (1) the people above you are sick rat bastards, and (2a) they will keep you down or (2b) you don't want to be like them anyway. I'm certainly *not* going to write that becoming one of the handful of people who lead gigantic firms is, like winning Olympic gold, some complex function of extraordinary native talent, intense training, and luck. That will send my book to the 5 for $5! table at the bookstore in no time.
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[1] A subgenre difficult to distinguish, philosophically, from MILF pr0n.
I don't think the author would disagree with this - he uses "sociopath" outside of the common usage of the word. For example, neither David Wallace nor Robert California are "sociopaths" as the word is commonly used. Both of them show empathy and normal human emotion at varying times. What separates them from the "loser"/"clueless" categories mostly comes down to their motivations and to their wilingness/ability to exercise agency
It's my experience that people make arch or sly use of a word idiosyncratically because they want to borrow a little of the connotation surrounding the common use while being able to plausibly deny that they meant that AT ALL. Feels pretty dishonest to me.
I think it's a cleverly-devised schema that only works because Venkatesh Rao is a good writer, not because it's accurate. I used to have more faith in his structure, but I tried using it for explanatory power with other people and found that the mappings just aren't very clean.
> But I honestly don't see what Sociopaths get out of it, unless they do are deluding themselves.
That’s just it - they’ve gone beyond any “means to an end” / “instrumental vs terminal goals” reasoning. They’ve concluded, or rather, feel they’ve been awakened to the reality that, structured philosophy like that is all pretend; meaningless. That’s the nihilism part.
So they do it because, what the hell - might as well have fun using as much of your own influence, manipulation, power, etc to go as far as you can. Pull off whatever insane stunt gooses your endocrine responses. Fuck around with it all, because you can, and wrap yourself in as many layers of seeming-eusociality as you can as just one more expression of how completely you’ve pwned reality and the rubes around you.
“Be your best self” takes on the dark meaning of “ruthlessly become.”
This book has had more influence on me than any I've ever read to do with businesses, companies and management. Maybe it pops more if you've spent time in offices, to mean generic gray office parks and supposedly wacky startup offices? It's extremely applicable to my experience working in advertising and marketing departments at small and midsize companies. I think these Rao-ian power dynamics are most visible in such organizations.
Having worked in startups, medium size businesses and large enterprises, I can say I've seen a lot more of the psychopathic behavior among the startup founders than the C*Os of larger outfits. Or maybe those embedded in the Fortune 500s are just better at concealing it!
Or maybe Fortune 500s are more stable, so less need for all kinds of crazy tactics to stay ahead, compared to the chaos in a start up.
According to Rao this is normal in a startup. Most people at that stage are committed and are high performing. The sortation does not occur until maturity. Think Jobs staying CEO while Woz gets sidelined.
Maybe I haven't worked in a company of the right size and temperament, but I've never really seen Dilbert-esque office politics in the wild. I imagine you need a company with enough layers of management that "climbing the ladder" becomes a going concern.
I've read that software development used to be really vulnerable to the Peter Principle (because programmers are famous for not having people skills so putting a programmer into management would end disastrously), in recent years it's become common for software development to have a split career ladder - you can go into management if you have the people skills for it, or you can just become a more and more senior software developer working on more and more complicated projects. I wonder if this model only makes sense in certain types of hierarchical environments.
That’s a good insight. I think you’re right that it needs to be an organization with a fat enough layer of middle management to let these dynamics play out. Then you can see the losers and sociopaths clearly in context.
(I have only read the review, not the book)
The most significant and counterintuitive claim seemed to me that
1. top management people performed below average when they were lower-ranked
and
2. now that they are top management, they help (some) other people who perform below average ascend to top management, preferring them to people who perform average or above average
Does that match your experience?
This wasn't a very accurate description of the book. Let's take somebody in an entry level job, on a project designed to end in 8 months. A bad or lazy worker will just do badly and get fired at the end. A Loser will do is share of the work and move on to the next project. A Clueless will put lots of effort and in a year will be Team Leader, with lots of extra work and basically the same pay.
The Sociopath on the other hand will spend most of his time to learn the structure of the company, the power lines, the important people and any possible way to get ahead. He doesn't ignore his actual work because he's lazy, but because he's simply to busy doing the actual important stuff (from his point of view). He'll deliver stellar work - but only when the bosses boss is around.
His Team Leader will dislike him, because the Team Leader a clueless. But one (or two, or thee) levels of management further above, somebody will recognize him as somebody who can play the game at a higher level. At the very least, he'll be recognized as somebody who's socially adept and can tell the difference between strategy and tactics. So he'll be put on a fast track and skip the boring and dead end middle management positions - because he'd be wasted there.
Critically, that has to happen around the 6 months mark, because by month 8 his project will be a failure and he has to start from scratch at a different company. This kind of stone-stepping is characteristic for a Sociopath's career. It's also eerily similar to most politician's careers as well.
Okay, but assuming this entire categorization isn't complete bunk, and sociopath managers can recognize other potential sociopaths... what incentives would they have to put them on a fast track to high positions? Surely every sociopath would want to be the only one who "can play the game at a higher level", and would want to be surrounded with clueless people who work hard on the stated company objectives and let the sociopath reap the profit?
Why would someone who cares more about office politics and their own career than about company productivity reward potential rivals?
You can maybe argue that a level N sociopath would want level N-1 sociopaths because they're the only guys savvy enough to wrangle the N-2 sociopaths and regular clueless/whatever people... but at that point you're getting back to the null hypothesis of "managers get promoted based on their ability to motivate their teams to do good work".
And of course, the prior is still on "this entire classification is bunk because all management book classifications are bunk".
They don't recognize them as sociopaths, they recognize them as competent people, or more precisely competent at upper management.
If you need a departmental or branch head, you don't want somebody who works 9-5 and only cares about his after work life. You also don't want a clueless, because the clueless aren't independent enough - they live to play the game as it's presented to them (aka become the employee of the month). And since large organizations need a constant supply of upper management, it's reasonable to take such people and groom them early.
In this respect I think the categories really do offer some value. At least I can easily recognize extreme losers (happy ones) and clueless. Sociopaths are rarer, and by definition less easy to spot.
Zvi also has a series on moral mazes, which is definitely a very good read (tho long).
I'm still extremely skeptical. Your entire class of reasoning would sound about as convincing by replacing "clueless" and "sociopath" with "Hufflepuff" and "Slytherin" or using Myers-Briggs or five humors or classical elements or D&D alignments.
It's super easy to make up thematic classification and to start telling stories about how social dynamics fit into these classes. But I'm not seeing any evidence they have any predicting power, or that they're any better than some other classification set I could make up in 5 minutes.
("Really, what organizations want is to have Lawful Good people at the bottom, Lawful Evil people in Management, True Neutral in accounting, and Chaotic Evil in executive positions!")
Yes!
Some categories are valuable for their predictive power (you go to a doctor when you're sick, not an engineer). But some just help you make sense of the world. They just serve as quick heuristics, or help focus your attention when something is blatantly out of category. After that, you use better mental tools to sort things out.
You’ve sort of got it.
A sociopath wouldn’t want to invite anyone they perceived as an actual threat (regardless of type) into a position where they could get backstabbed or blindsided. That’d be stupid.
They would also however not want to keep such a person at a distance, where they might lose visibility on them, the other person could use the shadows to strike from, etc.
What to do?
Well, disarm them with kindness, pull them in, convince them you’re no threat to them and in fact you see opportunities to divide and conquer together. Lure them with your superior authority (if you’re on the upper hand organizationally) or with your obvious prowess (if you’re lower) and sweet talk them into joining forces. Do it slowly, cautiously, and deliberately because you don’t want to seem too obvious that you’re buttering them up for a devastating and brutal betrayal.
Seriously, watch some Survivor. You’ll get it.
That honestly sounds like a just-so story with very little grounding in actual corporate practices. Again, anything you can explain with this theory can already be explained by the "managers get promoted for being good managers" default with no sociopathy involved.
That’s not what I’m trying to explain.
Please reread the thread that got us here.
You asked the question “ Okay, but assuming this entire categorization isn't complete bunk, and sociopath managers can recognize other potential sociopaths... what incentives would they have to put them on a fast track to high positions?”
So tell me, because I’d rather not waste either of our time, are we proceeding from here with the assumption that the categorization isn’t complete bunk, or not?
Also, watch some Survivor. Seriously.
I feel like I see a lot of these archetypes at the high school I teach at - among the teaching staff, the site administrators, and the school District administrators.
Not the students?
It likely exists but I don’t want to ascribe my interpretations on to what might really be going on between different groups of students. I guess I just personally find it much more interesting (and directly related to my work life) to notice the adult interactions rather than the student ones. Within the confines of my math classroom, I try to teach the students all about the same, though it is clear that they have differing motivations.
Sounds like Rao is desperately trying to come with an (imaginary) structure to justify himself to himself. And sounds fairly obvious, and at most marginally more useful than, say, Myer-Briggs.
Choosing the terms to maximize how cynical the whole thing sounds, rather than to maximize the legibility of the terms, seems to enhance this effect.
My sentiments exactly.
Such cynicism seemed have been the fashion in 2009. That was the era of PUA blogs, Alphas and Betas, red pills and blue pills, mean-spirited End of Men feminism, etc.
I couldn't put my finger on it but I think that's exactly how it resonated with me.
Here's a less cynical reinterpretation of the Gervais principle: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/
Alex Danco did one better, and if you want a red-blue-grey interpretation, try American Manifesto by Christopher chantrill.
Yes, I'm intuitively skeptical of any theory that goes "people are divided into X groups, of which one is clearly smarter and better and by the way can you guess which one I'm in? :D"
The world *might* contain a group of superior people, but I require some evidence (not drawn from fiction!). There something fearfully attractive about categories to humans: if the existence of some categories is asserted, it's easy to slot things into them. For categories usefully to describe the world, we need some evidence that things cluster accordingly.
It is more a description of stratas of social flow. Wage and Wealth vs Personal Prestige vs Positional Power.
I read these blog posts a few years ago, and I agree they do not work as full archetypes. But, I feel like Venkatesh had some good ideas and decided to see what happened if he built it out into a full theory, with moderate success. The Ribbonfarm group blog this was posted on has a lot of interesting content like this, my personal favorite is Wittgenstien's revenge (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2020/09/03/wittgensteins-revenge/) where the author argues that facts don't exist.
I think these 3 categories work better when you realize that they're archetypes within the specific context of Business, which is one social world with it's own rules and structure. In reality, people live within multiple divergent social contexts at the same time, and which archetype they follow depends on the context. For instance, I would consider myself a (well meaning) Sociopath when it comes to topics related to religion/politics, but within Business I definitely act predominantly as a Loser, because I have deliberately turned down advancement of the type discussed and care far more about social approval. People behave dramatically differently within different social contexts and any archetype system that doesn't take that into account is going to be limited in its application
Yeah, I think if you view the archetypes as largely context-dependent, they make more sense. I still think it's way overdetermined, but that's true of any theory like this one.
"Business" seems much too generic to be one social world with its own rules and structure. Isn't it really about a specific type of business context, i.e. the one portrayed in the Office?
"Wittgenstein's Revenge" is just the usual confusion produced when someone notices that the standard rationalist metaphysics of absolute clarity and certainty don't work, yet keeps trying to use words as if they did. "Fact" is an invalid category only if you interpret it from the very mindset that you criticize by saying it's invalid. We still need the word "fact" for propositions that we're very confident of. We just need to stop being overconfident so much.
Having not read the book, how much of this description of Loserdom is meant to coincide to what most consider liberalism broadly defined (a second-best system where everyone can define how they are special in their own way)?
Hahaha, this book was clearly written by a sociopath. The guy simply can't imagine that someone would choose to be empathic towards other people. In his eyes, if someone is empathic, it is because that person trying to win approval or just acting out their social programming. No, dude, the critical voice in my head is not my parents, some teachers, or some spiritual guide. The critical voice in my head is my own. And yet I choose to be empathic towards others because I enjoy it. And I don't crave power over others, because I find it very limiting for my goals and personal happiness.
He does mention this is possible - this is the Gandhi sociopath thing.
So in his classification I would be a sociopath? I thought a sociopath was someone that didn't feel empathy towards others. But it seems like his definition of it is more as someone that is not subject to social pressures. Do you see how such a definition looks like it comes straight from a sociopath? It seems that he can't conceive of empathy as an "internal locus of control" type of attribute.
What exactly does he say about Gandhi? Does he think Gandhi was faking his concern for others as a path to power? Or does he think Gandhi did feel real empathy but it was secondary to his desire to succeed because of some "will to power" drive?
Rao explicitly says that he isn't using "sociopath" in the standard way and that Rao-sociopaths can be motivated by compassion, pity, or charity.
Ok, thanks for the explanation! A lot of the stuff makes more sense now. But I get annoyed when people make up their own definitions for words that are very different from their common usage. "Sociopath" is not the best word to describe the concept he is trying to capture.
Also, as a side effect this now makes it more difficult to talk about actual sociopaths (one of the greatest problems of humankind, in my opinion) with anyone who has read the book.
I strongly prefer either the term "psychopath" or the more clinical ASPD in actually serious cases. "Sociopath" has lost too much of the bite the concept deserves out of overuse, IMO.
If you will yourself to be epic-level empathetic, like, if you’re *striving to be Gandhi or Mother Theresa, every day, as your sole driving focus*, then yes, you’re a sociopath (even if you aren’t literally Gandhi yet).
If you’re just, like, “hey man, I’m my own person, and I care about people, and I’m not just a sheep, I matter!” then you are a total Loser.
Venkatesh's (probable) actual intention behind calling Gandhi a sociopath: Gandhi is commonly thought to be a manipulative and cunning politician, who often subverted nationalist interests in India in order to hog the limelight.
I don't think calling Gandhi a sociopath shows that he understands empathy. Gandhi was really weird, and his actions could be interpreted as selfish, esp. by a sociopath. I've read a lot about Mother Theresa, and she was definitely a sadist and a masochist, but managed to pursue her kind of pleasure in a way that earned her praise. Terms like sociopath, sadist, and saint are socially constructed to have all their properties line up with "good", or all to line up with "bad", which does not respect real human nature; so the inferences we draw about people using those terms are often wrong, notably the inference that someone who is unselfish is good. Many Catholic saints seem to me to have been unselfish sociopaths, sadists, or masochists.
It's interesting that we see these archetypes in The Office, Dilbert, and other work-related media like Office Space ("straight shooter with upper management written all over him" = sociopath). There's definitely something to it.
What might be to it is it's a good, comic story to tell, regardless of its truth value. Executive management often comes off as psychopathic to rank and file corporate workers, so there's a humor bias towards writing them as literal psychopaths. It's similar to the humor bias in a lot of political humor.
Real sociopaths are like tone death clueless ala Andy.
Great review. I'll drop a few comments here:
- First is that Lacan's 3 structures isn't necessarily the correct move here. Most people in business are neurotics, with sociopaths leaning closest to _perverts_, because the pervert understands social reality, but views it as meaningless. Think Patrick Bateman. Psychotics tend not to do well in business at all, because they can neither play the game from the "inside" as with neurotics, or from the "outside" as with perverts. They struggle with social structure's existence, period, and historically end up doing more solitary pursuits (art, revelation, etc: note that Moses needed an Aaron to actually implement his prophetic vision).
- If we wanted to tie in Lacan's theory here, better to deal with the "RSI" layer (Real, Symbolic = the Other, Imaginary), expressed as "registers" or in terms of the Gordian Knot. Unfortunately for everyone, these terms are used almost completely differently for Lacan, especially "Real". What Venkat refers to as "sociopathy" seems to be the dominance of the Imaginary over the Symbolic. Quick background: we haven't really discussed the Symbolic but it is what it says on the tin: "social reality", which is also the same thing as the big Other (because the big Other is a form by which we speak about "social reality").
For Lacan, that whole thing about "quarks and stuff" belongs strictly in the "Imaginary" and *not* the Real (I can hear the protesting, give me a second). The "Imaginary" is called that because it's constituted by *images*, not because it's *fake*. So, a lot of early exposure to, say, Science, is about developing imaginary constructions, and similarly, Venkat's discussion of "the real world" stems from the Imaginary register: the executive who wants to achieve some sort of *vision*, which they imagine and then set out to enact in the world (have you read Arendt's "The Human Condition"? I highly recommend it).
The "Real", for Lacan, is a *rupture*, the Kuhnian Paradigm-collapsing moment that disrupts all our best laid plans, and is always traumatic, the encounter with something that absolutely resists our attempts to symbolize. All trauma stems from an encounter with the Real. What Venkat describes as the path of the sociopath is indeed an encounter with the Real, which smashes through the Symbolic register of one's childhood and forces them to reconstruct their symbolism (= structuration of reality) at a higher level, in this case devaluing social reality (what Lacan might call "the social bond") in service of their Imaginary, or alternatively re-evaluating their desire, which used to respond to gold stars or high-fives because back in grade school, gold stars and high-fives got you what you wanted, but you now need a different approach.
As far as I can tell, what Venkat is ultimately describing is specific way of resolving trauma (by becoming a "sociopath"), which for Freud is merely the formal separation of parts of the psyche. Something happened that you can't process. Now you have a part where you still remember it happening and associate things to it, and a part that can't explain and thus can't accept it. You're split in half. This is all trauma is (and "hysteria" is the short circuit). As Lacan says, the highest ethical aim of psychoanalysis is "never give way to your desire", and learning to play manipulation games at the level of the social field is a great way of doing this, although many might see it as... perverse.
Anyway it all gets tangled up, because Venkat is mixing developmental narratives (ethics) with psychoanalytic theory (formal construction based on a specific set of constraints re empirical observation). I think a better connection is with Fussell's Class", reviewed here ages ago. Do you not see echoes of the "sociopath" in the "barbarians" of the upper class, "clueless" in the "philistines" of the middle class, and "loser" in the "populace" of the lower class? The divide between classes, for both Fussell and Venkat, is not just material but also *social*, in terms of what kind of interpersonal reality they inhabit. And, to me, that's the most interesting part: how does a person become encultured to properly "upper class" socializing? What do they gain and lose along the way? Are we not properly accustomed to seeing the journalist bluechecks as "clueless"? We can inhabit this external space of observation without falling victim to Venkat's analysis, because Venkat is writing about business archetypes, rather than properly *social* ones. Perhaps we're all Class X now?
- A final comment on business, rooted in personal experience: these roles are flexible, and the main question is not *how* you relate but *to whom*. I think Venkat is absolutely correct that the function of management is distribution of blame, which falls from capital holders/investors and clients, to the C-suite external representatives, to C-suite internal representatives, to clueless managers, and eventually becoming work on the losers' desk. Each role exists in relation to the other roles, and the games involved are naturally different as a result of differential conceptualizations of task and domain. I don't necessarily think this *needs* to take on a metaphysical weight; often CEOs are just as motivated by developmental psychology as the lowest level developers. The psychoanalytic question is: what's the basis of their desire? Do they want to get rich? For what end? I'm sure you get different answers at large corporations vs small ones, and I appreciate Venkat's work in making things legible, but the question is ultimately "what's lost?"
Endorsed, as a solid interpretation from a school of thought I reject of a book I have not read. 👍
> Psychotics tend not to do well in business at all... and historically end up doing more solitary pursuits (art, revelation, etc:
I thought Psychotics were incapable of understanding metaphorical thinking? If so, how could they be artists?
The most dramatic cases are things like outsider art, like, look up Henry Darger. It's not metaphorical to them, instead it's a quite *literal* rendering of a very complex imaginative world, which is felt as absolutely real. Typically they'd be unable to even grasp why normal people (neurotics) would find it interesting (i.e. the fact that we'd apply an interpretive process to a piece of art even though it wasn't "meant" for interpretation). I have seen this in my personal experience with a psychotic friend: he made a great pun, which I and my other friend laughed at as he looked at us curiously. We tried to explain the pun to him, and he simply couldn't understand the dual meaning/implication that made it funny for us.
Darger in particular wanted his work to be destroyed when he died, but his wishes were not honored. Kind of sad IMO.
Oh OK. I'm still getting used to Lacan's terms and, as his use of "neurotics" is not the one in ordinary usage, I wasn't taking "psychotics" to mean what it might normally, but it sounds like it might. I thought you were suggesting that most artists might be "psychotics", but that is apparently not the case.
Ah yeah, more like "for the relatively rare psychotic person, art is one possible thing they can do to survive, since business is probably out of the question."
this was great, do you have any good resources on Lacan? Most of what I kmle of Lacan is through the polemics in Anti-Oedipus
Unfortunately, Lacan is mostly "Freud redux", so to get a grasp of Lacan, you need to have a really deep knowledge of Freud. You might be able to learn some things but it wont cohere without that specific background. That said, nosubject.com is good as a (terse) reference.
this is the fun post, but here is my Lacan-flavored spin:
1. Real is when the company has some "dark" needs, where C-suites pushes their plans to Mid Management, even when desires and articulation may not align.
2. Imaginary is where company identifies itself, where Middle Management preach to the laboreres and public on what to do next, and what the goals are.
3. Symbolic is when company tries to do things to follow their self-identity, sounds like labor class serving the C-suites, but they can never be a perfect work drone.
I've never watched Seinfeld or The Office, so a lot of the review was lost on me.
Can similar characters be found in, for example, Dilbert?
I think Dilbert, Alice, Wally, Asok, etc are supposed to be Losers (though it doesn't really work here - they're drones, but as engineers they're inherently less social-focused). The Pointy-Haired-Boss is *sort of* Clueless although not a perfect example. And Dogbert, Catbert, and the bald big-headed CEO are clear Sociopaths.
Wally is a loser, taking pleasure in doing as little work as possible. The others are more clueless, in that they expect the system to work for them and are upset about it not doing so
I concur. Wally is a Loser, all the other engineers are Clueless, and the Pointy-Haired-Boss is a Sociopath. He's not very intelligent, but that's not required.
Thank you all (Scott, Random string, and FLWAB) - that makes sense!
The pointy haired is still clueless, cus he is not torturing people for fun, he is inept in doing good. "Nice Guy Sociopath". The baldie is the real deal, "silent deadly".
Have you read the comic? Half of what the Pointy Haired Boss does is torturing people for his own amusement.
It is more "we are in this together" than "you are in pain lol"
While the PHB is the basically the definition of clueless, he is not Clueless, as that would require him to be focused only on the object level goals and be ignorant of the power structures within the company.
And while he is certainly evil at times, his petty evilness mostly comes from his lower-c cluelessness.
Take https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-19 (in which the PHB asks Dilbert to implement changes suggested by the PHB's wife.) For me, this does not look like a sociopath coming up with a new way to torture his employees ("We are switching to COBOL" would probably be a lot more effective than whatever random ideas his wife came up with there) and more like someone whose is playing out his socially assigned role of manager, which would code him Loser.
Baldie and Catbert are probably Sociopaths.
The engineers sometimes seem to care about the success of their projects (or safety concerns) instead of being motivated by paychecks and social relationships, so that would code them Clueless?
> he is certainly evil at times, his petty evilness mostly comes from his lower-c cluelessness.
Correct
> Take https://dilbert.com/strip/2022-04-19
His wife is a sociopath (probably), therefore he is getting pawned like an idiot. An exclusive take on the management equivalent of Gervais, try https://thecontextofthings.com/2021/01/25/the-three-tiers-of-work-and-life/
> Baldie and Catbert are probably Sociopaths.
Correct
> The engineers sometimes seem to care about the success of their projects (or safety concerns) instead of being motivated by paychecks and social relationships, so that would code them Clueless?
Correct
Wally sounds like a sociopath to me. They're the ones who underperform.
Nah, they're all Clueless, not Losers, with the exception of Wally. This is especially highlighted with the introduction of Asok, whose defining trait is his blind trust in the system and which the other characters make fun of him for. Asok and Tina are the fresh meat, so to speak, while Dilbert and Alice are more experienced and disillusioned but still beholden to the archetype. Note the paired characters, which highlight the reaction of women to workplace discrimination (Cynicism =Alice>Dilbert>Tina>Asok). Meanwhile Wally has checked out entirely and is actively looking to exploit the system where he can, making him a low-status Sociopath rather than a Loser. He has no pretensions about his specialness. His female counterpart is Carol the Secretary.
The biggest Loser in the series would be Ratbert, who is explicitly motivated only by a desire for approval and hopes that one day someone will love him back, followed by the Elbonians, who do bad work and use misogyny to harass higher-ranking women like Alice, but are hilariously ignorant of their own flaws and never take responsibility for them. In third place is Bob the dinosaur, who is motivated by nothing and wanders around acting more or less randomly.
Actually, I might be jumping the shark on the Elbonians. They live in a world of literal mud and make no pretensions about their specialness, so maybe they're a country full of Wallys?
Obviously Rao wrote this book for Losers so they can all tell each other they are Sociopaths with special insights for liking it.
This is how he is executing his master scheme to manipulate the world.
I think the comparison to Lacan is relevant here. There's really no good mapping, which suggests that one or the other (or both) are wrong. I think it's possible Rao's sociopath description is more or less correct, but I think the point of _The Gervais Principle_ is to keep manipulating the clueless, giving them a very legible system that they can act within.
I'm also not convinced the system applies beyond the corporate environment at all. Again, Lacan seems more generally applicable (though I don't know if I buy it either).
The reviewer didn't talk about it, but I thought one of the most interesting parts of _Principle_ was Toby's descent into loserdom, deliberately putting the masks back on because that's what makes him happier.
> There's really no good mapping, which suggests that one or the other (or both) are wrong.
Speaking generically, this doesn't necessarily follow. If one system divides people into tall and short, and another system divides people into fat and thin, and there's no good mapping between them, it could be that one or both are wrong, but it also could be that the two systems are orthogonal and that you could get a more-complete taxonomy by taking the cartesian product (in this case giving 4 groups: tall-fat, tall-thin, short-fat, and short-thin).
I'm not convinced the model even applies to the corporate world. I think what he's describing is more like the personalities who tend to surface at the point of civilisation collapse/social destabilisation. The Russian Revolution would be a good example. There you do find the classic rule-breaking and entitlement that sociopathy describes. Who cares if it says General Post Office on a brass plaque outside a building? You can just rip that off, stride in, and reclaim it as party headquarters. It could also be that protest groups operate in the same way. I've not particularly well read in that area. But from meeting some of the people, you can definitely see a lot of the same personalities at the helm.
Good observation, as faithful and secular also found this logic https://www.jehovahs-witness.com/topic/5726928013099008/gervais-principle-jehovahs-witnesses https://www.quora.com/q/yxxdvhkqkijlizkv#!n=6 https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/wd7qxFBF2swRscBiS/academia-as-company-hierarchy
Less bombastic if you replace "manipulate the world" with a narrower task "sell a book".
I'm not super familiar with his work, but so far Rao doesn't sound like a guy who frames his goals in "less bombastic" terms
You're a Loser in Rao's terms. The difference (and I'm loosely quoting here) is visceral, not intellectual. Knowing in your head that everything is bullshit (an oversimplification of his premise but meh) is not the same thing as feeling it your bones. What is the *default perspective/paradigm* in which you evalutate new data?
I think what I like most about the Gervais Principle is that it neatly explains why every alternative game that gets big enough turns into another version of the same old game of sex/money/power. You can predict for instance that any Far-Left political movement will be corrupted inevitably once it hits a certain mass.
Why specify Far-Left, instead of just any political movement? All organizations that are large enough to require bureaucracy are vulnerable to being taken over by Sociopaths.
If I had to guess, it's because he has an axe to grind with the far-left.
Not really. More find it interesting that something created explicitly created to be non-exploitative gets completely exploited as soon as it's big enough to be worth it. I think that's why Rao's piece resonates for me, it seems to be gesturing at some real and important facet of humanity, a pattern that repeats despite herculean effort to the contrary.
I guess I don't find it interesting because I was raised to accept that everything (save God Almighty) is impermanent and humans are imperfect. Maybe this is more fascinating if you come from a secular background?
Maybe? My dad is a Methodist pastor, so I don't really come from a secular background :) That being said, knowing that humans are imperfect is different than knowing the specific ways in which they tend to be imperfect. The latter is a lot more actionable.
Because no one is ever surprised when that happens to Right-aligned enterprises.
If I had to guess, because one of the primary goals of the Far-Left is to flatten hierarchies and be above all this sociopathic game playing. To escape from it and create a Utopia where everyone wins.
Extreme right does not really try (or claim to try) this. It just promises to knock over the current hierarchies and replace it with a new hierarchy, approved by whoever is angry at "the current system".
The FL's failed flattening game half-fails, and someone rise to the top. The FR failed rotation game half-fails, and people move around the top and middle.
True. Also, societies can potentially become sociopathic in themselves. But this understandably gets lost in the mix when talking about things in terms of psychology.
I immediately thought of the Electric Kool-Aid test reading the second paragraph of your post. I always remember Wolfe saying about Ken Kesey's alternative hippy commune (paraphrasing) - "isn't it odd that the two leaders happen to be two strapping, athletic ex-wrestlers who tower over everyone else?" Of course, officially, there weren't meant to be any leaders at all. But everyone knew who was unofficially in charge/who it would be unwise to directly challenge.
Also seems relevant https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths
Thanks for the link. I was vaguely thinking "isn't this kinda similar to some subculture dynamics article I read ages ago" and it turns out, the author of that article refers Rao's ideas directly -- see the footnote: https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths#fn_1
Pretty similar to my thoughts on the book. His questions and thought-process are better than his answers in a lot of cases. But it's a credit to him that he's clear in his reasoning and takes a shot at providing answers. No typology is perfect, and it's easier to poke holes in one that isn't an enormous, pretentious, convoluted mess (you've been reading Lacaan; you know such things).
Felt like he made a mistake building everything from that one cartoon, but since he was doing the writing in slow chunks, in the form of blog posts, with no intention of making it into a book originally, by the time he'd gotten far enough to write his way out of the typology in the cartoon, he felt like he had to carry it through. It's hard to write something consistent and cohesive through a blog that you don't work on consistently. As I recall, he wrote this over the course of more than a year. Maybe multiple years.
There's a book about blame-avoidance in government bureaucracy (by Chris Hood I think?) that gets at some of what happens when you have a system of blame-avoidance with no stable sociopath class and very little value in getting credit for things. That's not exactly what the book is about, but that's kind of what I got out of it, and one of the things I find most interesting about systems like the federal government.
Seconded the blame-avoidance thing, literal Yes Minister insanity.
“but if any of you are very high up in big corporations, please poll your peers and let me know what they say”
Hahahahaha
That suggestion confirm that you are not a sociopath!
Or maybe he just assumed that any _competent_ sociopaths would be able to 'poll' their peers without revealing what they were doing.
But the poll would just reveal information about masks on masks on masks, right? A competent sociopath would know the reality without polling their rivals. :)
I think it would depend on whether, or to what degree, the Sociopath's behavior is driven by explicit or 'conscious' thought versus intuition!
If it's more/mostly intuition, I would think a competent Sociopath would be able to _learn_ the reality from the revealed information about the 'masks'.
And if we could convince a 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! And, as I think the 'theory' would reasonably predict, the Clueless refuse to believe any of it :))
I hadn’t read this review before the voting. If I had I would have given it a 10. Fuck all that manipulative status seeking crap. It *is* just bullshit. You’re just a good insightful writer and deserve to recognized as such. Live your own life the way you want.
It *is* possible.
This was written by Scott and isn't part of the contest.
Oh. My opinion still stands. Very good piece.
This happened last year too and I appreciate the independent confirmation that people still like my work even when they're not biased by their previous opinions, thank you!
For the duration of review-tide, it might be wise for you to prepend the titles of your book reviews with "Scott Reviews" or something of the sort.
Got about halfway in and I'm updating my prior on psychoanalysis being total bullshit. I'm going to read the book today, the review really speaks to me.
Also, if anybody is interested in a somewhat darker take on workplace comedy and phycology I strongly recommend "Severance" on apple tv, it's only one season and quite good.
I've read the original series as a teen when it came out and I've recently re-read them. Back then, I was actually very impressed. Upon re-reading them, however, I had the feeling that it derailed a bit in the end. The general idea is sound and the writing is good, as you conclude, but in the end I had the slight feeling that Rao wants to send the message "look how cool of a psychopath I am". This is (truly!) not meant as an insult, but I'm a bit allergic to the edgy-teen-with-bloated-ego-talk and the end tingled my sensors quite a bit in that regard.
Another thing that really opened my eyes was watching the office. I only did so recently and a lot of "impactful" scenes, which I knew were coming due to his partial spoilers, mostly felt like they were just played for laughs. Especially the scene where Jim talks to David sounded extremely impactful in my imagination, but the real thing isn't: https://youtu.be/SWC08MHYp2M?t=44 . It's even less impactful within the context of the epsiode. The Michael-Jan-affair and Ryan as ascending psychopath are other examples.
What I really think makes sense is the group dynamic sidenote. Maybe it's just confirmation bias, but I see quite a lot that people are unhappy in groups where they are clearly at the top or at the bottom or when people within the group are clearly ranked; the theory that people enjoy being in groups where the middle is muddied is something I see in real life (and, although a bit of a sidekick, the fact that all the groups you're (still) in have this dynamic kind of works as evidence for it).
Overall, even though I no longer agree with all points, I still like it and think it's worth a read. Your last sentence about status economics books is probably true :-)
>I only did so recently and a lot of "impactful" scenes, which I knew were coming due to his partial spoilers, mostly felt like they were just played for laughs.
It *was* just played for laughs, The Office is a comedy. When people pull examples from easily recognizable fiction the point is not about how "real" the scene is (the realness has already been discarded given the example is fictional, it is just used for illustrative purposes).
There's definitely a difference between played for laughs and played just for laughs. The whole point of the book is that Rao assumes that Gervais modelling actual company structures in a satirical way. Now, the primary intention is obviously to create a comedy, but that doesn't mean that Gervais (or the other writers) weren't also recreating something from real life, possibly exaggerated for comedic effect.
The pool scene is not "real", obviously, but if it really has no intended subtext (which is what I thought when actually seeing it), then it makes a particularly bad example and does not lend the story credibility, especially since this scene is used as the primary example of power talk.
My personal mental model of office politics is this:
You've got a bunch of people who pretend they are working for the company when in fact they are working for themselves.
There is so much overlap between the two interests that from a macro level economic perspective its a system that works pretty well, and stuff like division of labor is so valuable that it makes up for the lack of incentive alignment and empire building and bad management and whatnot.
On an individual level, if you take company promises as not lies then you will actually be humble and wait to be noticed you will usually be outcompeted by people who talk themselves up. Some people go into spirals and put all their energy into putting in really good work and will never make it far because they take their bs evaluations as gospel truth, change their work quality to address imagined flaws but never build relationships.
Indeed I find it really strange that basically everyone admits to relationships + baseline competence being more important than competence. Like I often watch YouTube videos day in the life of X and they openly say they don't do the best work they do good work and "have good relationships" with their superiors. Vague but that seems like quid pro que nepotism to me. I promote you you support my projects and give me good reviews and such.
As you get higher up in management it seems to be this combination of politics and innovation/profit maximizing staretegies that gets you ahead.
Some executives focus on delivering profit and some focus on playing political games. They all have to deliver a baseline profit and have a baseline political sense. Different organizations have different levels of toxicity depending on which side they lean.
Start ups have to be much more innovation-focused to the point that they seem less toxic on average.
The consequences of which is I feel like I'm being lied to everyday by corporate so I have no moral problem with making up resumes whole cloth. Interestingly only like 20 percent of employers seem bother checking. I also find it easier to be consistent if I'm making up a resume than if I'm using my actual resume, because I dont remember the exact dates I worked.
Most people seem to lie in interviews but also swear they don't lie in interviews. It feels like taking dope for athletes, it's basically required but only some people get caught.
Some people seem really clueless and never get it and just put even more effort into their work product and rarely get promoted and it's sad.
Some people revel in the politics and pioneer new innovative techniques to get promoted without doing anything.
Other people actually try to add value and are political when they have to be.
Most people work to live and kind of just follow the mold of whatever org they are in.
Psychopaths and sociopaths and narcissists are disproportionately represented but they are such a minority they are usually not the majority or the CEO. Sometimes they are and they'll usually ruin a company over time.
The disabled are in a bad position because they have to pretend not to be disabled or not get hired in the first place. ADA protects against being fired but not against not being promoted.
Pretty much agree with all of this. The only people I'd label as narcissistic/sociopathic (even though I'm not a fan of psychiatric labelling as a rule) in business are the people at the lower levels of the organisation. People hired on contract. People who work in new business. Often people who work in fairly meaningless low-level management positions. CEOs in themselves are a strange breed. They can apparently get through an entire day while being constantly harassed and having to think in a dozen different directions. I imagine they score very high in resistance to stress/multi-tasking. Otherwise I've no idea how you'd categorise them. Either way, I don't think I've ever met a CEO who struck me as being particularly intelligent. Many seemed quite stupid.
Sounds like the book has a lot of psychological ruminations that are fascinating to mull over I'm sure but conveniently the Gervais principle is also, as a book of business advice, reducible to a set of clearly falsifiable claims about business:
1) Sociopaths run the company.
2) Overperformers get promoted to middle management.
3) Underperformers get fast tracked to leadership.
4) Clock-punchers keep their jobs as long as long as their minimal productivity is sufficient to justify their job.
As I do not currently run a company, items 2-4 are most relevant to me instrumentally as possible principles that could guide my attempts to achieve my goals. They are also material claims about business, so I can assess how well they conform with my experience of businesses I've been a part of or closely interacted with. In order of reverse controversiality I assess these as follows:
Principle (4) seems obviously true to the point of banality. Perhaps is expressed in a less banal way in the book, but to me it seems like it's self-evident that at a job a minimum performer will be kept on as long as their labor is still profitable and above replacement value. Replacing any worker has significant costs that grow as organizations become more complex, and the kind of businesses Rao is talking about are pretty complicated (I'm assuming he doesn't assert his model applies to "mom and pop" operations). In my own career I've always understood (4) to be true and adjusted my behavior accordingly. If one has found a sufficiently remunerative occupation (4) is a very good place to be.
Principle (2) seems to me to be almost certainly true, perhaps with some variability for industry. I only have some doubts about whether (2) is universally true because I've observed widespread cynicism about whether hard workers get promoted among acquaintances in other fields, but in personal observation of the growth industries I've worked in, the manager and director-level positions are filled with people who excelled at their individual contributor roles, delivered some impressive projects, organized a successful high-profile event, etc. Certainly luck, circumstance, talent, and even (dare-I-say) privilege play a role as well, but for someone like me I'm comfortable concluding that my degree of effort is a significant factor in whether or not I get promoted to director in the next 5 years.
Thus far then the Gervais Principle's advice is mundane and not particularly audacious: if you want to keep your job, you just need to do enough to be worth keeping on. If you want to get promoted (to middle management) you should work hard and excel. I already believe those things and act accordingly, so no new understanding to instrumentalize there.
What then, of principle (3)? If Gervais is right, this is would be novel information that should significantly alter my behavior. After all, I could work hard and try to stand out and make director so I get promotions and more salary and stock options and increase my quality of life (at which point I'd happily settle into "loser" behavior and cash them checks), but that's a sucker's trade if I could just as easily be an under-performer, get selected by the sociopaths at the top, and fast track my way into leadership to massively increase my quality of life. But his assessment just doesn't track with what I observe about leadership positions in personal experience (caveats again that different fields and industries may have dramatically different social norms). I've worked with some of these people, and those I haven't worked with I'm perfectly capable of reviewing the LinkedIn profiles of, and what I can clearly observe is that Silicon Valley c-suites are largely occupied with people who exhibit markers of being lifelong high achievers - some or all of excelling at a rigorous program at a highly selective university, time served at notoriously demanding associate-level positions such as consulting and investment banking, some significant time spent in middle-management positions, during which presumably they continued to over-achieve (notably, time spent at an organization known to be extraordinarily demanding such as Amazon is especially highly prized.)
So either Rao is wrong, or the mechanism by which underperformers are promoted is so devious that it's entirely imperceptible to those outside the star chamber. I imagine Rao would assert the latter, but I have serious doubts. If I note that all the VPs I know got there by first becoming Directors, then it clearly suggests that if I wish to become VP someday I should first be a Director, and it would take extraordinary evidence for me to update that assumption. I note also that if the mechanism by which underperformers get elevated to leadership is indistinguishable from the career path of high-performing middle management up until the final promotion, then I would hardly call it "fast-tracking" at all when up until then you paid the same dues as the overperformers. Perhaps once they reach middle management underperformers have some special qualities that endear them to leadership and open up further career opportunities unavailable to overperformers. Being "strategically lazy" is of course good instrumental advice, certainly at a certain level one's ability to delegate effectively and organize efficiently - ie, to manage - is more important than how hard one works. But if we accept that this is true, then my behavior shouldn't change. First I should attempt to reach middle management, and then I should then endeavor to exhibit the attitudes that would enable my further ascent, should I so wish.
What then for the first of the Gervais principles, that businesses are run by sociopaths. Today this is a sentiment one can commonly find everywhere, and expressing it lends an easy false sophistication to many a reddit or twitter comment. Perhaps this exposure has inoculated me against Rao's argument here, but I also add that strangely I personally and intimately have interacted with more business owners than I have upper management/leadership due to a quirk of my particular social context. I went to a (public) high school whose alumni includes multiple billionaire startup founders and whose millionaire startup founders are too many for me to number.
So from personal experience, the billionaire startup founder is a combination of lucky/talented/smart/hardworking - they all worked harder/got better grades than me in school, invented, assembled, or built a technology/platform that happened to succeed at meeting some unmet and profitable need, and thanks to the magic of capitalism were compensated with a significant share of that realized and potential profitability. (I note that this model holds true even for the CEOs of companies I worked for, older people that I did not personally grow up with.) Now perhaps we can take the weaker form of the assertion and simply say the ambition and drive necessary to achieve these things requires a certain degree of DGAF attitude, which I might agree with, but as Scott points out at point we've muddled the definitions to the point where the model is useless as a instrumental tool. Is working 100-hour-weeks at an entry level I-Bank position in pursuit of your will to power a sign of a sociopath? I would say in some sense yes, but I don't think that fits Rao's model at all. So if I know that roles like that are part of the journey that got billionaires I know where they are today, what does that say for the model?
Maybe the Gervais principle doesn't apply to growth industries at all, where the social dynamics are just too different, and instead applies to a businesses like a paper company that are trying to carve our fiefdoms of profitability in a established market? I don't know, perhaps my personal experience and context is just too alien to what Rao is describing for his advice to useful? I'd suspect this is the case, but it seems his biographical context is at least adjacent to my own. It's strange because reading this review I kept on thinking that this model might describe a certain kind of older and moribund organization such as we see in The Office, but I can't map it onto, and derive useful instrumental advice for, my context in companies with first-generation leadership.
Best comment in the thread. Just putting this here so more people read it.
This is the problem with reading a review and not the book. Rao specifically says that early growth companies do not fit into this mold. This is a description of a fully matured company. The next step is that the sociopaths mine out the value and the productivity falls off often leading to the companies demise.
Useful context, thanks. What's would be his definition of "fully mature" vs "early growth"? Because depending on the definition (if the milestone is "run by first generation leadership," this is a state that can last ~40 years) I think it's plausible that many/most people reading this blog work in growth industries/companies and the model is irrelevant to them. And the model that companies have a innovation-growth-maturity-complacency-death lifecycle is one that is already widely embraced among the disruption/creative destruction set, and a model I've already internalized myself. But if granted that complacent companies are shitholes then I won't devote a lot of cycles to thinking about how to thrive in that environment when the easier path available to me would be to avoid those environments entirely.
As an employed physician I’ve only worked in pretty mature (ossified even) systems so honestly have no experience with growth systems. I think they would map well onto the known cycle that you mention. I also heartily agree with your avoidance strategy and generally wish I had chosen a speciality that would allow me to be in private practice.
Wouldn't then Zvi's Moral Mazes be more of a useful set of writing?
Or when reading Rao's work is there any actionable information?
And if Rao is from growth industries, how does he know this about mature companies? Using pop culture references such as The Office may make it easier to comprehend from the audience's side, but there is nothing necessarily true about The Office and it isn't trying to be a piece of anthropology or organizational psychology.
Point of order: Zvi wrote a set of very interesting posts *about* "Moral Mazes" and its subject matter. The book itself is by Robert Jackall.
Which is why I recommended Zvi's Moral Mazes and not Jackall.
I mean, if that's what you actually meant, it's a perfectly good thing to recommend, but you should phrase it in a way that won't make the reader think you're conflating different things! E.g., "Zvi's Moral Mazes sequence", or "Zvi's posts on Moral Mazes", or "Zvi's Immoral Mazes", since that's what he actually titled many of the posts. Basically, readers can't assume you know what you're talking about and selected every word deliberately, because such an assumption fails for so many writers; better to communicate more robustly.
I mean, if I really wanted to spend more time on it I could have linked https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2020/05/23/mazes-sequence-summary/ instead of relying on someone typing "Zvi's Moral Mazes" into google and seeing that post as link 2 (link 1 being "quotes from"), but instead I opted for the underperforming course of events to allow me to display my sociopathy and execute on my terminal value of punning.
It's always worth remembering that tech isn't typical because it relies heavily on skills that are rare and highly quantifiable.
With respect to point 3, it’s important to note that the Gervais principle predicts that underperformers are either fast tracked to leadership OR fired/leaves the company. The idea is that the sociopath quickly rejects the ‘loser bargain’ and schemes to ascend or bails entirely.
As someone who fits well into 3, and has seen a lot of success (mostly through starting my own tuning), I really don’t see his account of 3 as remotely plausible as a common path to leadership.
DW has it correct.
I currently work in one of these corporate hellscapes, and at entry level, sociopaths job hop a lot. A lot of underperformance is only obvious in retrospect (in 3 - 5 years) and under this timeframe + strategy most sociopaths are long gone.
There's a dude in my industry who my managers bitch about. He's a "promising young engineer - promises this, promises that, then doesn't deliver". For some reason not apparent to me, upper management really likes him.
I do find that most people within my org are happy being "clueless" or "loser". Most "clueless" won't quit because of attachment to the work itself, "loser" won't quit because all their friends work here. I also find this typology most useful when you envision that everyone has changed between these archetypes at some point or another - a toxic enough workplace turns most losers into sociopaths at least temporarily, and when said sociopaths find a friendly enough workplace they'll promptly revert into losers.
The weirdness is that the sociopath, in this context, underperform in so far as they are not willing to give out asymmetric promotions and rewards, and therefore is not worth his time. These are the "aspiring founders" to quote Michael O Church's three ladders. If he is not a prestige person, and is unwilling to put up with either grunt work or "dancing with the stars" he is screwed.
I think "underperforming" is misleading people. It sounds like the minimum-effort clockwatcher, but clearly it's not. I think what Rao means is not "just show up and put in the bare minimum" but rather "on your talents and ability you could be doing a lot more in this particular role, but instead you choose the path to get you promoted".
Things like "a highly selective university, time served at notoriously demanding associate-level positions such as consulting and investment banking, some significant time spent in middle-management positions, during which presumably they continued to over-achieve (notably, time spent at an organization known to be extraordinarily demanding such as Amazon is especially highly prized.)" *are* the 'underperformance'. The Sociopath knows that working for Amazon is going to stand out on his CV more than 'worked for greyly respectable company' so he makes sure he gets into Amazon. It doesn't matter if he does a mediocre job there, what he wants is to be able to put down "worked as X for Amazon for three years".
What the Sociopath underperforms at is "being the best darned sales manager for Burton's Buttons ever!", he leaves that for the Clueless. What the Sociopath wants out of Burton's Buttons is being able to put down "significant time in middle-management". So the Sociopath does work hard, it's that he works hard at promoting *himself*, advancing *himself* and not in the interests of the business. He wants to be the leader and the policy-maker, so he maps out the best path to getting on that track and works on that. Burton's Buttons can go bankrupt and crash into ruin ten minutes after he walks out the door, he doesn't care about that. All he cares about is being able to use that position there as a rung on the ladder of advancement.
Everyone knows that job-hopping is the way to grow your career now so the behavior you describe as "Sociopath" to me reads as "rational and unexceptional career-building." In my professional circles it's astounding to hear of people willingly staying at one job for more than 4+ years, it's conventional wisdom that you grow your career/compensation by job-hopping, and if someone doesn't job-hop its either because (1) there's some serious self-interest compelling them to stay such as stock prices that have ascended so consistently that vesting RSUs have become lucrative golden handcuffs, or (2) they're (perceived to be) unambitious plodders. Like seriously, if you are stuck in one job for 7 years and it's not something like Google or a hot startup with serious upside potential on IPO or an over-compensated leadership position people will wonder what's wrong with you. The notion that people stay out where they are out of a sense of "loyalty" or "friendship" and not self-interest is completely alien. It's a given that your relationship with your employer is supposed to be one of mutual self-interest.
I do think that the culture is one that's pretty good at understanding the importance of aligning employee self-interest with employer self-interest, in part with equity grants but also just a culture that accepts people will pursue their own career goals and not expecting anyone to stick around for extraordinarily long. Every time I've left a job to advance my career I never got a sense of betrayal from my managers/coworkers, and vice versa when coworkers left. If anything, it's in all of our interests for our professional networks to grow and for us to have former coworkers throughout the industry, and if some of them find their careers flourish elsewhere, all the better for us to have friends in high places. It's additionally in my interest to be known in this broad professional network as someone who can be trusted to get things done, so this model isn't exactly incompatible with me being incentivized to excel at my job in the time that I am there. IE, from your example, the "sociopath" strategy of putting in time at Amazon still incentivizes the sociopath to impress his peers at Amazon (remember, we're all likely expected to leave Amazon with supercharged resumes and these are my future internal references). Thus are virtuous positive-sum interactions born. Again, the point is if the sociopath strategy is indistinguishable from conventional over-achiever strategy then what is the novel insight of Rao's business model.
Noting also that in all of the places I've worked of course the business would prefer to retain their employees, but most of the strategies they pursue to that end operate in the logic of employee self interest - equity grants, growth opportunities within the org, compensation tangible and intangible, perks, etc I've never worked at a place that expected me to stay out of "loyalty." They understood that their job was to make the most persuasive case that my staying would be in my interest.
Counter on (3): It is in essence "underpromise and overdeliver" and "never overpromise or underdeliver".
If clever underperformers are preferentially promoted, it's probably somehow in the boss' interest, e.g. the underperformers are smart and mean enough to sabotage the company and lower its profits, so the boss promotes them give them a personal stake in the companies' success.
This regresses toward the Dilbert Principle (akin to Peter Principle and the partially incompetent). The issue is that skills are not uniform, finders vs binders vs grinders logic.
I agree 100% and mostly thought to the extent this review actual represented the book accurately, the book is pretty garbage.
In your system I'm clearly green (everything fits) and also green is my favorite color. Clearly you are onto something!
A decent contingent of people vibrate between assessment and judgement without even realizing it.
It'd probably be good if we looked at models like this as assessments and kick judgements to the curb. There's no objective measurement of which type (presuming the types actually represent reality) gets more or less out of life. Or out of work.
Each organizational archetype clearly gets something (and misses something) different out of life. Given the nature of personalities, it's probably best when the personality type aligns with the organizational archetype. No shame in being any type as long as being that type works for you.
The labels for the archetypes of course are a hybrid of judgement and assessment labels which serve to conflate assessment with judgement. This is probably intentional but it's not helpful for comprehension in my view.
Our culture is disturbingly admiring of sociopaths, particularly when they put their personal success above everything else.
This is actually a pretty worldwide thing. It's been considered a necessary evil given that the many empires of conquest throughout history have needed a steady supply of sociopaths to fill their ranks. Apparently this maps fairly well onto corporate politics.
> "Somewhere in your head there is a microphone. It produces a little voice inside of you"
Did someone reverse the polarity?
@Scott,
I also don't see myself as one type only in the context of my whole life, and I probably wouldn't say that most people I know well in multiple contexts are a pure Rao-ian type either. I do think it's plausible that most people slot into one of these roles at each job or social institution they participate in, though. I can definitely name jobs where I did the Clueless thing and others where I took the Loser bargain, and do something similar for informal social groups and hobbies.
I don't know about the "dark enlightenment mind games" aspect of Sociopaths, but I think "would rather succeed than be liked" is key. I would actually change it to "would rather succeed than have friends or solve interesting problems". This makes it practically self-evident that Sociopaths would end up on top, since focusing on success would let you out-compete people splitting their focus. But I think this also causes self-selection among non-Sociopaths into lower-tier positions.
A view from computer science academia: According to everyone I know and all the stereotypes, the fanciest professors/advisors are almost always terrible to work for. Their grad students can either barely get their time or are hounded to constantly produce. Some professors won't let you collaborate outside their lab. Although they are sometimes still thought leaders in their fields, more often than not they don't really do research anymore. And yet they are highly respected in their fields, their labs produce a lot of good research, and maybe they even have a startup or two.
But of course working for these people is difficult! They have an aggressive research agenda which necessitates an aggressive enforcement of work ethic among their students. They also have minimal time to spend on most individual students -- they'd rather have their lab do 100 things they're tangentially involved in than 5 things they worked on deeply. And the student is on the hook for delivering, or else *their* career fails, so more often than not the student will figure out how to be successful with minimum involvement from the professor (and if they don't, whatever, there are 99 other things going on). I'm making it sound like these professors are skimming credit, but that's not even necessarily the case -- their involvement in those 100 things might still be highly influential and valuable, even if they put in a small number of work-hours on an individual project compared to their underlings. Like I said, it turns out optimizing for success makes you pretty successful.
But it's not just competition. It's self-selection. Right now I'm personally struggling to choose what I actually want as I'm in the process of becoming a professor. For a while I thought I wanted to be a great prestigious researcher, you know, really change the field and all that. But now I realize that in order to produce at the scale that other professors at the cutting edge do, I would have to basically turn into a glorified CEO/manager with a huge lab, where I have minimal contact with my students, get as many people to do free work for me as humanly possible, unabashedly take all the credit, and generally view the world more as assets and obstacles rather than people.
And I don't want to do that. I would rather have meaningful relationships with a grad student lab and colleagues, and continue personally working on interesting research problems. (And if any of those brings me success, all the better.) But that means I'll be out-competed by people not doing that. So I'm deliberately excluding a couple of prestigious universities from my job search, because I know the culture at those places would make me miserable. The less prestigious route where I actually, you know, *advise*, sounds way more fun. But a Sociopath would take that trade in a second.
Hmm, while I think your priorities are in the right place, I don't think deliberately excluding prestigious universities is necessarily the way to go. I think at most top universities, you basically get to choose the number of PhD students you want and how closely you advise them, so you can really pick the management style works for you, if you are deliberate about it. And if you want to work closely with only 1-2 students at a time, you probably want a place where they will be as smart as possible. There are many ways to succeed, and you don't necessarily have to imitate the flaws of others. The flashiest faculty aren't always the ones doing the best work.
Wow, the fake Green-Blue-Red typology described some of the closest members of my friend group surprisingly well, better than the Sociopath-Clueless-Loser typology.
Trinity vs Hierarchy in one line.
Maybe there is just a class 'business books' are merely psychoanalytical exercises meant to scaffold something attractive to those {publishers, readers} who know there is endless churn around 'management philosophies' that can be exploited. Gin up a simplified horoscope and you're on the path... Something about Tajfel?
I would not be surprised if that's more-or-less how publishers see their contradictory titles on management philosophies (or education).
However, the way you phrase it might undersell the value of Rao's tripartite schema, Freud's version, or any other semi-arbitrary simplified horoscope. These schemas encourage the reader to think about patterns among the personalities of people they know, and then check whether there are important things that correlate with those patterns. For example, status within a corporation.
Without being exposed to an endless cycle of such schemas, it's easy to put all your eggs in one or both of the baskets 'We're all alike'* and 'We're all unique.' Instead, we should also place some eggs in a third basket, 'We're divided into groups,' and rearrange the eggs within it depending on the context.
*Except for the brain-dead, I guess.
I remember reading these posts a few years ago and generally agreeing with the thrust of this review -- that they have a handful of interesting insights on human behavior but the top-level categories are not very convincing.
On a meta level, I think we should have a high level of suspicion for systems that seek to break people down into Type I Suckers, Type II Suckers, and Super Cool Badasses Who Don't Take Shit From Anyone. Partly this is because the Badass category tends to just end up as a flattering description of the author; as others have commented here, this book sometimes feels like Rao justifying/explaining his own personality and behavior. But I also think these categories often amount to a psychological trick; the natural reaction from the reader is "ooh, I want to be in the Badass category!" and to start looking for Badass traits in oneself, and at that point you've already bought what the author is selling regardless of whether it reflects reality in a useful way. I think you also see this reflected in the supposed "sigma male" archetype which was popular on the internet for a minute, although thankfully that's been mostly memed into oblivion since then.
Actually, I think Rao's Sociopath category is mostly indistinguishable from the sigma male thing, except that it's framed in a way that targets adults instead of teenagers.
I dunno, my reaction was that being in the Badass category sounded like the worst possible thing, even if the reward is absolute freedom from invented social structures. It precludes ever being an authentic, whole person, and you get to stand on your pedestal and pull the strings of your puppets below, while your strings are cut and there is nothing that moves you.
Fussell's "Class X" is another great example of this.
Come to think of it, so is Scott's "Grey Tribe".
"the natural reaction from the reader is "ooh, I want to be in the Badass category!"
Well, some people do. Some people, like me, are "Badass? Oh come on, I'm not fourteen any more and this is real life not a blockbuster movie" 😁 I'm always some what suspicious of people asking me "But don't you want to be COOL?" Well, no, actually?
In reality, "badasses" are more often "pains in the ass" for other people to have to deal with, and clean up after them.
It seems that Rao only had 'Office' esque wage-slavery in mind when writing this. I'm studying VFX, and I actually see a lot of utility in joining a company hierarchy for the sake of mentor-ship. I'd be more than willing to play the role of 'clueless' at the right company, not because I like working myself to the bone, but because it could give me the opportunity to develop my skills FASTER than I'd be able to alone. The ability to accelerate a learning curve is incredibly valuable in a field that might take decades to master.
It's almost like Rao completely neglects the idea that people actually enjoy things, and might like to develop themselves. It's strange that a self identified sociopath doesn't notice fast routes to power(here 'power' = 'skill').
Wouldn't you just be a sociopath (under Rao's framework) here? I don't think Rao suggested anyone likes working themselves to the bone for what that's worth.
For the moment, no. They want to focus on learning VFX skills and the fastest way to gain those skills is to allow someone else to abstract away all the other secondary skills that a VFX artist needs.
For example they might appreciate that their employer is handling cash flow (give them the same amount of money at regular intervals), taxes (those are way simpler for wage slaves than for self-employed people), health insurance (if they are American it's customary for employers to handle that), project management, customer acquisition and so on.
This is what Rao calls "mediated reality". You get other people to handle the parts of the world that don't interest you so you can focus on doing what you like or what you are good at.
"You get other people to handle the parts of the world that don't interest you so you can focus on doing what you like or what you are good at."
Precisely. I think the examples you provided illustrate exactly what I'm talking about.
I think there is a viable symbiosis to be had in many of these hierarchies.
Another example within the VFX industry is access to hardware. Large VFX houses have massive render/sim farms that enable artists to reach heights unreachable on their own. In exchange, the management types get to make some easy money off the backs of artists. Everyone wins here. Obviously this balance can sometimes become corrupted; but I think it works fairly well for many people.
I can see why one would view this as mutual sociopathy, but I don't know enough about Rao's framework to make a statement on his version of the word.
I worked for a large VFX studio that hired two young aspiring artists at the bottom rung of the ladder - One Clueless, one Sociopath.
The deal was: do ~6 months of menial labour as a PA runner: non-artist work doing odd jobs around the office, and when a junior artist spot opens up, the company would promote them.
The Clueless gave the company 110%. She was the best PA runner the studio had ever had. Everything ran better when she was around. People noticed it too. She'd frequently get compliments on her work, and took pride in it. The company never promoted her. She quit after 2 years of never being seriously considered for an artist spot.
The Sociopath gave the company nothing. He spent most of his time making friends with department leads, and angling to help out with artist work rather than do his assigned runner tasks. Coworkers would frequently complain that he never did his job, but evidently, he did enough not to get fired. After a few months, one of his friends pulled some strings to get him promoted to a show.
This sort of thing is definitely a problem in the industry(especially this past couple of years it seems). I think however, that this Clueless PA is exceptionally clueless. She is not in symbiosis with the company in this example, because she allowed herself to be hired for wage-slave-labor. I'm perhaps being extremely optimistic when looking at actual industry job availability. Perhaps this was the only path she had as an option.
(Obviously, this is still the company being a bad actor and exploiting her.)
What I was thinking of was more like, a skilled Houdini artists getting access to massive particle sims that otherwise would be unusable. You don't learn a tool like Houdini and become a runner(if you have any sense of self worth).
The trouble is the mismatch. The 'Clueless' person wanted to be an artist, but her work as PA was more valuable to the company, so they didn't promote her. From their point of view, why would they? She was creating more value doing what she did than hiring her on as an artist.
The 'Sociopath' stuck to his aim: be an artist. He did everything to make that happen. Of course he did the bare minimum as PA, that wasn't what he wanted to do, and being valuable in that role was no good to his desired career. So the company keeping its end of the bargain and hiring him on as an artist was fulfilling the agreement: do the 6 months grunt work and we'll give you a slot.
In this instance, I don't think sociopath is a useful description. He wanted to be an artist and he did what he could to make sure the company didn't exploit him and renege on the deal. That's not being cold-blooded user of others. The 'clueless' person didn't understand the real terms: by being more useful as a PA, she didn't demonstrate that the company would benefit by making her an artist. That was naive on her part, but now she has the experience to understand for her next job what she *should* be doing, which is "if I want to be an accountant, I need to concentrate on getting into the accountancy department, not being a stellar employee in the post room".
The company wasn't looking for "can you work hard?" and that was her mistake. It was looking for "how badly do you want to be an artist, can you figure out the path to becoming one here?"
You can rent a massive render/sim farm by the hour from Amazon Web Services. If you're using it 24/7, it might cost you 10x what it would cost to build and run your own, but if you're only doing a big render a few times a month, it might actually be cheaper, even before you deduct the vigorish extracted by management and shareholders.
The other examples, cashflow and health plans and mentorship and stuff, are valid though.
You might be right, but are you sure the average person can afford the same size render farm services a large studio can provide? I have a feeling that big studio's like ILM and Weta are willing to throw huge budgets at theirs. That's just an intuition though. Also, I think some studios are using cloud solutions like AWS, but again, I'm willing to bet that they are a throwing an un-matchable amount of money at this.
Maybe I'll ask at the VFX reddit to see if I can get a clear answer. Or celluloid_dream might know the answer.
See this video for an example where personal render farm renting becomes an issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5q3oq6SM-4&t=691s
According to the artist in the video, most of that avalanche is one sim. Sure, you might be able to afford a single take, but what happens when you need to iterate? Sounds expensive to me.
So I asked the vfx subreddit.
It's not totally black and white, seeing as we can't easily calculate the amount of computation time that an individual in a studio is getting access to. Nor can we easily calculate the cost of a shot like this, because pipelines might have totally different setups for render passes and compositing. However, the answers are showing that rendering even a single frame can be extremely expensive. Iterating on a personal budget would probably be impossible for the vast majority of people(assuming you are looking to match AAA render quality).
Here is the thread if you are interested. More people might comment in the future, so keep an eye on it if you are interested.
https://www.reddit.com/r/vfx/comments/uosn1x/how_large_are_modern_private_rendersim_farms/
"I don't think Rao suggested anyone likes working themselves to the bone for what that's worth."
Yeah, that might be me putting words into Rao's mouth.
Is this entire book based on *The Office* ? If so, then is it applicable to the real, non-fictional world -- at least, more so than any other literary criticism ?
I think it is just using well known caricatures of what he is describing to illustrate the point. Not in an "it is true because it appeared in fiction" sense which is always ridiculous and I think is what you're referring to, but in a "this is the kind of thing I'm talking about" sense where mapping that to real world experience (or failing to) is left as an exercise for the reader.
Yes, among other fictional works, but he emphasizes at every turn that The Office itself is an uncannily accurate (funhouse) mirror of the real, non-fictional world. Whether he's right, well, I would suggest to read it and decide for yourself.
I read this years ago and it was life changing. It made me realize I’d been clueless, and so I tried my best to become a sociopath. I disagree with some of the claims Rao makes and would summarize my disagreement as “the mic in my head is a panoply of all these different voices but is ultimately controlled by a singly concept, which most classical philosophers would say is “ The Good” and which I would say is a hardware-specific approximation of the good.”
I followed my own, modified understanding of this theory and it worked out for me. I found a sociopath at Google (director of an org with ~350 people) and got on his good side by selling people on bitcoin as best I could. He never got into bitcoin, but I succeeded at selling him on me. He took me under his wing, showed me some tips and ultimately connected me with a mentor who then showed me the real goods: yes we are all controlled by stories, but we can choose which stories we tell ourselves, and feeling good ends up making you perform better. So true super saiyan abilities come from cultivating love and decency in yourself, while having zero doubt that you will ever be anything but Ok.
The key for me was to reject dark enlightenment, and go for the real deal. Rao sees a world run by storytellers with no intrinsic meaning or purpose, and what I see is someone buying into just another story. “It’s constructed narratives all the way down,” is ALSO a constructed narrative.
I want, and still want, to accomplish goals with unbounded scope. I want to do things that move the world in ways big enough that that I will be historically relevant. My goal isn't to be relevant or to matter, mind you, it's to do some phenomenal amount of good in the world.
You could call it 'will to power' and i don't think this is wrong, except i'd phrase it differently: i think there have been instances of a few people who really did have tremendous positive impact on the world, and i want to be one of them. That's the narrative that convinced me: that people with massive outsized impact on the world aren't smarter or more capable than i am - they just a specific kind of path and followed it.
I'm not interested in power over others; i think that kind of power ultimately limits your ability to impact the world. I want the social influence of joe rogan, the technological acumen of elon musk, and the spiritual bearing of a mixture of Sadghuru, Jordan Petersen, with the AI framing of Josha Bach.
You might argue that i want these things primarily because it's the only way to maintain order in my head. I'm a politician in here, there are many many of us inside, and keeping order seems to require a constant focus on some ridiculous outsized mission.
First off, thanks for asking. You are giving the gift of understanding and i very much appreciate it.
Maybe the word 'goals' is the wrong way of putting it here. I am _absolutely_ interested in being a good person. If anything, that is the simplest way of putting the goal. I just want to be good. I want to live a good life. That is more important to me than anything else. So THAT really is the goal. Global impact and success are only plausibly instrumental there.
One of the things i've come to learn from my coach, and come to see experientially, is that everyone is different and 'living a good life' means, to a large degree, being who you really are. When you're pissed off, angry, tired, frustrated, or afraid, that isn't the real you, nearly as much as who you are when you're calm, well fed, feeling connected and loved.
And who i am in those states is expansive, intensely loving, wanting to sacrifice himself for the good of the world, wanting to help, to create, but also to play, to love, to laugh at a global scale with much of the whole world laughing along in joy, not because i want to be popular but because i so see so much suffering in the world and what to do whatever i can to alleviate it.
I have tried to make the change you're describing - to alter myself so that i can maintain order without unachievable goals - and i would say that those things aren't even goals so much as... milestones that seem to appear on the road ahead.
How do you feel about the following self story:
"If I act in accordance with the principles of my environment, the area of the environment accessible to me will grow. The new areas will have more complex, subtle principles, meaning alignment will be a more computationally difficult challenge. Once I learn and master those principles, the area accessible to me will grow still further. There is no end to this process, and there may be no end to the extent to which i am interested in exploring. I suspect that i will go further than anyone else before me, in part due to sheer hubris, in part because of the weird place in history where i grew up, specifically details about my family background, and a period in late adolescence where i blew up my worldview from scratch to recreate something from first principles. I suspect that once you reach a certain size/scale of operation, changing your worldview becomes insanely risky, and this explains why nobody seems to be able to approach Elon Musk in terms of world impact: his worldview was based heavily on physics and first principles, which allows him to process this extremely wide environment in a way that most people around him cannot. Others at his scale of operation are stuck with whatever mindsets they cobbled together on their way up, and they cannot possibly risk undoing deep contradictions in the foundations of their world models, because that would imperil their day to day operations. There is most certainly an element of arrogance in here, but that fellow and the rest of us have made our peace; he is not simply 'along for the ride', nor is he in the driver's seat, but rather one out of a constellation of virtues, a somewhat-cancerous-confidence, we virtues are all at odds with one another, all jostling for the lead and then relinquishing it, in the service of what our ancestors would call almighty God, and i would say is maximizing the number of possible future states accessible to the physical universe, as modeled in the mind of the hardware upon which this network of virtues conducts its intercourse."
And what successes do i imagine where fame would be instrumental?
- i want to heal the schism in Christianity so that the protestant reformation no longer smoulders as it has for the past few hundred years, so that evangalists will see evolution as being part of god's plan and even find support for it in scripture and the catholic church will come alive again, vibrate with joy, just as the god or worships rose from the dead
- i want to convince the world that AI risk is poorly understood and that in reality, the orthogonality thesis only holds over vanishingly short timeframes, that for sufficiently large, complex organism, there is no meaningful difference between "self" and "other", the boundary is a moebius strip, and buddhahood is the only plausible survival strategy over long enough time frames
- that turing completeness is the mathematical basis for human equality, that the world is a turing tape and we are merely finite state automata traversing it, and that only when we identify as the world itself, we become turing complete and thus capable of simulating our own determinism to such a degree that we can break free of it and become self-authoring
- the world peace is entirely possible so long as the econonomics of violence mean that invasion, theft, and robbery are net-negative ROI, at which point peace wins not for any reason other than greed suggests it's better to get along with your neighbors
- to build an alliance of abrahamic faiths to fulfill god's promise to abraham and settle human beings upon every star system in the galaxy
- to convince staunch materialists that moral realism is an approximation hueristic, that valence realism is more or less equivalent for human purposes, and that valence is just a compression of the long-run consequences of our decision making
all this stuff jostles in my head all the time, i am under tremendous tension and pressure, but i have learned that satisfying goals never makes a person happy, instead this comes from appreciating things in your day to day life, in other words you've got to use your seretonergenic system to make yourself content with life; goals are just one kind of activity that's ideally only about 505 of your time, last night me kids were climbing trees in the front yard as i pulled weeds and said thank you god for htis life, thank you god for this life
i have been consistently hypomanic the last ~6 months due to family circumstances on top of the plague/war/famine/geopolitical instability but i'm holding on to reality most of the time
thank you for coming to my ted talk
Oh, you're totally right. Thank you for the concern. Normally i just try to stay focused on day to day tasks, but the act of communicating this caused a flare up of emotion, consider it like the flare gas at an oil rig. Normally i engage in proof of work (i.e. doing my day job) to stay sane.
I get that the likelihood of any of this happening is largely zero, and that in reality my greatest contributions to the world are likely to be 'just' being a good dad, a good son, a good friend, a good brother. But i'm ok with that. And maybe i'll do more writing. Something tells me Don Quixote was maybe a little bit autobiographical.
I have in fact always suspected that it's best to be a loser
+1
I read this a number of years ago back when it was just 6 blog posts, and came away reasonably impressed. I think the core insight of "when you look around an office, what you'll see is people trading their labor for 1) Money, 2) Power, 3) Something else." I'm less convinced by assertions that most people only want one of those, and that there are enough people who want "something else" to the exclusion of money and power to be economically significant.
>there are enough people who want "something else" to the exclusion of money and power to be economically significant.
Hard to really explain the continued existence of caring jobs that get paid dogshit (public school teacher, nurse, etc) without them. People can pay these critical jobs less because people actively want to do them, and not for the thrill of holding power over the weak and helpless.
The majority of people are working in jobs because you need a job to live. If you're lucky, you get to work at something you really love doing, or at the very least find the job meaningful. That's how you get people who are "I always dreamed of being a teacher/nurse/electrician/bakery owner". As you say, because there are some people for whom it is a vocation and not just a job, you can get them to take lower-paid, lower-status jobs.
Some people have an entire career plan mapped out where they are going to climb the ladder and get the position of Big Cheese and have all the money and power and so on.
But for most of us, it's a way to earn the money to pay our bills. You do or don't put in more effort, over-perform, depending on how engaged you are or if you really do think you will get raises and promotions and praise for it. And there's a lot of work that is routine, that is in the middle, that isn't going to get you higher up the ladder, but it still has to be done. I do think some entities have way too many layers of management and could shed many of those jobs, but you can't simply say "well all those middle-managers are doing nothing in particular, get rid of them all".
The sociopath thing doesn't make much sense to me, apart from the very ambitious types who are out for themselves alone and want to climb the ladder as fast as possible, so they do push off routine work on others, take on the work that gets them credit (or lets them take the credit from others) so they can impress the higher-ups, do the networking and ass-kissing to move on up, and switch jobs to always be moving up and getting better and better opportunities until they reach the level they're aiming at. They don't care if the business is making biscuits or drugs to treat cancer, they do care about being CEO or Global President or a seat on the board. But I don't think that means sociopaths 'know' what reality really is, or have a better view than the rest of us; they know the games to play beneath the veneer of mission statements, but that's only part of the reality. You make drugs to treat cancer because there's a lot of money to be made out of those, but you also make them to heal the sick. The 'clueless' who think they are doing good work and helping humanity are not deluded or don't know reality as it really is; that is as much part of reality as 'look guy, this is a business to make money, they're not going to give away drugs for free so forget all that nonsense about helping the sick'. As we can see from Martin Shkreli, a Sociopath often comes a cropper against Reality.
Sociopaths "sets" the reality in a way.
The book also discusses how people transition from one type to the other. When a Clueless person is betrayed they sometimes realize they can't rely on others to mediate reality for them, so they become Sociopaths. They need some time to focus their strength and gather some resources before they can pull off their new sociopath plans, and during this time they can't afford to spend all their energy at their day job so they do the bare minimum (i.e. they act as Losers for a while).
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to perceive Scott as following this path. He was working as a Clueless high performing employee for an hospital, and he was happy because his employer abstracted away all sorts of stuff that are annoying to deal with. All he had to do was help the patients his employer assigned to him and he would get money and respect. He didn't have to worry about customer acquisition, marketing, and even some details about tax payments and insurance deductibles would be abstracted away by the Sociopaths of the healthcare industry.
When his employer could not hold its end of the bargain, that is when it looked like being a good psychiatrist wouldn't be enough to keep his job anymore, he quit. He's probably not the type to harm his employer or patients by working the bare minimum like Rao says a Loser would do in that situation, but I think putting his blog on hiatus served the same function, allowing him to focus on creating his own company.
What'd you think about the various 'languages' the different types use with each other?
I wasn't able to get much out of it, which is why I didn't include it here. I just kind of felt "well, that's a claim" without being able to think of good examples.
Interesting!
I found "Babytalk" – like the kind of bullshit that's spouted at company meetings – to be particularly irksome. Company-wide memos also seem like great examples, tho they're spectacularly unremarkable, which may be why they're hard to remember.
Someone was telling me about how, at their office job, "At a meeting with the higher-ups, I try to explain why this business strategy is what we should be going for, but no matter how clear and convincing I make my case, they always just gloss over what I said. Their responses don't even make any logical sense, it's like they literally didn't even hear me." This struck me as a perfect example of failed Gametalk: the person doing the explaining was under the assumption that he and them were engaged in the shared goal of running a successful business, but he was wrong. His bosses were more engaged with status games, which forbade them from taking any of his suggestions no matter how good they were, because they could not allow him to take credit for them and rise in status relative to them. They were speaking entirely different languages, which is why he thought their responses made no sense.
Imagine the talks being rephrased as company strategy, then it will be useful.
What do you mean exactly?
Gametalk: Company family culture, amenities
Posturetalk: Company values and ideals, PR, branding
Babytalk: Corporate loyalty, LinkedIn mindset, "don't insult managers"
Powertalk: Business strategy and planning among senior management
Realtalk: Social critiques and whistleblowers
Oh, I see. That framing doesn't match what Rao describes, though. I actually find his examples much more sensible, particularly power talk as information bartering under plausible deniability. The person who was telling me about management not listening to him was apparently not aware of these types of communication, hence he futilely kept trying to engage with his superiors as if they were equals.
Imagine this form of simplification, as in common office interactions that just happend often, would be cool.
Or possibly the proposed business strategy was obvious nonsense?
Charitably, I think this kind of thing makes a lot of sense. "higher-ups" are 'playing a different game' – their 'object level reality' (or the parts of it that are important to them) is just very different. "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM." captures a part of that.
I tried to read about this online, but I didn't find a good explanation, just scattered ramblings. is there somewhere that succinctly describes it?
Did you read the book or the original blog posts? Scott links to the posts at the end of this post.
I remember reading this when the first series of blog posts appeared in, like, 2009 or 2010. I've seen it pop up here and there since then and I do find it interesting.
Basically, I think The Gervais Principle is is very, very good - as a piece of television criticism. Like, it explains what happens in the American version of "The Office" and the interactions between the characters *perfectly* from what I can remember (granted, it's been awhile since I've watched the show). So if you want to read a book that does an excellent job of explaining what happens on "The Office," read it, it's great.
As for its ability to make sense of human interaction, or organizations, or psychology, I'm pretty much with Scott. It's interesting, and contains some nuggets of actual insight, but is way overdetermined. I think it's probably better than the average dev-psych-inflicted-internet-pop-psychology theory (is there a phrase for this sort of stuff? I feel like there should be one), but you can't take it too seriously. The world is just far messier than the "principle" implies - though, in fairness, I suspect Rao might admit this if asked.
I agree with Erik Dietrich: https://daedtech.com/defining-the-corporate-hierarchy/
> Venkatesh’s analysis is wonderful .. But I have three main problems with using the archetypes, as described, to elaborate on my own theories of corporate politics:
- The names themselves
- The assertion that over-performing middle managers are generally idiots
- And the placing of corporate citizens into one of three buckets on the basis of assigning them serious shortcomings.
Instead, I think of them in terms of what the modern corporate structure has *done to them:*
- Broken the losers
- Tricked the clueless
- And forced the sociopaths into ethical conundrums.
I propose that we name the losers, clueless and sociopaths to “pragmatists, idealists and opportunists.”
- Pragmatists are line-level employees who find value in life outside of work, mainly because the hope of any meaningful advancement and enjoyment of their profession has been taken from them.
- Idealists believe heartily in the meritocratic company (and organizational superiors) as a benevolent steward of their careers because perspective has been taken from them.
- Opportunists refuse to yield hope or perspective and recognize that the only way to win the corporate game is to play by their own rules. In this realization, they give up ethical certainty and human connection – opportunists play a lonely, sad game to get what they get.
I’ve spent a lot of time in a lot of different organizations of different sizes and domains, and I just don’t run across cartoonish people like Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute.
By and large, the people in these organizations, at all levels, are relatively well-intentioned, reasonably intelligent and doing the best that they can on the micro, day-to-day level. Corporate structures are, however, substantially less than the sum of their parts, so good faith efforts in the small are perverted into rampant dysfunction writ large across the face of industry. Organizations are pathological, as Venkatesh points out, and they are pathological in a way that corrupts their components.
I don't think Rao would disagree with much of that.
I've spent a good bit of time now in various organizations of differing sizes (and domains) too and I have frequently run into extremely cartoonish people – their writing just isn't as good as the Office's is.
This criticism tracks, but I'd add one thing: in my experience a large portion of middle managers are people who generally enjoy their work and are good at it, and want to enjoy a secure upper-middle-class lifestyle without the constant, workaholic stress that comes with being in upper management. Which isn't to say that there is no stress in middle-management, but I think those roles strike a reasonable balance between stress, money/prestige, and maintaining a connection to the actual work that is appealing to a lot of people.
Also, I've literally never in my entire life encountered a person who wholeheartedly believed in a corporate mission statement. Sometimes people may find certain things to like in them, but I think everyone knows they are mostly bullshit at the end of the day. At least I assume that's the case.
As a former middle manager, this sounds right. I liked what I did and the rewards were reasonable.
I had a CEO ask if I wanted to be a CEO. I said no as I never wanted the demands of being an executive - interrupted downtime & holidays, perpetual jet lag from travel, crazy amount of email/calls/meetings/issues, responsibility for keeping the business growing, difficult customers, hyper-competitive peers etc.
I've found over the years that I'm less averse to 'stepping up' and filling the gap in a team/group with respect to, e.g. coordination and 'executive decision making'. I've found over time that almost any 'project' works much better when there's a clear 'dictator' that can, as needed, 'just pick one' (option).
I learned to appreciate bosses that would make a decision at all, even if it wasn't (what I thought was) the 'right' one.
Generally, quite a LOT of people seem to _fantastically_ underestimate and under-appreciate the value of _any_ management, let alone 'good' management.
I have known a _few_ people who seemed to take 'corporate mission statements' at face value. Most people seemed to have at least a _little_ skepticism tho.
Love this analysis - I'd supplement it with the observations that while Opportunists might be overrepresented in the upper echelons of a corporate structure, (a) their success rate may be higher on the margins but most Opportunists fail just like everyone else does, and (b) overrepresentation does not mean the space is exclusively composed of Opportunists.
In fact, lots of this "dark triad" and "psychopath CEOs" literature seems pretty specifically targeted to unsuccessful sociopaths/opportunists, since it affords them a fiction that despite their lack of success they are part of a special successful class.
I just wanted to comment briefly to say that this matches my experience, and I think it's actually a fairly important insight to have to realise just how often opportunists/Sociopaths fail. Thank you for posting this.
Manipulators (the Andy flavor of Clueless) and Opportunists ("sociopath" in the most anti-clinical sense) seems to be different breeds but with similar characteristics.
By extension, Dwight and the Believers would be tuned into conforming to both Idealist/Clueless and Pragmatic Losers. It gives the illusion of meritocracy.
See: Alex Danco and Michael Scott's Theory of Class.
based rectification of names. And also please dissect the three forms of idealism too.
I think my comment here is going be less blind rage than my previous comments on Lacan and "Sadly, Porn", and that's because A) I've actually read this book and B) It isn't Obscuritan. Scott has summed up much of the more incoherent criticisms and things I liked about the book (blog posts, actually) pretty well here.
I'd add that there were a few sections not covered, such as the section on money not being a real thing, or being treated as similar in value to monopoly money. No wonder the self-identifying sociopath Rao thinks his sociopathy is a real difference between him and the "Losers" (not so much the "Clueless"), when threats to his status don't similarly translate into a threat to livelihood. If you're already rich, and being hated isn't dangerous for you, you have a lot less reason to care about status (and status-illegibility, and the support network that is group belonging) because those things aren't important for staying alive. It seems like he doesn't understand the whole "caring about other human beings as a goal in-of-itself" thing in addition to focusing a bit too far up that hierarchy of needs.
I'll say I at least appreciate that I can pick out ideas from what he's written and criticize them or praise them independently without the ever-present dodge of "well you don't know that's what they *really* mean" that comes from the obscurantists. It's possible to actually find useful insights in the book, as opposed to staring feverishly at it and hallucinating.
What do you think about his claims to being a sociopath in itself? I find Mark Fisher's argument that most self-identifying sociopaths are simply overestimating the extent to which most people are being authentic or 'real' in social situations. The self-styled sociopath thinks "Oh, that person is being so polite to that server! I could never force myself to care about someone like that." Not realising that, in most of these interactions, most of us are just going through the motions too.
I suspect you're right; that he's in the category of people with no particular surplus of empathy, but not a sociopath regardless, at least not in the sense most people mean. I'm not familiar with Mark Fisher's argument, though, could you link that?
I would think that a self-styled sociopath would pick up on the fact that most social interactions are just grease, and think of themself the way they do when they see more genuine interactions and realize they don't have those, but I'm not living inside their head.
Hey. Thanks for the reply. :) I don't have a direct link to the Mark Fisher point, and I can't remember 100% which book it featured in, but I'm pretty sure it was in his book "Ghosts of my Life". Well worth checking if you like odd/eccentric takes on contemporary culture and politics. Great writer as well.
Rao's "sociopathic" ideal is those that can un-cancel the future if they tried, those that can exit if they were to not try to climb and preserve the system, and make their own alternate reality. The clinical sociopaths are noted in the book as extreme clueless in this regard, who tries to be "cool" but always fail.
That sounds really interesting. Can you remember at all which part of his book that argument features in? I'm assuming you're paraphrasing some part of it. No worries either way, I'll definitely get around to reading the whole thing at some point!
Chapter III "metaphysics", Chapter V "schism", and the whole of Chapter VI.
I suspect many sociopath's are playing to a parent's voice in their head as well. If your dad said things like "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing." You might spend your life trying to win your dad's approval and behave as a monster to get it. Not all parents put pro-social messages into their children's heads.
It's not institutional success and wealth, performative/dramatic fame, or affiliative prestige. It's power. Alex Danco noted the difference between real power and prestige ("detachment from reality") and it is worth checking.
P.S. And then you got the loser class which is "dad went out to smoke" scenario.
I don't think David Wallace and Charles Miner are good examples of sociopaths. There is no evidence that they were initially lazy employees of the company who schemed their way to the top. Jan is probably a better archetype of a sociopath.
IMO, the three archetypes in the Gervais Principle are only relevant to large bureaucratic organisations and the people within them. Anyone who has spent too much time within such organisations (like me) can relate to a lot of what Venkatesh is talking about.
"Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit."
This is absolutely correct and explains why so many large bureaucratic organisations appear to be so over-staffed with middle managers. I especially recommend part 5 of the essays 'Heads I Win, Tails You Lose' https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/10/14/the-gervais-principle-v-heads-i-win-tails-you-lose/ which anyone in a large bureaucratic organisation should read, if for no other reason just to avoid being the unwitting fall-guy for senior management.
A long time ago, I wrote this post https://www.macroresilience.com/2013/12/04/how-to-commit-fraud-and-get-away-with-it-a-guide-for-ceos/ influenced by my time in banking and the above-mentioned part 5, on how CEOs and senior managers can and do capture the upside of fraud without the risk of being held culpable.
I never knew how to describe Venkatesh Rao. Postrationalist heresiarch is good.
I don't think the framework fits the real world (but will refrain from rehashing comments making those arguments in my own words). That said, because playing "fit the square peg in round hole" is a surprisingly fun game in general, let me try and fit myself in:
By Rao's definition I was once a Sociopath and deliberately chose to switch to Loser, because I knew it would make me more successful on pretty much all desirable axes. "But, Neike, if you choose it intellectually, you're still a Sociopath by Rao's definition!" The problem with that framing is that I made this rational decision approximately twenty years ago. It's long since become an instinctive and emotional setup and that was the plan all along. Rao's "Loser" category is my cherished default. I can still step outside it (in fact, recently did so on a particular subject), but it takes (1) remembering there is an outside, (2) wanting to step outside, (3) a bit of non-zero emotional labour to make the transition (again, very intentional).
I feel like the categories would be more useful if the author didn't insist on trying to hammer it into a cynical frame. He could start with the names: "Strategist" / "Loyalist" / "Idealist", as one possible substitution triad (not trying to suggest this matches perfectly well or is even unambiguously positively framed, they're just the first three that came to mind). Might make the whole thing more digestible/accessible and might make it easier to fit his ideas onto the wider real world.
Agreed. I thought the same thing. He's an exceptional writer. But his book is never going to achieve acceptance purely on the basis that the categories are too arch and cynical for mass approval.
Let's remix, shall we?
Sociopath-Loser: "Sigma Grindset" and anti-bureaucratic entrepreneurship
Sociopath-Clueless: ACX and the polytechnic neo-liberal non-governing elites
Clueless-Loser: SocDem and the community college populist class
These all souned familiar, but there is a dimensionality to these three forms.
>I can see bits of myself in the Clueless archetype. I like legible systems. I’m the person who did really well on standardized tests, really badly at networking, and ended up in medical school because it was the highest you could go on test scores alone
>But I’m bad at listening to authority figures,and quit my last job to start my own company. Also, Clueless people are supposed to be bad at using language in original ways, and I’m a professional writer.
Clearly Scott does not fit into any of the categories Venkatesh spells out. What's also important is that he does not have a corporate job. Venkatesh was writing about the kind of people who choose to work corporate jobs for extended periods of time.
Yeah the framework worked reasonably well as I thought about my time in a corporate job. I was clueless for sure!
Weird how people switched from not "choosing" to work corporate jobs to "choosing" to work corporate jobs just as capitalism started getting big. Maybe working at a company brain-fries you to think this way, but that doesn't really seem to be the way these categories are framed.
Not choosing to work corporate jobs has always been a thing, regardless of the influence of Capitalism. Scott is an independent psychiatrist, for instance. Those have always been around.
I am self-employed too. Corporations sound fuckawful. Also I applied to a bunch of corporate jobs in the (largely evil) American insurance industry before finding I could make a living wage from my hobby and just doing that instead.
People are not "choosing" corporate jobs. Those are the jobs available to them. When given the choice, they are choosing almost anything else.
Expend this scale, and we get Alex Danco and Michael O Church. The gig economy on professional labor is already a sign that it is clueless circa 2020, which goes with the bloated mid management and professional deluge (see also Peter Turchin's "Elite Overproduction"). The cottagecore and etsy-fied life is for cool losers, and the ones who can naturally LARP "grindset" and surmise Great Reset is for future sociopath/elite/opportunists.
Scott is principally Andy-like, the half-idealist half-opportunist BoBo class. He is not completely deluded/idealistic, nor willing to be stained by opportunism, but has he ever considered to return to blue collar or prestige-free working class. https://alexdanco.com/2021/07/08/michael-dwight-and-andy-the-three-aesthetics-of-the-creative-class/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AlreadyRed/comments/1zso5x/spergs_cynics_and_manipulators_how_powertalk/
The idea that Sociopaths identify and promote other Sociopaths, particularly when they are defined as underperformers is implausible under the book's own definition of the groups. Why would a Sociopath want to help another Sociopath? By definition they are disinterested in social approval. Clueless are supposed to be better at object-level work, so promoting a suspected Sociopath is to intentionally seek lower object level performance. On top of that, since there are layers and layers of Clueless between the established Sociopaths at the top of the company, an entry-level Sociopath is going to have almost no chance of getting noticed by high-level ones.
The only way this could make sense is if Sociopaths commonly found personal enjoyment in a master-apprentice type arrangement (And before you post it: yes, I thought of Sith Lords too). But for entry-level Sociopaths this would mean that a still-climbing Sociopath in middle management (the only people that routinely interact with entry-level folk) would need to risk their own career growth by spending time and opportunities on a Sociopath instead of an object level performer. I admit that master-apprentice might occur, if both Sociopaths can reliably cooperate to advance together. "Riding a manager up the ladder" is a concept I've heard of more than once. But it doesn't seem like it could be *the* way things work, because unless there are continuous chains of Sociopaths from bottom to top, which would be *really* obvious as the only way anyone gets promoted to upper management, the Sociopaths at the head of each chain are rising under their own power.
Regardless, I don't think looking for early underperformance among executives is likely to work out as a validation of the theory. If nothing else (and there's a lot else) object-level performance and management are *by definition* different activities that should exercise different skill sets. You can show that Managers promote those that exhibit Manager aptitude even if they're not a great object-level performer, but that is exactly what you'd expect an actually good Manager to do. It doesn't by itself attribute any of the Sociopath characteristics to the Manager class.
Building a patronage network? Master/apprentice isn't just for fun, it's a conduit for the sort of illegible power that can only work through bilateral arrangements or small cliques.
(epistemic status: ehh)
So the motivation for a ranking Sociopath to patronize a budding young Sociopath is to enable collusion at a level of open selfishness that would be impossible to have with the Clueless, who would be appalled/disillusioned at "corrupt" behavior? Seems reasonable, but isn't it just trading off the work of manipulating the Clueless for the work of protecting oneself from sudden yet inevitable betrayal by the junior Sociopath? Perhaps it's nice for the ranking Sociopath to have a little of each to break up the monotony of running the world.
Splitting of senior management and C-suite work, and making middle management easier to handle? Also that layer is not doing small labor, medium craft, but big "action" (mobilization games).
Thanks for explaining what appears to be a clear case of "sociopath-splaining"
Consider the iron law of oligarchy, in view of Rao's description of sociopaths.
"Underperformers" is both right and wrong; somebody who grasps the social realities of a business, and has the ambition to be promoted, is not going to pour most of their effort into the work they are assigned, but rather the work that gets them noticed. Any given institution will tend to eventually be run by those who are interested in running the institution, rather than in implementing the institution's actual goals. Rao's sociopaths are just doing that thing.
However, the three things should to some extent be regarded as strategies, rather than archetypes of people, strictly speaking; something like "near thinking" and "far thinking", rather than "phlegmatic" and "choleric". Sociopathy is "Meaning-making", Loserdom is "Making do", Clueless is "Doing". Sociopathy is also "big picture", Clueless is also "detail oriented".
Do Rao's terms carve reality at a useful joint? Well, I'll just observe that a lot of people have carved reality at similar joints; I think so. Do his terms add any kind of meaning?
Well - here's the thing. Literally, no. You can come up with other, similar terms for what he is describing, and make the entire thing seem kind of like a fantastical structure built out of nothing; okay, if "sociopathy" and "wise man" boil down to the same kind of thing, what the hell is he talking about?
But even though you didn't actually learn anything new reading his stuff - and if you stop and think about it, you weren't introduced to anything new, you already know all of that stuff - you still somehow understand some other set of ideas better.
That's kind of curious, isn't it?
Imagine a generalization of this as a trifactor model of human behavior is best. Unfortunately common sense is becoming less common and cannot be sensed directly.
I'm pretty sure the way actual sociopaths get promoted up the corporate ladder is they spend all day toadying up to their bosses instead of working, and eventually after stealing from the company for four years straight/having literally no qualifications whatsoever for a field which requires accreditation/spending all day on petty sadism with their underlings rather than doing anything useful/etc, they get found out and fired. This is just astrology for annoying cynics.
This is more clueless than sociopathic TBH, e.g. Andy, Scott, and other Yuppies. The "sociopaths" in this context are expected to be entrepreneurial and C-suite smart in nature.
Sociopath is a diagnostic criterion for a type of mental illness. Using it wrong doesn't change this.
Very mid response, but okay. (/s)
For serious, the people who understand the phrasing already rectified the names as Opportunists-Idealists-Pragmatists.
Torn between disliking the Gervais ideas generally for being a bit self indulgently grimdark (things are true in proportion to the intensity of your desire to find them repellant, instead of true because when you try them out you say “huh, that worked”) and trying to map it to my own “modules” way of thinking.
I did laugh out loud over the correct change anecdote. I have a lot of grandiose thoughts about how government should be restructured and two weeks ago I passed out in the nursery rocking chair after putting my son in his crib. I woke up having tipped completely backward and was stuck in the corner of the room with my feet in the air and a really neat neck cramp. It took the better part of ten minutes to quietly escape. My first thought when I realized what the hell was going on was: “this is a very unbecoming set of circumstances for someone who thinks himself to be correct about major policy issues.”
As Scott mentioned in the article I think enough of this is true to be interesting but when you take it down to the individual level it sort of falls apart. I tend to think these are all just modules that exist inside people that get brought out depending on their own nature and the environment they find themselves in and often working at the same time. Work in c level corporate America but it doesn’t seem you get promoted without doing a good job. I call my similar modules for loser the player module (ie you want to play a game and bring value to your team, you get feedback from teammates and think at the task level) the coach module (you want to command a team and get feedback from wins and losses and think at the tactical level) and the game maker module (you think strategically, realize there is a degree of arbitrariness to games, but hopefully understand it’s not totally arbitrary because only some games repeat and propagate). I think I’ve been all three of these in the corporate world at various points, sometimes all at once, and so has everyone else I know.
I will grant when I was just quietly stewing over the fact I knew answers to questions my bosses didn’t know I felt a lot more bitter about management, before I self reflected enough to realize that unless they knew I knew the answer it was sort of my fault for not speaking up more. Once I did I managed to advance pretty quickly. I also tended to think of self-promotion and networking as really gross Machiavellian things instead of just practical “people can only work with you if they know who you are and what you can do” before I actually had to lead things. Then it became a lot less cute for people to play humble/be shy about what they could do when we were trying to meet deadlines. I do get where the grim dark stuff comes from. I guess I sort of had just had a very stupid prior belief that everyone should just be able to see what was in my head without having to be told. Anything to actually deal with that externally felt like bullshit work that was selfishly done just for my benefit. I mentor people a lot now and it is amazing how many others also see that as some kind of gross evil thing, instead of just the practical work of helping your organization build a mental modem of itself, especially other millenials.
A lof of this is about typology. I wonder have you ever researched in depth MBTI?
Have you?
It's funny that Rao puts Michael Scott among the losers, since I've long felt he was one of the most realistic depictions of a sociopath in popular culture. He's not some sort of ruthless, calculating machine, but a walking embarrassment, because he lacks the capacity for embarrassment or any other number of compunctions that might allow him to form a useful theory of mind
Rao noted how he is the antipathy of corporate sociopaths ("Alpha" and "Grindset" peoples who are do not fit the clinical definition), and instead are clinical sociopaths who turns the office into a psych ward. The entrepreneurial personality (cognitive psychopathy, rational theory of mind) and the corporate parasite (affective psychopathy, lack of intuitive theory of mind) seems to be different.
"Most people have a special place in their heart for the book that first made them understand the idea of status economics."
Very curious for some examples of books on this topic.
Is this the second in a multipart series on "garbage books Scott wouldn't give a second look except that he kind of vibed with the author's blog?"
I think these need content warnings. ("Content Warning: No content.")
I mean, he's still reading it so we don't have to.
But yes, perhaps a "I think this book might be nonsense" at the top might be economical for those who don't want to watch Scott struggle.
I love the "Content Warning: No content."!
This is the third installment I'd say? For Sadly Porn, Lacan and this one, I was kind of expecting a punchline, an explanation that the books might seem to contain useless nonsense whereas in fact... But no.
Sadly, Gornisht.
This book is literally the potentially most interesting part of the author's blog, published as a book.
Scott, what was the unusually good undergrad psych textbook you read? And since I don't expect Scott to respond here, did anyone here have a great UG intro psych textbook?
Wait, I'm the guy who doesn't care about status hierarchy?
So... a loser then.
Reminds me of Moral Mazes too, although I'm not quite sure on how. Fascinating book / book review.
I'd probably be more open to this analysis if the classes were normies, competents and leaders. One of the things I didn't like about The Office (American one 2 epidsodes seen) was the contempt for average people.
Normies, "Autists", and "Psychopaths" as a non-transitive loop. Someone memed it before.
I was thinking about it a bit more and thought of Thomas Kuhn's "Normal Scientists" as the Competents/Autists/Clueless class. Perhaps instead of Normies - the Lumpens. I was also thinking that the Competents divide based on their ability to interact with Normals or Leaders or Both. Competents generally have trouble coping with those internally unmotivated and with people who don't follow the rules but those who can deal with one or the other can prosper. Those who can deal with both may very well outperform the natural leaders.
Try American Manifesto by Christopher Chantrill, or Michael.O Church's MacLeod, or maybe L Dean Webb's Counterelite Theory, or more abstract, Samo Burja's Empire Theory.
Fun-time activity: Take a taxonomy that claims its author is in the only group of clear-thinking people, hypothesize that it's broadly correct about everything EXCEPT that group, then complete the pattern.
If Losers crave validation from their peers, and Clueless crave validation from on high (systems/authorities/ideals), it seems to me that the third group completing the pattern should be people who crave validation "from below"; i.e. people who want to be venerated by the masses.
This might motivate them to, say, seek prestigious titles (like "president" or "CEO"), manipulate blame and credit, hoard wealth and influence, and spread narratives that paint themselves as virtuous.
(If you were a sith lord whose power comes from manipulating the social masks that other people mistakenly think are real, would YOU publish a book explaining that?)
That is the problem with these kind of grand overarching categories; you don't know what the other categories *really* think/believe.
Rao is a self-described Sociopath, so he's giving *his* view of "this is what the Losers think and what motivates them; this is what the Clueless think and what motivates them". But of course he can't *know*, he can only observe from the outside and put his Sociopath spin on it - those chuckleheads really believe all that bullshit! If he's motivated by "what's in it for me?" then he can't understand "I want to do a really good job on this for the pride of the work" or "My job is not my life".
True and worthy of interviewing, since self-accounts are good as well.
Here are some extra observations:
1. People identified that the best IQ difference betwee leaders and employees should be 18IQ (~ 5 years of extra experience), which matches up with Rao's rule of thumb
2. Those that are stereotyped to have IQ of 110-125 (10 points higher than the crowd) are often branded as "midwits" who wants to self-promote, whilst not knowing better, whilst those with 125+ IQ (20+ points higher than the crowd) often knows a greater truth that closely match with the crowd. this matches up with 'Curse of Development'.
3. Rao also identified in his tweet that collaboration with 10x differnce in wealth (equivalent to 9IQ) is unworkable and antagonistic in nature, whilst 100x in wealth (equivalent to 18 IQ) is merely awkward but not plausible as patron-client relationships or sociopath-like self-humbling.
4. We can also observe that Senpai-Kouhai (colleague seniority) culture has a bit of inversion of dynamic of Sensei-Gakusei (mentor) culture, the former more likely to happen as Clueless-Loser or Sociopath-Clueless posturing and ego inflation of high-performing losers and clueless, whilst the latter is more Sociopath-Loser "real talk" as mentor is beyond correct, whilst trainee should accept in full humility.
I've had the same thought about all of these Lacanean posts, with each article increasing my confidence.
Based on the idea of the selfish gene, we would expect most people to believe in and support society (because otherwise it would collapse) but also some number of defectors will exploit this idea for their own gain. But what is it like inside the head of a defector? Probably something like: "society is a lie and cooperators are deluded or manipulated sheep". Both groups assume their own cognitive processes are "normal" and that the other group must have been traumatized or developmentally stunted in some way. Lacan seems like a defector psychologist trying to "understand" cooperators.
I don't have the data to answer the question of whether defectors or cooperators are somehow developmentally "superior" to the other, but I can say that I sure am glad most people are cooperators. And as a cooperator I am fine with defectors being treated like the viruses that cooperators perceive they are. (Note: not a call to violence, just an endorsement of things like laws and social norms.)
I think most of us cooperate to some degree and defect to some degree depending on the exact situation. (And that we've each constructed an internal narrative in which our particular choices on this matter were the right ones.)
I know this isn't really the point. But the use of the word sociopath and loser and the like really speaks to a kind of insecure social weirdness. Like the whole alpha/sigma thing. It really does seem like astrology for guys to me.
It seems like a tool meant to deny the humanity of the majority of people and to create some kind of elite. You're a sociopath so YOU negotiate your role with society and try to push it into being what you want. Don't feel like you're succeeding? Well, you're one of the Clueless! Don't worry, just read this book and get a clue. (Alternatively, buy my course for the low, low price of $999.) But still you're not like all those awful normie losers who definitely don't get it.
And I'm not making this as a moral comment. If you think that you're modeling the world wrong because you understand people with alternative goals not as having those goals but as failing at having the goal you have objectively decided as being correct..
It reminds me of all those corporate samurai books that were population a few generations back. Yes, other people are just ordinary office drones. But YOU are a samurai slicing your way through deals! It's a way to self-glorify. But it also has an underlying ethos of overwork being good and corporate competition in a specific career as the ultimate good.
Imagine if it turns out Sigma (Open and Stable free thinker exiting the system), Beta (Conscientious and Extraverted to climb the system), and Delta (Agreeable to survive) as psychometrically different lol. (/s)
But seriously, this is just estates or class theory reapplied in the modern times for small groups. Whether you want to exit, climb, or "make a difference" are all clearly marked out.
Keep in mind that this is inside the narrow context of an established corporation, where motivations are totally predictable and the guy who wins is usually the least scrupulous. It's also describing the way that things *are*, not the way things *should be*, and it's a dynamic that, e.g., Congress could disrupt or destroy entirely if it ever felt a need to do so.
These mechanisms exists as the "Cycle of the Firm", you could be describing the startup phase of a corporation.
There are wider contexts that this applies to, e.g.
- class systems https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class
- society at large https://americanmanifestobook.blogspot.com/search/label/contents+three%20peoples
- religions https://cluelesscreationcorporation.quora.com/#!n=6
- academia https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/wd7qxFBF2swRscBiS/academia-as-company-hierarchy
- high school (lol) https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0743558418809537
Great post.
I know that when Scott reviews a book he always tries to get inside it and understand it on its own terms. But in this case, that sounds like way too much of a stretch. Using a sitcom as the main source of examples for an analysis of real life creates a credibility canyon, and it seems like that needs to be addressed somehow. I suppose I'm supposed to have heard of Rao and be very impressed by him and believe that his experience intrinsically means he knows how The World works better than me... but isn't the point of writing a book that he has to demonstrate his knowledge?
Why should anyone not just throw the book away, saying, business insights from The Office is a stupid idea?
>Also, a few weeks ago I got in an argument with a clerk over the right amount of change, after double-checking it turned out I was wrong and the clerk was right, and even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it. Doesn’t really feel very ubermensch-ish or transcended-the-need-for-other-people’s-good-opinion-y.
There are two ways this can cause embarrassment, one signifying an internal locus of control and one signifying an external one. Here's a test:
If the clerk had agreed with you on the amount of change, and you'd only realised *later* that you were actually wrong, would you still feel embarrassed?
If not, then you're definitely working in shame mode and want others' respect.
If you would still feel embarrassed, then this is an internal guilt thing and not related to others' opinions of you.
Granting that the idea is right or even semi-right, I still don't get it. If the only way to become a CEO is to forswear all value systems then what's even the point?
I absolutely believe most people are "special in their own way" and consent completely to judging people's value to a group on their strengths. That seems like a better use of my limited lifetime than truly reckoning with the godless nature of reality or whatever. You stare into the void, it's Katy's birthday and we're going to have cake.
Also, I know n=1 but when I underperformed at my jobs I got fired.
I think by "underperforming" he means "just enough to keep the job but not going above and beyond".
When I was in my salad days, I swallowed the line about work hard, be enthusiastic, do more than you're asked, and you'll reap the rewards. I learned fairly soon that companies love that kind of worker, because if you do extra work for no money, they don't have to pay or promote you, so it's free labour. I did start my working life at a bad time (Ireland during the 80s economic recession) but advice for getting jobs was "volunteer to work for nothing and if you do a good job, they'll offer you a permanent position".
Need I say this didn't happen like that? When I was willing to do the job for nothing the company was happy with my work and would let me stay there as long as I liked. When I asked "so any chance of a permanent job?" suddenly there was nothing to be done and I could leave. There was also the job for which I had the relevant qualifications and experience, I applied, was told "Sorry, we're not hiring at the moment, not even for temporary summer work". Later on I found out - let's call her Jane Doe - got a job the same as I applied for. "I didn't know Jane was qualified in that field", I said innocently. "Oh she's not, but it's a summer job for her to earn money until she goes back to university", was the answer. So how did Jane get a job when the business wasn't hiring even for summer work? Well it just so happened that Jane was the daughter of the Managing Director...
So yes, since then it's been (a) if I really like the work and the job is interesting and/or (b) they really do badly need extra input for a short haul, then I'll go above and beyond. Outside of that? If I get my day's work done and then it's just messing around on the Internet while I clock-watch until it's time to go, that's the way the day goes.
Does that make me a Loser? Okay, I'm a Loser. I don't care. I've done the eager Clueless bit and it got me nowhere. I'm not Sociopath enough to want to climb the ladder and be the one giving orders and setting policy.
Exactly. But there's a category for people who do exactly what is asked of them too in the above analysis. It clearly separates out "underperformance" from "barely adequate performance."
Tbf it also separates out "underperformance because you think this job is beneath you and you're scheming to get promoted" from "underperformance because you suck" but if I'm really honest with myself, even though I think the latter is more acceptable, it was probably the former with me. With that said I've also never stood on a mountain in a thunderstorm and realized that the people in the valley below and the ants beneath my feet are of equal moral weight or whatever, so I clearly am missing some trait this author would think I should have.
If you're standing on a mountain top during a thunderstorm, the next thing through your mind after "the people in the valley and the ants beneath my feet are of equal moral weight" will be a bolt of lightning, because making yourself the highest point in a storm is an excellent way to give the gods a target to aim at and get yourself fried 😀
"underpromise, overdeliver" is a weird addage, but it applies here (same as "don't be a wise guy").
after reading my backwards through most of ribbonfarm a year or so ago (thus getting to gervais only after digesting most of his later posts), most of venkat's posts seem like elaborations/studies on the theme "all losers/clueless are alike, but every sociopath is sociopathic in his/her own way". on the surface, the whole sociopath category as he describes it does seems really crude and status-gamey, especially a decade+ since, but i feel like the entire series was all a setup for what he went on to explore - in other words it created a sort of negative space to explore.
probably the best lineage of posts (reverse-chronological) i can come up with off the top of my head that feels like may prove this:
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2019/09/04/worlding-raga-7-worlds-of-worlds/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/11/21/the-age-of-early-divinity/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2018/03/29/the-key-to-act-two/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/06/27/been-there-done-that/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/11/09/ceos-dont-steer/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/31/human-complete-problems/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/04/28/immortality-begins-at-forty/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/12/17/we-are-all-architects-now/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/17/how-to-be-a-precious-snowflake/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/20/the-cactus-and-the-weasel/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/10/08/the-adjacency-fallacy/
- https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/02/25/the-epic-struggle-between-good-and-neutral/
I always think of TLP's point that everything in a system happens on autopilot. The sociopaths aren't promoting underachievers by whatever measure gets people promoted. The system gives sociopaths an overachiever ranking (to justify the promotion). The system set up a bad measure completely deniably from the people it benefits. How many people do you know who claim to be doing excellent work who don't get promoted? I know a lot who complain about this, and I think the implication is that they are clueless.
Isn’t this kind of a reformulation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs? Losers and Clueless are stuck at belongingness/esteem, and Sociopaths are at self actualization.
The business claims are obviously just ridiculous; does anyone really think that someone like Bezos would have underperformed as an entry level engineer?
It seems like the useful ideas boil down to: 1. Be an independent thinker. 2. Don’t confuse the esteem of others for your self esteem. Which is well… kind of obvious even without the dark enlightenment schtick.
Bezos isn't really an engineer, though, is he? Even though that's what he gained his degrees in, really he's a salesman, and that's how he succeeded. Getting an entry-level job was to pay the bills while he worked on his real passion:
" He first worked at Fitel, a fintech telecommunications start-up, where he was tasked with building a network for international trade. Bezos was promoted to head of development and director of customer service thereafter. He transitioned into the banking industry when he became a product manager at Bankers Trust. He worked there from 1988 to 1990. He then joined D. E. Shaw & Co, a newly founded hedge fund with a strong emphasis on mathematical modelling in 1990 and worked there until 1994. Bezos became D. E. Shaw's fourth senior vice-president at age 30.
In late 1993, Bezos decided to establish an online bookstore. He and his then-wife, MacKenzie, left their jobs at D. E. Shaw and founded Amazon in a rented garage in Bellevue on July 5, 1994, after writing its business plan on a cross-country drive from New York City to Seattle. With Bezos at the helm and Scott taking an integral role in its operation—writing checks, keeping track of the books, and negotiating the company's first freight contracts—the foundation was laid for this garage-run operation to grow exponentially."
So he started off in an engineering role, shifted gears to customer service, moved into banking and then hedge funds, and was promoted upwards until he decided he had enough seed cash to leave and start what he really wanted to do.
'Underperforming as an entry-level engineer' may not be quite the right description, but it's clear he wasn't really interested in the engineering side and he got out of that and out of working for other people as fast as he could. So you could say that, relevant to his ability, he did 'underperform' as a engineer because he wasn't sinking all his effort into that job.
I think he has an engineers mind - must have to create the logistitics network he did. For example the famous "API dictat" was something an only engineer with a ton of vision could have pulled off and it was absolutely central to amazons success
Now try the updated 8-layer hierarchy, there is a difference between Dwight (guild belonging), Mike (social self-esteem and cognitive), and Andy (aestheic self-making) in there too.
It's obviously powerful to be able to position oneself as the Other who creates meaning for alleged 'normies' who cannot act without the validating presence of such meaning-structures. (The old expression 'making the weather' comes to mind.) People who make a grail of this stand-apart power do write about it quite seductively and poetically.
Often, though, those people undervalue the concreteness of the 'masks'. Statements like "The climactic moment in this journey is the point where skill at manipulating social realities becomes unconscious." is where they kind of lose me. The more likely outcome of a 'dark nirvana' is profound nihilism and inability to engage with the required but meaningless rituals.
Why is it that those kind of books always read like "ten reasons why you should be a sociopath and manipulate everybody for your own advancement" ?
That's what it takes to get on in business? I dunno, but it does seem like "if you want to succeed in business, all you must care about is making money and getting power so you can make even more money" and as the saying goes, "if you want to see what God thinks of wealth, look at the people He gives it to".
He does in his later post hinting on proper "side gig" methods of getting out, but inside the system it is definitely a mess.
> I might try Be Slightly Evil next and see if it enlightens me further.
I was disappointed by this, and most other stuff written by Rao. I used to follow him in his Quora days and liked him a lot, but at some point he either didn't have anything interesting left to say or (more charitably and probably more likely) he felt he had to put out more volume, at the expense of the density of good ideas.
It feels as he is trying to be really clear and get into the heads of masses. It is only bad if you are a middle-of-the-world rationalist and you want a cliff's note.
The Gervais Principle IS the work that introduced me to status economics many years ago, earning said special place in my heart, but your critiques are right.
Reflecting on it again, I think the office culture examples kind of hamstring its ability to say what it really wants to say about human nature. The categories are a mess when you try to apply them outside of the corporate atmosphere (or even inside some corporations (or even inside most corporations)). But his thoughts on so-called sociopaths have been most insightful to me and reflect my own experiences coming around to moral anti-realism / materialism, and the subsequent challenge of finding meaning there.
In my understanding, the "real" categorization scheme, from which the Gervais categories are borrowing alpha, is just the spectrum between symbolic thinkers and physical thinkers. Symbolic = buys into social realities and one's own manufactured realities. Physical = everything is quarks and forces, and humans lying to themselves. The Clueless and Losers are two kinds of symbolic thinkers, the former a bit further down the spectrum. Gervais categories say more about office-specific behavior, but if you want to distill out the parts about psychology - the real fundamental difference between Michael/Dwight and David/Charles, *as people* - it's their different positions on the axis of symbolic vs physical understandings of reality.
Written before reading the comments:
When I read the Gervaise Principle on the blog, I would have assumed it was too cynical, but there were a number of people who said it explained what happened in their jobs.
One thing missing in the review (maybe it wasn't in the book) is that the theory is about how businesses (perhaps also governments and non-profits?) evolve. They can start out making some sort of business sense, and then they get taken over by sociopaths (they're very focused on taking things over) and the dynamics from the book become dominant.
Seconded this as Peter Turchin's Elite Overproduction in corporate setting, too many people made to be fired in case something happens, but not enough useful men to deliver value in the organization, so no potential firings.
So Elon Musk is a genius, and was successful in being admitted to a pHd program, where I am sure he could have been very successful.
But rather than let this success hold him back, through the lens of the Gervais principle, and bind him to this graduate role, he had the courage to drop out after 2 days, and then self-actualize himself into a billionaire who might land earth on the moon.
I guess that's why he's a billionaire leader.
"Rao theorizes that most of the middle layers of companies are giant and powerful machines built by Sociopaths to guide and redirect the flow of blame and credit."
This is a pretty big part of the thesis of Robert Jackall's Moral Mazes, which I would highly recommend. For me personally it made a lot of my workplace more legible. Based on your review here of the Gervais Principle, I personally find Moral Mazes to make far more sense as a fundamental explanation of the function of the firm.
The framing is pretty problematic here. It borders on excusing sociopathic behavior by assigning almost equally derogatory terms to the alternatives. If you're not a sociopath winner you gonna be a clueless loser?
Yes corruption is everywhere including being very present in corporate structures, but it doesn't mean it's a good thing to make excuses for sociopaths. That's how you turn society into a corrupted despotic banana republic. And yes it's a constant battle that everyone should be waging. It's one of the most common theme in epic narratives. What's the point of this apologia for the dark side.
There's a kind of cynical dark aesthetic to Rao's work, but ultimately he doesn't seem to actually glamourize the darkside. If you actually read the gervais principle in its entirety, the sociopath does not sound at all appealing (though maybe as a loser I would say that). "Loser" and "clueless" apply to success seen through the lens of power, whose methods are inherently dark, but ultimately empty
Opportunists vs Idealists vs Pragmatists? (borrowed from somewhere else)
As I read the summary (and especially as I read the comments that seem to buy into the book’s framing), this increasingly looked less to me like “a functional theory of corporate structure” and more to me like red pill/incel literature reskinned for careers.
Like incel literature, the core of its appeal isn’t in its accuracy as a model, so much as the emotional needs it can fulfil for its target audience(s):
- Providing the unsuccessful and hopeless with go-to excuses/comfort (“I didn’t fail because of anything I did, I just have too few millimeters of bone in my jaw/not tall enough/not enough of a sociopath so success was always impossible”)
- Providing a fantasy which merges a path to success with vengeance. A "forbidden" path where the incel/loser is told he can succeed by becoming a sociopath/Chad/alpha and treating other people as less than human. On this "dark" path, “getting back at them all” is not just a benefit, but a necessary step all successful people must take. This affords the fantasy of cruelty which, instead of just making me cruel, makes me both cooler for practicing the forbidden arts and morally defensible because it’s really the only way anyone succeeds.
- Bringing the whole thing together with a status-framework in which the incel can, in his mind, elevate himself above others and associate with the successful class despite his lack of actual success, and insulate himself from critics of his mental model (“I may live with my mom, but I’m a sociopath like Elon Musk,” “all you guys online telling me this theory is nonsense are just losers/betas who aren’t smart like me and don’t see the system for what it is”)
So the appeal of the model is only tangentially related to its accuracy, and ultimately the model tells you more about its most fervent believers than it tells you about the corporate structure itself.
No wonder we end up with dysfunctional corporations that can’t see past next quarter the same way alpha male jerks land pretty girls with too many issues to hold down a healthy relationship.
From his taxonomy, the losers are basically the smartest group; they're the people who pursue their own personal happiness, and achieve social success, and live internally meaningful lives. If you grok who the losers are, they should be the group you aspire to be part of, because society is basically organized around them, and the stuff they think is the Good Stuff.
The clueless exist in an orthogonal reality to everybody else; it's basically meaningless to compare them to anybody else, because they don't care about the things other people care about; basically, the clueless are everybody who isn't "normal". If any of the categories fit me, it's the clueless; like, ultimately, I prefer when I'm working hard, because I enjoy working. I've had to work pretty hard to avoid getting promoted to middle management over the years; people keep trying to rope me into it, but being responsible for other people gets in the way of the shit I care about. And I basically don't care about money. From the perspective of the corporate-ladder-climber, sure, I'm clueless. I want to be exploited, in a sense; give me shit to do, keep me busy, I'm the most satisfied that way.
The sociopaths are broken Losers, and it's necessary they begin as Losers, for whom the only happiness available is experienced entirely indirectly, in trying to help other people experience a little bit of happiness; alternatively they may choose other forms of emotional satisfaction, having both had, and lost, the capacity for happiness itself. It's not a literal sociopath; literal sociopaths are going to be in the clueless category. The sociopaths in Rao's categorization have to follow a particular trajectory to get where they end up, and part of that trajectory involves something like a crisis of faith in humanity which a literal sociopath wouldn't be capable of.
That's part of the point, though. If that were really what he meant, why not be clear and recategorize "Losers," "Clueless," and "Sociopath" into "Smart People," "Confused People," and "Broken Losers?" If you're trying to sell people on an accurate model of corporate culture because the model is accurate and useful, you want (ideally) to communicate the model clearly so that your audience can understand it, appreciate its value, and then buy into it. Using some reverse-polarity description system where you refer to all your most successful cases as "the failures" wouldn't make any sense.
But it's fine for Rao's model, because he's not selling an accurate model based on the virtue of its accuracy and usefulness, he's selling an emotional sop dressed up with just enough defensibility as a model for his audience to buy it without having to acknowledge to themselves they are buying a sop. And "succeed by becoming a broken loser" doesn't achieve his emotional sop objectives the way "be a little evil" or "succeed by embracing your inner sociopath" does.
Thus the fudging is necessary, because more accurately he described his model, the more clearly his audience would see its deficiencies and recognize it for what it is. In the real-world corporate context the kind of category based success/failure framework he's arguing for doesn't occur. Examples of all 3 categories can be found among the successes and most individuals fail regardless of category. Which leaves the model no more accurate than something like Enneagram or Strengths-Finder, but way more toxic to its audience.
I think this implicitly accepts his framing of himself as a Mover-and-Shaker, a person who is manipulating his audience into doing what he wants, a powerful and charismatic cult leader, a reality-creating Sociopath.
Whereas I'm pretty sure he's just a guy who wrote a description of the world around him as he sees it.
I'd read it more as identifying his product being the fantasy (for himself and the reader) of being a member of/becoming a member of/the existence of a reality-creating sociopath class, instead of the product being an accurate and useful model of human interaction.
I feel like maybe you should read what you have just written several times until you notice the contradiction?
Alternately, you could write what you think I'm saying here and why you think it's wrong? That would probably be an easier way to figure out whether I've mis-stepped somewhere or if you're just misunderstanding me.
I'm sure "you are wrong for these hundred very good reasons which I swear I totally have but which I will co-incidentally keep behind this curtain" feels good to write on the internet, but it's not particularly persuasive.
Statecrafting and Entreprenuership as equivalent ala Samo Burja's Empire Theory and Great Founder Theory.
Rao seems to claim that 80% of the population see themselves as the most beautiful, special person ever - I always thought that was a middle-class thing? Although if he's studied organisations where you have to be middle-class to get in, it might well be true within the sample.
Working class rank-and-file "we are just wholesome citizens" vs middle class "we are the righteous"? IDK but the "special" thing is more America's Got Talent type of uniqueness, not the "man with a purpose".
That's not what I was aiming at. The bit about "Each grows up knowing that he or she is deeply special in some way, and destined for a unique life that he or she is “meant” to live." sounds to me much more like what you'd find in university-going circles and less in the kind of school where most people know early on that getting a stable job in a shop is a more realistic outcome (and the sooner they get out of this education thing, the better). Of course these people can watch AGT and dream of becoming a superstar, but I don't think each of them grows up convinced that they're destined for it - reality has its way of intervening in that thought process early on.
Rao is tone-deaf in that regard, but the gist is: the stable job minded people will always have hopes and dreams that are aspirational, virtures that are internal and self-oriented (everyone has unique talents at their trade, everyone should be respected as a human beings, everyone is equal under the law); the university class of people will have grand-scheme ideals that are completely detatched from reality, often detremental to themselves and/or others, and they will force the agenda unto others (opinion leaders with no teeth, political "activists" and their windbag zealotry, Karens obsession with passive-aggressive politeness and authority).
Ok I read the posts.
There's some useful stuff in there. In particular, the need for legibility among the 'Clueless,' and tying that to arrested development seems useful. Less as a way to describe a specific type of person, and more as a way to understand behavior that has always struck me as nonsensical, both in myself and in others.
Trying to please the gods of the microphone (as Scott described this bit), is an incredibly useful lens for bizarre decision-making. The gods aren't real. They may be modeled on real people or things (e.g. your parents, the crush that rejected you, The Lord), but the version you're trying to earn approval from is entirely your own creation. Because you need a path to the approval, you'll constantly put objective goals in their mouths that are measurable enough for you to say "yes, I did it" or "no, I didn't." But also since your self-image is entirely defined by seeking their approval, if you meet a goal, you'll just have to give them a new one. (Hey, that's what all that Lacan stuff was about!)
Unfortunately, in real life, that's not... nobody is measuring your objective worth, they're too busy trying to establish their own. So when you try to use your "gain the approval of my private God" methods to gain the approval of peers and coworkers, you come across as deeply out of touch with the social reality around you. Because you are out of touch with the social reality around you.
The second bit though - about social illegibility within groups - seems genuinely unhinged to me. I get that "people have a relatively set amount of social capital/status" is in service to the ultimate thesis is that only money/power/sex *actually* matter and we're making up the rest. But this is never actually justified in the text, and I don't see any reason to assume it's true. Human beings have all kinds of impulses that might be derived from the material/power/sex requirement of life, but now operate independently of it. There are definitely status-affirming clubs out there, a lot of them. And within clubs there's always some status jockeying. But generally speaking I think people join a band if they like to play music? Humans sometimes congregate in groups because groups can do things better than individuals, and it's weird that possibility never even gets discussed.
As for Zarathustra, I'm not buying. I saw the attempt to explain that there's a difference between intellectually understanding The Absent God and viscerally understanding The Absent God. But, like, I'm constantly aware that the words people are saying and the games they are playing are meaningless diversions on the way to the grave. It's a serious issue. I see people parrot the hot take of the week and inwardly roll my eyes at it too. Generally 90% of the things that get discussed in my social circle register to me as "Please like me, please please like me please." I definitely prefer to discuss ideas over events and/or people. And generally I think I mostly march to my own drummer.
But none of this has given me some kind of supernatural ability to manipulate the social or spiritual realities of others. Mostly it just makes me very tired all the time. Is there some version of this taxonomy where "sociopaths" are replaced with "people who are tired of being at this party and would like a nap?" Because honestly that seems the more likely outcome of being hyper-aware of the motivations behind all the social dynamics occurring around you.
If you read the original, Rao talks about promoting Sociopaths out of Losers, and when you grasp what he's talking about, it's pretty obvious the Sociopaths -have- to come from the Losers (although he doesn't seem to necessarily agree, I think he is confusing himself with his own terminology); his description of their "final form", when they have fully matured as a Sociopath is, basically, yes, "Tired of being at this party and would like a nap", except the party is life.
Want to know the magic trick to manipulate the social or spiritual reality of others? When they say "Please like me, please please like me please" - tell them you like them. That's it. That's the magic trick of Rao's sociopath. It is also, and not by any coincidence, entirely the core of Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. You can then assert control over other people's behavior basically by withholding that same affirmation.
(There is a dark mirror version of that, of course, once you notice there's a core of people who are actually saying "Please hate me, please please hate me please")
Now, as for status illegibility - he's basically right, at least as regards the interactions of Losers, who are also sometimes called "Neurotypical" people. (Most of us neurodivergent fit somewhere in Clueless land; what, you think the guy who is obsessed with airplanes isn't going to work really hard when he becomes a pilot? He's in a private utopia, of course he's going to work hard, and of course he'll have absolutely zero problem with other people exploiting his hard work, because then they're incentivized to make sure he gets to keep doing what he loves doing)
Status illegibility is primary about not having a pecking order. The wrongheadedness is by trying to assign a number to status, because that's not how status works, that's an attempt to create legible rules to try to make sense of status. (I'm amused that Rao thinks that he is a Sociopath)
This is status illegibility: You're not better than me. I'm not better than you. In a social dynamic, if somebody starts acting like they're better than everybody else, everybody else gets kind of annoyed with them and takes them down a peg or two, or just stops hanging out with that person.
Also, the person at the "top" of the social hierarchy is, basically, whoever is getting everybody together; the person organizing the social event, often, but it can be somebody else if, say, somebody else organizes a social event with a group of people who are basically a group of people because they're all friends with some other person.
The top-ranked person is basically whoever would win a popularity contest in a given group; observe that the most popular person in a group can be the least popular person in a subset of the same group. Status isn't a number, it's more like a graph.
Rao's bottom-ranked person is completely wrong, though. The bottom ranked person is not, in fact, the lowest-status person; status doesn't exist like that, it's a graph; you have to actually be popular in a group in order to achieve the kind of status Rao describes. Indeed, the bottom-ranked person, in Rao's terms, can actually be the most popular person - ever been in a group where the most popular person, everybody's favorite person, was also the most likely to be the butt of the jokes? (Oh, you mean most groups?)
The thing is, I kind of knew that was the trick and didn't care. Rao's article made it sound like knowing *how* social structures work automatically leads to manipulating them, and I don't see any reason why that would be true.
As for the rest, I agree completely with your take on the illegibility thing. If my friend group is running a role playing game, I'm the highest-status person for the duration of that game. If we're going out to a bar, I'm definitely the lowest-status. And this status swaparoo is fractal. At role playing night, maybe during a break, someone brings up unique LGBT issues. Suddenly I have no social credibility, since the whole thing doesn't apply to me. Then we get back to the game and my credibility is restored.
But it's this very dynamic that makes me feel like the whole taxonomy is dumb. I'm neither the highest-status nor lowest-status person. I'm "the most role play-y person." Rao would say that this is the exceptionalism myth at work. I need to believe I'm above-average but I'm a massively average person, so everyone agrees to judge me on my DMing skills, while they judge our nightclub friend on his sociability. That way we never know our explicit pecking order and so we can't determine whether we're over-valuing or undervaluing ourselves by associating with this group.
But, uh, what kind of deranged lunatic picks their friends by mentally evaluating comparative social statuses? There are plenty of examples in Rao's articles of the Clueless trying to join groups and messing up their application by trying to value their status too explicitly. But Occam's Razor suggests a more...sane?...option: People don't think in those terms either consciously or unconsciously, they instinctively dislike and avoid people who do, and the Marx Principle is silly. Maybe the point of groups is mostly to share experiences and ideas with other people because humans have drives besides the will to power, material wealth, and sex.
My personal guess was that a younger Rao tried to join a group he thought was high-status (They're so cool), got pushed off (imagine hanging out with somebody whose reason for being there is because they think the people are just so cool), and interpreted that as a statement about his status (I'm not cool).
Later, when he stopped trying so hard, he found he effortlessly fit in with the high-status people (possibly in college), interpreted this in turn as a judgment about his relative status, and tied all this into a narrative story about how his newfound nihilism made him part of the cool club. Which in a sense is true, if my little story is correct. Maybe he noticed that the "social ranking" of the group seemed to shift depending on context, but rather than updating the strict linear model of social status, tacked on an additional bit about how people can be "the best in the group at X", thereby explaining the shifts in social status without eliminating the numeric ranking system.
But also, then, later, he realized that said nihilism made hanging out with the Losers in the cool club was kind of tedious; they cared about a bunch of meaningless nonsense; maybe he only interacted with that group of people in a context in which the organizer of the group was always the same person, so never saw a shift in the "top dog" of the group; it was always the same person.
Mind that this is a just-so story, and the point isn't so much to be accurate so much as to demonstrate how somebody can sensibly come to a particular set of conclusions about the way social interactions work; I'm just custom-designing some evidence that would lead somebody to a set of beliefs. I definitely do not endorse that this is actually true, and apologies to Rao if he happens to be reading this, particularly if I accidentally got it right.
Best to generalize these functions, such that the descriptive can be well rounded. I for one hated Michael O Church and Christopher Chantrill for being partisan hacks, but their logic are weirdly similar.
If "hacking it" is impossible, it becomes Alex Danco's theory of social class, and being good at top dogging is more or less genetic or socially stratified.
The three-pronged classification rings false to me, but what rings true is the part where everybody works hard to construct a particular set of values which allows them, personally, to be high status according to those values.
Instead of values causing behaviour, behaviour causes values. You do what you're naturally inclined to do anyway, and then construct a system of values in which your behaviour puts you right up the top. Naturally inclined towards chastity? Then chastity is a virtue. Naturally inclined towards sluttiness? Great, then you're a brave sex-positive feminist who is fighting the dark forces of et cetera.
Then so many conflicts in society arise when people who have carefully constructed one sort of value system rub up against people who have constructed another sort of value system.
It was an epiphany when I realized that what I wanted, and what most people want, is a world that rewards their natural tendencies. I’ve tried to stop awarding myself points for just following my default settings and overvaluing my aptitudes.
Some things that came up for me. 1. Does the author define "sociopathy"? As I understand it, "anti-social" is the prefered term in psychology now. 2. As I see it, the kind of sociopathy the author is taking about is more the kind of personalities who tend to prosper when society is on the brink of collapse/going through a economic crisis or depression. I don't personally see any of the characteristics he cites in upper managment in a western, business-as-usual democracy. 3. I agree with Scott's counter-argument vis a vis the problem with psycological labeling. I've often thought it would be useful to run a meta study where you randomly aggregate personality traits into personality disorders, and then see how many people identify with those disorders vs disorders which are non-randomly generated. I've a feeling there probably wouldn't be much of a difference. I'd be interested to hear if anyone knows of any study like that that's been performed.
The author describes the Sociopath at length, but it is fair to say that "Nihilist" is a better description than "Sociopath"; the steps to get there involve realizing that none of the things you cared about actually matter, there is no objective truth to anything, that experience and reality are entirely subject, so on and so forth.
But you have to kind of care about those things in the first place to be positioned to behave like Rao's Sociopath. Why would an actual sociopath care about climbing the corporate ladder? What's up there for them? Money is the shit you want when you don't know what you want. Power to do what? And the more you climb that latter, the greater you fall under scrutiny from other people, the more other people pay attention to you. Better to be a clown, or a truck driver. If you're smarter, you could be a surgeon. If you want to get paid to kill people - do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life - there's the military, or police. Like, what are your actual goals?
Climbing the corporate ladder is for somebody who wants to "win" at middle class values, who wants to be seen in a particular way, who has, basically, normal-people dreams, motivations, goals.
I had the same thought- why would a sociopath want all this power or money or status? Maybe this is in the book, and it’s all just masks the sociopath wears until the last mask falls away revealing the internal abyss. And then the sociopath…what? Maybe they’re left with a choice between suicide or picking a lane and becoming a Loser.
I’m pretty sure I’m some kind of sociopath and that I’ve done this myself. I never had the follow-through to capitalize on my sociopathic tendencies anyway, and after a prolonged period of hopeless nihilism I’ve chosen a set of beliefs and a quiet life. Maybe if I was better at being a sociopath picking one of the masks back up off the floor would be an option?
@Scott in a previous post you wrote on whether introverts make less money than extroverts, you closed with a question on what introvert's experiences were like. I responded on that post, but after having read this post, I have a few more insights. I think I was conflating "introvert" with "analytical" -- the two correlating, but being technically distinct things.
> Clueless people [...] may be brain surgeons or rocket scientists. But they are fundamentally incapable of grasping the shifting, illegible nature of social reality. They retreat to objective reality - over-performing at their object-level job - and taking the official legible rules really seriously.
This resonates with me as an introverted (and perhaps more importantly, analytical) person, and might be one of the reasons I don't get promoted (into a sociopath) and thus don't make as much money as the extroverts (who perhaps correlate with being sociopaths in Rao's meaning of the term???) do.
Does anybody else feel eerily reminded of Fussell's classes? The main difference being Fussell's Elites are only pretending to be above it all while Sociopaths have true insight they use to be above it all.
Fussell's description tracks better/seems more plausible though. I believe the reason is that Fussell was looking for actual classifications with as detailed indicators as possible (and his point being that since this succeed, class is real) while Rao seems to describe much more how these categories interact. Maybe better terms would simple be "Rule makers", "Rule abusers", "Rule aceptors"
But since both describe practically the same observation, I am very confident they saw "something real". Or Human Brain Like Three.
The only real question left seems to be whether there is an alternative. Fussell describes a class X, I believe one point of Sadly Porn is to demand action independent of Rules.
I'm surprised you didn't mention anywhere in your review the meta-nature of the Gervais principle itself. Rao is offering a categorical schema, the quintessential sociopath move. The people who accept it uncritically are marking themselves as Clueless, the people who mostly ignore it are Losers, meanwhile any potential sociopaths reading it will naturally use it as a heuristic for manipulation and success, but only until they develop their own internalized, more dynamic system, which they will then presumably dumb down and foist upon others in a bid for greater control of an organization.
Interestingly, this creates an ironic scenario where the only people to OPENLY embrace the book and declare themselves committed to the sociopathic way of life are the clueless. The sociopaths would presumably know better than to put their cards on the table like that.
I think he was fairly successful at his goal of turning his Ribbonfarm blog into a business/lifestyle brand that a small but very impassioned group of people followed religiously and sunk money into. Sort of like what Scott did, but a lot more deliberate and a lot more ruthlessly capitalistic. Depending on who you ask Ribbonfarm was either a pretty successful business blog or a pyramid scheme with Rao at the top.
As an aside, I remember going to dinner with a friend who was a Silicon Valley attorney and her casually mentioning how much she absolutely hated that her clients wouldn't shut up about him, which was when I first realized how deep his penetration a targeted segment of the market really was.
My impression 100%. Rao is a salesman, not a deep thinker. He's well read and smart enough to produce essays which are vaguely insightful or "hinting at something true", but nothing more. He's in the business of sounding like a "heresiarch intellectual", not in the business of figuring things out. Ironically, he basically gives his game away in one of the posts (title "premium mediocrity" if I recall correctly), where he sort of confesses to being a rather mediocre thinker who's good at projecting a certain status. In some other (old) post he lays out his strategy of turning his posts into a web of "illegible canon", which provides little intellectual value but is a good marketing move.
All in all, if you want real intellectual content and stimulation, forget about Rao. He's marginally interesting at best.
Personally, I'll readily admit to being in Rao's Clueless classification. I'll just observe that Rao himself is in here with me. A Sociopath wouldn't create a schema, but would instead assign that work to somebody else.
Now, is this response a Sociopath response, or a Clueless response? And how does the fact that I have asked that question, change the answer to that question?
Hold up, I've gone off script. Let me check the notes. Ahem.
The idea that the schema of the book is self-referential is fundamentally Clueless; it is literally following the rules to their logical conclusion, treating them as inherently Meaningful. The very idea that there is a deeper meaning to the schema, that the rules are deeply and inherently meaningful in and of itself, requires that you are looking for Meaning; a Sociopath already knows that Meaning doesn't exist, and it's all just paths to power.
OPENLY embracing the book is textbook Sociopathy; you don't have to believe in the Meaning. A Sociopathic priest isn't going to openly question the Bible; the only course of action is to openly embrace it. Openly embracing the book is only putting your cards on the table if you actually believe what it says.
... says the script.
Yeah, I can't track the levels of irony, but I think you're off if you genuinely think that a sociopath doesn't develop his own vision. That's basically ALL a sociopath does, is "Envision" with a capital E. Mostly what they are envisioning is their own success and the destruction of anything that stands in their way. According to a normal interpretation of success, the reason this kind of thing is tolerated is because these people tend to be very brilliant and innovative and good at their jobs, so the things that they envision really are valuable to other people. But according to Rao, this is all a side-effect. The REAL reason organizations embrace sociopaths is that they can't function without some sort of hierarchal schema in place, and sociopaths readily provide an infinite supply of that (with them always at the top).
Its essentially Seeing Like a State, only instead of a group of government engineers and surveyors, you have a handful of mad Game-of-Thrones characters Will-To-Powering their entire operation into something that can function as an entity whose drive roughly mirrors that of whoever comes out on top, which is the only way it can exist productively at all.
A vision, sure. A detailed schema? No, that's Clueless work. Which is kind of implied by the Seeing Like a State bit; legibility is the domain of the Clueless.
This probably wasn't an intended outcome, but I know understand the name behind the show Arrested Development.
I think Scott gets at the primary value of the book (albeit a little obliquely) towards the end of the review: this is not a typological system for understanding one's self or others in general, it is really meant to be be a business book. Meaning it's about organizational psychology: how we behave in relation to others within a group that has a a shared goal and a hierarchy. As such, I think it gets at something that is real; I've certainly seen these kinds of dynamics at play in the hospitals I've worked at, and I would place myself pretty firmly in the "loser" category. That said, that doesn't make me a loser in my personal life, it's just who I am within the hospital ecosystem.
"Also, I don’t get the impression that most top executives are people who had traumas that caused them to see the unmediated Real and achieve dark enlightenment. Lots of them seem to be the rich kids of rich parents, who did well in school and have some level of business talent. I’m guessing the average single mother trying to make ends meet as a receptionist has had ten times more unmediated-Real-experiencing than they ever will. I don’t know, maybe I’m using an unsophisticated definition of trauma and the Real here."
Clueless can be top executives too; sociopath is more of a reality mediating role, and it's independent of title.
I think this is only the second time you reviewed a book I'd already read. I enjoyed the review, but it was especially interesting that the stuff you seemed to not agree with was the stuff I found the most Obviously True. Automatic knowledge of highest and lowest status within loser groups, etc.
Sociopaths control "Loser Spirituality" by providing positive and negative feedback in order to force status updates.
Your attempts to fit Rao's types into other writers types is missing a key fact about systems: systems are observer created, and where the delineation occurs is entirely arbitrary. Picture a radial graph of personality types; Rao's 3 buckets cover the same people as other authors' 3 buckets, but the radial lines are in completely different places. I suggest "An Introduction to General Systems Thinking" by Weinberg if you haven't already read it.
Interestingly, it does seem to me that Rao's buckets are almost exactly 60 degrees offset from Lacan's.
"They can be found carefully studying the Mission Statement, trying to figure out how best to embody its values. Or putting up inspirational posters in the hallways. Or trying to win the hokey competition for Best Office Morale so they can get the first prize pizza party or whatever."
The Apple TV+ series 'Severance' plays with this idea quite well. It imagines everyone in an office mentally "raised" to be Clueless as a means of control.
I am very conflicted because on the one hand it sounds like weapons grade bullshit (and I read the whole thing back in the day), on the other...
My current "boss" is completely Clueless, and he was literally promoted because everyone else was more competent than him. I was offered his position back in the day, and I refused because it sounded tiring and I had better things to do as an individual contributor. So the poor guy constantly attempts to herd cats (= myself and my colleagues, all cynical Losers) which we find somewhat cute, and if he ever steps out of line his boss - who I'd consider an enlightened Loser or a Sociopath with too much conscience - yanks on his leash.
So yeah, Rao's series is growing on me with more experience in the trenches.
I think the Garvis principle might just be from peoples dependence on certain emotions. [Robert Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Plutchik) theorizes that there are 8 basic emotions each pushing for an opposite response given a certain context (Prediction - Anticipation and Surprise, Threat - Anger and Fear, Affect - Joy and Sadness, Morality- Veneration and Disgust). The Morality axis is where Clueless, Sociopaths, and Losers differ. Associated with prosocial behavior it, we get an emotional reward when we receive words of praise and when we punish defectors.
Clueless prioritize the Morality emotional rewards above all others emotions. They are extremally high in conscientiousness, and as Adam Smith would say the desire "to be loved and to be lovely". Part of their salary is actually that warm fuzzy feeling of being part of the tribe.
Sociopaths, people capable of completely ignoring the Morality axis of emotions, have a tool that others lack. They are willing to be hated, and do the disgusting things that would be beneath the others dignity. They also are immune to the moral arguments that others put forward, and trade in longer lasting currency than "attaboys", and headpats.
The Losers, are people who are either getting their emotional payout elsewhere, or lack the skills to get it at work. If they do get it from work, it is from their coworkers, in the standard normie way. While in a work setting, they are probably prioritizing Joy, or responding to threat (anger and fear).
Here is an alternative hypothesis:
The Boomerang Model of Emotion has three phases:
Appetitive motivation (Sociopath/Elite/Opportunist/Executives Powertalk) - High Arousal and Pleasure
Neutral motivation (Loser/Labor/Pragmatist/Employees Gametalk) - Low Arousal and Mid Pleasure
Defensive motivation (Clueless/Gentry/Idealist/Management Posturetalk) - High Arousal but Low Pleasure
Appetitive shift feels like a description to the "velvet rope" plan, whilst defensive shift feels like the "employee of the month club" (to borrow from the MacLeod model).
Edit: I tried to convert my model into yours to see if I would get the same results, and failed. Rather than delete this madness I'm leaving it. I found your hypothesis interesting or I wouldn't have attempted this. I have no idea what model of emotion is better. I like the 8 factor one because it feels more right to me, but brains are black boxes, and who knows if it makes sense to abstract a certain number of agents out of them.
I really need to look up the Boomerang model. Off the top of my head I do think it might be possible to flatten the 8 factor model into it. Prediction and Threat are high arousal states. I hesitate to flatten Morality, but I would guess that Veneration would be positive and Disgust would be negative. Pleasurable states would be: Anger, Veneration, Joy; Painful states would be: Fear, Sadness, and Disgust.
Management would tend to be in the business of predicting the outcome of work, so both the Sociopath and the Clueless would get a bump in arousal from that. Sociopaths would be likely to engage in more anger than fear which would probably boost their pleasure relative to the others. I can't really predict who is in more fear, the middle management or low level employees. I think the clueless and sociopaths are likely to feel joy at work. But the clueless who aren't able to make their underlings happy might feel sadness (IDK). Also depending on the work environment the fear might far outweigh the affect axis (to the point it might be disregarded).
On second thought I can't really predict what jobs are more pleasurable. My instinct is that the Losers would be Low Pleasure and that the Clueless would be Mid Pleasure, unless the more invested middle management are more afraid. They do have more stress so that could be true. Having to include fear in the predictive model does add some complexity... I am going to be chewing on this for a bit.
I guess that is probably why I prefer the more factor models of emotion to the fewer factor ones. It is easier to make predictions by ignore sections of the problem.
Side note- My prediction converted into this model would be that Middle management would get a boost to Pleasure and Pain at work, while the sociopaths are operating without morality, and the losers probably getting more disgust (so pain).
I respect your opinion, but mind if I ask, can an 8-factor model be further condensed into 4 or 2 higher factors? Then it might be possible? Alternatively, maybe there is a correlation between stimuli-response rather than pure emotions? IDK
TLDR- I think stimuli-response and emotions are the same thing. People are just breaking it down differently. The number of factors needed probably differs for the context it is used.
I think Utilitarianism condenses the multifactor response systems into just just 1 axis (pleasure and pain). The other axis that the boomrang model adds is "prioritization". The more Aroused a situation, the faster we need to act. You probably can get a ton of milage into breaking down human action into these two systems. This might be a more accurate model. And for some people it might "feel" more right. We are biological ML systems and the wiring between different humans probably varies quite a bit.
The reason I like the 8 factor system is it feels more intuitive to me. My actions will differ wildly when I am in the different states; sometimes I feel like 8 different people are fighting inside me. I am extremely high in neuroticism and agreeableness, so maybe that might contribute?
I think people without much "spirituality" might have very weak "veneration", and so when disgust fires it just gets lumped into "Threat". This version has three axis -> https://www.psychologicabelgica.com/articles/10.5334/pb.340/ . The Threat Axis is called Domination.
The Big 5 personality Traits OCEAN might just breakdown what emotions or "meta pleasure-pain optimizers" dominate peoples decisions. Openness Axis is "Do you find the world threatening". Extraversion Axis is "Do you find people threatening". Conscientiousness is "Do you act as someone who feel strongly about the tribe would (Outwardly Moral)". Agreeableness is "Are you willing to subvert your will for the tribe (Inwardly Moral?)". Neuroticism is "Are you prone to being paralyzed or overwhelmed by Sadness, Fear and Disgust".
What was your "unusually good" college psych text?
I think your observation that these posts were a lot of people's introductions to status economies and that's why it has the power to change lives.
I think its big claim is that there are people who aren't playing status games, for reasons not explained by any acknowledgement that neurodivegence exists. I would like to see this claim evidenced, and so far have not, but I won't dismiss it out of hand.
(I'm neurodivergent and find status play a necessary nuisance.)
"You try it, and instead of getting praise/reward/validation all the time, you get those things rarely or not at all. If you can, maybe you go back to school (ie get a PhD), a strategy with problems of its own."
For purely practical purposes, I'd like to point out that if praise/reward/validation is what you are looking for, doing a PhD is not a very good idea.
Man, first Teach tells me I’m a narcissist, then Rao tells me I’m a Loser. Who will stand up for people who just want a paycheck, a free weekend and a good bowl of ramen?
Buddha.
The AFL-CIO?
You still have the paycheck, the weekend and the bowl of ramen, right?
Humble Vibe Check:
1. The "type overlap" can be further reduced into three subtypes as the socialite (Andy), cynic (Michael), and the loyalist (Dwight), and should be properly re-evaluated: https://alexdanco.com/2021/07/08/michael-dwight-and-andy-the-three-aesthetics-of-the-creative-class/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AlreadyRed/comments/1zso5x/spergs_cynics_and_manipulators_how_powertalk/ http://www.zzzptm.com/lss-002.html
2. Truth is possible within this frame, but how can we do this? "Pam Against Posturing" or romancing the "sociopaths" seems to be a possible solution, but it is still vague https://mereorthodoxy.com/michael-scott-theory-social-class/
3. Perhaps "sociopaths" have internal legibility (see also Jock humble brags), but not external rationalist and "publicized" legibility, whilst "clueless" desire open legibility (see also nerd rage), which is inherently instable in larger Dunbar scales?
This post had the effect on me that could be described as "assuming the worst", "overreacting", "blaming", "paranoia". It made me think that maybe I had been suckered into a position at work I don't want to be in as Clueless (middle management) in an occupation I don't enjoy, made me question my merits to run the unit as a meek pushover for the Socipaths (upper management), made me wonder whether I'd be happier as a Loser (worker) instead, not losing sleep over managerial responsibilities.
Meh, for me the theory seems conducive to a self-biased and suspicious outlook on my colleagues, and I really prefer to have a balanced and charitable view, where evidence about performance outweighs my personal intuition. To say "Hah, that's typical Clueless" sort of misses the point, because it disregards more objective measures of work dynamics. Maybe the theory seduces by tickling the suspicious part of your subconscious that desperately tries to look out for you, starting an inner monologue that goes something like "these other people are somehow bad, I dislike the way they talk to me getting me to do stupid bullshit I don't want to do, I do all the work while they just fart around". I immediately framed my own boss as a psychopath, but when I really think about it, she's a perfectly decent person who often has a different opinion than me but she's reasonable about our differences of opinion and we end up getting along well after a little bit of conflict. I immediately framed myself as a clueless, because it's a sort of a victim position to take, "I am reasonable, ethical, do my work well, and carry the heaviest load, woe is me!"
I think the categories wrap several dimensions into one.
like motivation and understanding
for example - someone could be out for himself, without great understandong how to pull things off. "whoever tries to get me killed is my enemy, no matter on which side he is on" - catch22.
someone could have great understanding of the organization, but do have some higher goal on mind, like God, country, Socialism, etc. These guys are clueless psychopath, and are really dangerous/effective.
"They identify underperforming entry-level workers as potential new Sociopaths. [...] Leadership puts these people on a track to upper management."
Why would Sociopaths promote other Sociopaths? Aren't they more likely to be a threat? Is using a Clueless or a Loser (with above average competence) in upper management management somehow bad compared to using another Sociopath?
I think sociopath are willing to make tradeoffs the others won't or can't. You need people willing to make ruthless decisions up top. Sociopaths are the only people willing to be hated. It is the untalked about skill in upper management. Also, the only way to stop your sociopath underling to work with you is to trade with them in a currency they will accept, and warm fuzzys will not work on sociopaths.
Two things: first, I really liked the Gervais principle when I first read it and it was nice to get a recap.
Second, I kind of can’t believe that you weren’t already very into VGR. You two seem very much like fellow travelers.
I believe Scott has linked "The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millennial" before, where Rao wrote:
> Yes, ribbonfarm is totally premium mediocre. We are a cut above the new media mediocrityfests that are Vox and Buzzfeed, and we eschew low-class memeing and listicles. But face it: actually enlightened elite blog readers read Tyler Cowen and Slatestarcodex.
I suspect that Rao confuses laziness and underperformance on the part of the "Sociopaths" with what the Italian philosopher Castiglione called "sprezzatura." From Wikipedia:
"Sprezzatura is an Italian word that first appears in Baldassare Castiglione's 1528 The Book of the Courtier, where it is defined by the author as "a certain nonchalance, so as to conceal all art and make whatever one does or says appear to be without effort and almost without any thought about it"."
The Book of the Courtier is a fantastic read, with both real substance and all sorts of weird details that paint a vivid picture of court life in Renaissance Italy. Its central concept is sprezzatura, the courtier's highest virtue (at least according to Castiglione); as the quote suggests, it involves concealing effort to achieve "grace." Sprezzatura is definitely somewhat deceptive, but can also be viewed as a costly signal of real talent (because only the truly competent can afford to expend effort concealing effort).
I find it easier to believe that Rao mistook sprezzatura for laziness and underperformance than that laziness and underperformance are Sociopathic virtues. This is partly because I don't exactly admire laziness but I do admire what I take to be sprezzatura when I notice it, just as I enjoy stage magic (not that I'd claim to be one of Rao's Sociopaths; I don't love the categories). It is also because I tend to defer to old books that sustained popularity throughout many ages and changing fashions.
I think he internally knows about this, just that "sprezzatura" itself is not as layman. There are a lot of nuances between managed expectation, and inability to perform.
"Sprezzatura" appeared in a recent NYT X-word. I never saw it before, and now it shows up here. I should read more 16th century Italian literature.
This post is not linked to from https://astralcodexten.substack.com .
Re this:
"1. Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses."
"2. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction."
This is the philosophy of Lauren Faust's "My Little Pony, Generation 4" (the one bronies like). Western literature has long used a Christian dogma of character, according to which characters are individualized only by the ways they fall short of perfection, and therefore authors create characters by giving them *flaws*. In MLP G4, by contrast, characters are individualized by having particular hyper-developed *strengths*, and their personal problems and social dysfunctions are caused by relying too heavily on their strengths. In Western fiction, each character must overcome his or her own flaw; in MLP G4, the entire group helps each character learn when to rely on their strength and when to do things someone else's way. Rather than each character individually seeking perfection, each character must learn how to integrate their strength into the group.
Someone should coin this the Faust's Law of Development Curse (hehe Faustian).
It was the philosophy of MLP all along, I love it!
Obligatory Dutton post https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlOQdr4S95c
Has the "higher managerial echelon correlates strongly with extreme social skill and a good headstart" been found wanting that we need resort to more complex typologies such as this?
I read this post, enjoyed it and forgot about it, and then went to watch Julius Caesar at The Globe. Fascinatingly similar, character constructs and strata; I’d encourage one (Scott?) to read JC now, having read TGP
I assume that Brutus reminded you of Rao's clueless. I suppose Caesar and Mark Antony resemble Rao's sociopaths; anyone else?
Who is similar to Rao's losers? Probably the characters I don't remember.
The way that the common men are caricatured is quite Loser-y
Love the audio versions of newsletters, but was frustrated that it wasn't an option for everything on substack. I find I'm pretty inconsistent with keeping up with Astral Codex Ten, and wanted to be able to listen to past versions. If you forward the newsletter to narrate@ad-auris.com it sends an audio version of the newsletter back! I've been using to keep up with everything.
Scott quotes Rao's introduction:
>Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance.
I suspect that this is mere rhetoric, meant to make the book seem significant.
But if it actually meant something, what would that be? Why would all 'writing of any substance' carry these risks?
Is it a banal identification of 'writing of any substance' with 'writing based on reality'? Or would Rao say that lesser sorts of writing can be connected to reality, too, just without being 'of any substance'?
> Somewhere in your head there is a microphone. It produces a little voice inside of you, whose approval you desperately crave. You would do anything for the voice to like you. Ghosts, mental models, and personified abstract concepts fight each other for a turn at the mike and the right to implicitly control your actions. Who wins?
I'm not sure if I'm interpreting this too literally, or whether this is an example of "What universal experiences are you missing?", but this does not match my experience at all.
> Sociopathy is not about ripping off a specific mask from the face of social reality. It is about recognizing that there are no social realities. There are only masks.
This is the kind of thing that took me right past rationality and into nihilism when I was younger.
Surprisingly few people state the antidote clearly: suffering is bad, and human flourishing is good. If you can accept those things and reject the idea that everyone should just give up and die, then that's enough to build a satisfying and beneficial ethical system upon.
This framework feels accurate, but incomplete. Compassion, for example, feels like it ought to have a place somewhere in there. I think you're right in pointing out that it's basically a random collection of traits sorted into three groups, where the traits could in theory be mix and matched freely, except that the frame presented here forms a stable status economy of sorts where the three groups reinforce each other's identities. By contrast, if you stuck an Effective Altruist, a crystal-wearing hippie, and a literal nazi in a room, their interactions would be entirely destructive and they would drive each other away. Rao's framework isn't the only possible option, just a successful example.
This framework mainly address how any within-tribe (of sufficient size) interactions of EA, hippie, and fashies would interact, not the interaction between-tribe interactions. Ring Leaders vs Useful Idiots vs "Sheeple". If we need to include out-group behavior, Samo Burja might have a better way with Empire Theory.
"Underperforming" Sociopaths are promoted to managers not because of low performance but because middle Management is a totally different job with totally different skills. A person who can't stand out as individual contributor (IC) but shows capacity to manage up can contribute to company in better ways than as IC. A person that stands out as IC will only go to management if they need to to get higher salary (and most of them are bad managers). A not good IC that does not show capacity to manage up will be soon dismissed.
Progressing in your career ladder inside a company usually means having to switch to a very diffeennt job with verydifferent skills from the ones you showed being good at , and companies want to make this inefficiency as painless for the company as possible. If all companies could have good parallel tracks for ICs and managers, all the rancor caused by having not brilliant IC performers being promoted would be greatly decreased.
A silly hypothesis: People respond to the idea of AI differently because they imagine that AI will be exactly like them, based on their place in this typology.
Sociopaths assume that AI will be a powerful and dangerous threat, obsessively fixated on a single goal and using any means—however harmful, however byzantine—to achieve it.
Clueless people assume that AI will simply be a complicated tool that mindlessly performs whatever tasks it is given, with no particular goals or agency.
Losers assume that AI will never happen, because humans are too special to be replicated. Or, if it does, it will look pretty much like humans do and we'll have no problem coexisting with it, as long as humans and robots both recognize and respect their own respective specialness.
Here is a counter:
Sociopaths does not believe in AGI, they just call it "AI" and solidifies goalposts like humor, irony, contextual understanding, and deep knowledge. They don't see it as a threat, as goal alignment has been a human-complete problem (similar to bureaucratic bloat and "cancel culture"). "There is no existential AI risk".
Clueless believes in AGI, it being a threat, and are scared of the moral implications. They will constantly mill over such idea in theory, but lacks backing in those deployed in the real world. They also cannot reconcile the difference between "AI bias" and "biological essentialism having merit".
Losers will see "AI" as an overhyped product akin to the toaster and freezer, or maybe a digital pet. If it behaves like a human, it can be handled like a human. They see that it can be easily fixed by data management ("don't give them data") and model interpretability regulation ("we need to see the algorithm").
This comment section is a mess. Half the people are using the book's definition of "sociopath" and the other half are using the popular psychological definition.
Well, Rao seems to have chosen his nomenclature for maximum offensiveness, not clarity.
Power seekers, object level driven and socially motivated might have been better terms.
"an unusually good college psych textbook"
Can you share the title and author?
"postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao"
what was his heresy?
"So maybe a better example would be to look at the top levels of corporations where performance is easily measured, and see how many of the big executives overperformed / underperformed / normalperformed during their first year. "
No such realm exists. Performance is *always* impossible to measure. If it was measurable, the Sociopath game wouldn't work.
I think it's really difficult to appreciate The Gervais Principle if you haven't spent a lot of time in the corporate world, which (to my understanding) Scott hasn't.
I'm reminded of a thread (https://nitter.eu/erikaheidewald/status/1368966115804598275) I read that also divided people into three categories: in this case, autists, neurotypicals, and allistic neurodiverse
in short:
neurotypicals live in the social reality
it is, to them, immutable and absolute
they will take the social ladder at face value and climb it for all it's worth
autists live in the abstract, physical reality
we do not see status.
it is arbitrary and nonsensical.
and allistic neurodiverse people basically sit in between.
they are seen as normal people, as they see and exist within the social reality, but they have difficulties fully understanding it, as they also see the abstract/physical reality, and assume those around them do too.
I thought at first one could map autists to clueless (we are, after all, clueless) but then I realized not living in the social reality is more a sociopath thing.
though, even that requires them initially living in the social reality.
I suppose it's unsurprising that a book on categorizing people in the framing of business doesn't include autistic people.
one can assume, then, that autists do not fit this trinary, and that the other two do.
the allistic NDs are a dead ringer for the clueless, existing in the social but distracted by the real.
which brings us to the neurotypicals.
strangely enough, the neuroypical is characterized as a status-seeker in a way that lends itself to both loser and sociopath interpretations.
perhaps this is the correct view?
both start out as status-seeking, but end up in different places.
so now we have a four-way model, with the neurotypicals being split up into losers and sociopaths, autists getting externally tacked on, and the "sees social reality but confounded by real world" group remining unchanged.
I don't know lacann's trinary, but you could likely pull a similar extention trick to make it fit.
it is worth noting that there are more than three (or even four) people in the world, and understand these are useful models at best.
if you ask two different people to divide people into three groups based entirely whatever criteria make sense to them, and the groups likely will not match up one to one.
these thing are abstract models.
they generalize and simplify to make stuff understandable.
atoms are not letters surronded by dots and lines, but that's what they teach in chemistry class.
Other than too many spacings, this has been reiterated before, and is worthy of an article on its own.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlreadyRed/comments/1zso5x/spergs_cynics_and_manipulators_how_powertalk/
I've heard rich people consider things that are punishable by fine to be legal, simply costing a given amount to do.
so that's absolutely a layer or two down.
I'm inherently suspicious of any books that classify sociopaths as the pinnacle of (social?) evolution. It's not the first time I've seen it, and somehow the idea is always explored by self-professed sociopaths. "Dark Enlightenment" is also a common motive, sometimes to the point of hilarity, as one blog I've read suggested that such enlightenment most often comes with a disrespect for highway speed limits (though it's only one of the first steps to the real sociopathic godhood, but such persons are already head-and-shoulders above various normies). Oh, and derisive names for everybody who's not a sociopath is also common with these books/blogs. But I can hardly believe these highly enlighted people would share their wisdom with us Clueless Losers. Unless... They maybe want our approval? And money. But also approval, or at least hate. Doesn't it makes them Losers, though? They might pretend they don't care one way or another, but I think anyone who takes up writing is seeking some form of external validation (I'd prefer you all to agree with this comment).
To your question about upper management and under/over-performance: I've never worked at a huge corporation, and suspect that it's distinctly different once a company reaches a certain size (aka - even management level employees are larger than Dunbar's Number). That said, I've worked in senior management for several organizations, and the top managers were mostly over-achievers, even the clearly sociopathic ones. Those that weren't clearly overachievers, I would label as highly productive anyway - they were just smart enough to get more done with less time and effort.
Separately, I think Rao puts too much stake into clear lines between groups. As with most people, I can see aspects of myself that fall into each of the three groups. At work, I'm probably more of a Sociopath - but I'm having trouble distinguishing the traits from the basic things a higher level manager would need. You can't be in awe of the rules when you're the person who writes and then changes them! I also have to regularly make decisions that result in significant negative affects (positive too, but those are easier) for other people. I'm not the owner from the 5th Element who callously fires thousands of people, but I've still fired a lot of people when it was needed, and it was often emotionally jarring to do. I've known too many high level managers who were upset at closing down an unprofitable business unit to think that they don't have feelings about it, but they still knew it needed to be done. In my home life, I'm probably Clueless - I overachieve and follow the rules. Socially (with other adults outside of my family), I'm more of a Loser, playing illegible status games so that everyone feels included.
What Rao shared does seem to be true to some extents and relevant. That different people approach questions in life and work with completely different outlooks is an important lesson. I realized it on my own when I would go from working with a group of management employees to working with a group of similarly intelligent and capable people who eschewed any management responsibility. I found it quite eye-opening to have coworkers who were 10-30 years older than me, who clearly knew far more of the relevant information to resolve an issue, who would come to me wringing their hands and looking for me to make a decision. At first I felt really awkward asking them for the information, past precedent, and then telling them to do the thing that they surely saw as obvious.
> Those that weren't clearly overachievers, I would label as highly productive anyway - they were just smart enough to get more done with less time and effort.
Clueless as Graeber's BS Jobs, or "Small-Souled Bugmen"/"Midwit", or the "Educated Gentry", those that does fake work and PR to maintain the status quo.
> I think Rao puts too much stake into clear lines between groups.
Imagine if there is a table for something similar to Ruby K Payne's class model, where one can be descriptive but flexible, then we can see if they are empirically valid.
> even though this was in an airport and I will definitely never see that clerk again, I felt embarrassed about the interaction for hours, and still feel pretty bad about it.
Do you feel bad because of this clerk's opinion of you, or because of how it changed your view of *yourself*?
> Whatever, Rao said (in one sentence) that everyone has multiple types. But then what’s the use of this categorization system?
Each of these categories are probably themselves masks that we add and remove contextually. It scenarios in which I'm comfortable or knowledgeable I might be more sociopathic, in contexts in which I'm less knowledgeable I might be more clueless. Or maybe that's just how a sociopath would approach it since they seem less beholden to one modality of action.
> For example, Lacan’s neurotics are defined by being subject to Law, and potentially by wanting to become the object of others’ desires, which sounds Clueless. But Lacan says neurosis is the most developed stage, whereas Rao says Clueless is the least.
Maybe it depends on what you view as "development". If you slice it by assuming social order is valuable, then neurotics are developed. If you slice by assuming that freedom to act is valuable, then they are clearly less developed, being bound to existing structures, modes of thought and action.
Maybe a (neuro)plasticity vs (emotional)stability personality distinction? Losers = low plasticity, Permanent Clueless = high in stability, Sociopaths = high plasticity, the "aspiring" = low in plasticity. The road to cluelessness = increasing stability and ignoring plasticity, becoming fragile to structural change. The road of getting on top = increasing plasticity first, then increasing stability.
Thank you for this wonderful review. I did immediately find myself in the "You read Nietzsche in freshman philosophy, and for a few weeks you vaguely feel like you ought to be the ubermensch" camp after reading just your summary of the book, so that last bit is definitely a mental bypass to avoid uncritically identifying with the content.
About this section:
"Most people have a special place in their heart for the book that first made them understand the idea of status economics. Gervais Principle does a good enough job with this that I’m sure it had a profound effect on some people. For me, that role was already taken by an unusually good college psych textbook, plus Robin Hanson’s blogging as remedial lessons, so I feel less transformed."
Which college psych textbook are you referring to?
Ehhhhhh. There's an implicit assumption that power and status are the only thing that matters. They do matter, but there's always someone with more. I try to have enough to sustain dignity without turning me into an asshole (because it pleases me not to be one). My demand for power is inelastic. There's nothing about objective reality that says maximizing personal power and status is optimal. It's subjective. Why should more powerful people get to choose what's important to me?
If you want to go full nihilism, no matter how sociopathic you are, it still doesn't matter, and you still die. So, what's the point? Any set of values you choose will result in the same meaningless fate. What's better about being powerful? You still suffer and die. Maximizing power only makes sense if you get something you want while you are alive. Desire is subjective, so why is anyone's desires more or less valid than anyone else's?
It seems to me that it's important to care less about others' opinions the weaker the relationship to yourself becomes. Total strangers on the internet (like you!) shouldn't matter at all. Sorry! Acquaintances matter more, friends a lot, and family the most. I've had good results. As internet platforms grow larger, the influence individuals have shrinks. The larger the potential audience, the less likely any of them will care what you think. You have more aggregate influence over a close friend than over a potential audience of thousands. The rational thing to do is to spend your time with your friends and family. This is all very obvious, but people don't act like it.
My father died right after he retired. That happens a lot! So, it seems to me, I should enjoy my job because the payoff for delayed gratification isn't certain. I also find that I am unhappy when I'm not working. Retirement doesn't hold much appeal. I will try to avoid it.
Money only exists to be spent in the limited time I have. Too much left over will only make my heirs miserable. Yeah, I want to be paid what I earn, but I'd rather buy less crap than waste time on pointless labor. I like my job and go to work happy.
Materialism is empty. Yeah, poverty sucks in absolute terms up to a point, but past that it's purely relative. It's up to me whether I care. I don't. Oddly, other people want me to. Even more oddly, I meet poor people wearing clothes that cost several times more than those I'm wearing.
Loser thinking? Shrug. What am I losing? If we're nihilists, I get to choose the game I'm playing because we all lose and none of this matters anyway. My worldview is as valid as anyone else's, so far as it's based on my subjective experience and not objective reality. Humor me.
I'll die. If I have any warning, I'll reflect back on a happy life. In the meantime, I don't worry about it.
re: Section VI
Don't try to use these ideas (or any ideas in any book of this sort) to understand/measure against yourself. Yes, everyone is unique but you extra double-plus unique along every dimension...
Rather, consider something like Twitter. Of course different people have different Twitter feeds, but at least in mind there are clearly three groups:
- there are the normies (who aren't actually in my feed, but apparently care about and generate the nonsense on the side, whether it's "Celebrity does thing" or "News that you're supposed to care about"
- there are the people I follow because they communicate about technical material I am interested in. It's very clear from the way these people feel the need to retweet politics that they basically match every point in the Clueless handbook. They are obsessed with legibility and rules (and all their political "zingers" are based on this, eg that supposed killer argument about abortion vs death penalty). They are mid-level book smart, but care much more about credentials than actual demonstrated smartness. They can only communicate, and in fact only think, in cliches.
And my god, what's the difference between the last sentence of the Eichmann section, "Just in whatever was going on at the time" and https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/i-support-the-current-thing ?
- finally there are the few people who could actually provide a decent answer to the Peter Thiel question “what is a heretical view you have?”. These are the Venkatesh Rao's, the Scott Alexanders, the Kevin Simler's.
The point is not that these people are actually sociopaths, or care about manipulating others, it's that they prioritize truth over personal comfort (losers) or socially constructed reality (clueless). The book puts this in a business context partially as a joke and partially as a "this is what's going on at the highest levels of power"; but this three-way dichotomy can be viewed from many different angles. My version as "prioritizing truth" works for me, others might immediately jump on as saying "sociopaths will lie to get what they want" (ie ignoring the point that genuine sociopaths are in fact well aware of the truth, they just don't care about lying).
The goal is to understand people, and a good framework is one that works for you. But of course, this can only be achieved (so I would say...) if you're in the sociopath camp.
If you're a loser, this all just seems like silly nonsense compared to family and having a good time.
If you're in the clueless camp, you will never get past your addiction to socially constructed reality to be willing to accept anything else.
Which camp are you in?
Well, do you have multiple (not just one) good answers to the Peter Thiel question?
Do you look at the political landscape and think "OMG, both sides and everyone who claims to speak for them are pathetic" or do you think "sure, they're both pathetic, but my team is RIGHT, it just happens to have a few pathetic members, and their team is WRONG"?
I don't think many people reading ACT are normies, but I do think a large fraction are clueless fantasizing that they are sociopaths.
This has been reiterated ad nauseum, might as well turn this into a book
https://www.reddit.com/r/AlreadyRed/comments/1zso5x/spergs_cynics_and_manipulators_how_powertalk/
It's less about typing people and more about seeing the sorting in a given organization.
Didn't Lacan say something about the psychotics being unable to imagine things or something like that? I remember you noted it was a very strong claim. Does it somehow map onto this book's view?
Pretty late to the party here, but there's something interesting in your comparison to Lacan and Rao's typologies.
First, consider that they are pretty incompatible with something like Erikson's development stages or Maslow's hierarchy or Kegan's moral development, while these models are quite compatible with each other (if shifting the emphasis somewhat).
Second, I find it really easy to imagine an 19th century version of Rao coming up with an tripartite division of "Worker, Petit Bourgeoise, Capitalist". Or a 12 century version discussing the differences between "Heathen, Heretic, Christian".
That is to say I think Rao (and Lacan) are identifying important aspects of the human psyche, but interpreting them through a particular historical experience. My read is that Rao's audience can probably find some comfort in the existence of his "sociopath" group (either as an aspirational objective or emotional backstop), but as you point out most CEOs/Founders are not existentially empowered manipulative ubermesnches. They are "just" the children of rich parents with talent, education and a network, but I suspect that gen-x'ers who faced the absurdity of late 90s/early 2000s corporate culture feel differently.
This is because the dynamics Rao observes clearly do exist to some extent (if you can't see yourself as clueless/loser/sociopath, I bet you can reflexively identify which are which in your workplace). Ditto with Lacan (to an earlier generation/context). But the archetypes presented are useful models for understanding a particular social environment, not an accurate description of human social psychology as a whole. Considering the latter depends on the former and vice versa, it's about as good as we're going to get, but we do have to keep in mind the limitations implicit in our construct.
Simply applying this model to yourself & the people you know in life seems a bit thick---the point is it's an organizational analysis and therefore mainly applicable to people's roles during the 9 to 5.
re: "This ought to be testable."
I think you misunderstand underperformance. It doesn't mean doing less than most people, or even acting like Victor Tugelbend in Pratchett's 'Moving Pictures'. Underperforming means convincing people that you can do more, if only...
This ties neatly into the concept of a sociopath as a person who creates social reality. If I can convince my boss that I'm holding back, then I demonstratably have some skill at manipulating social perceptions. It is the impression of underperformance that best signals my skills at manipulating others.