(I would love to have an app instead of using the browser to browse the site).
Just out of curiosity....why?
(I would love to have an app instead of using the browser to browse the site).
Just out of curiosity....why?
I suspect, but can’t prove, that now so many justify wanting something because of climate change that they don’t actually want a solution until and unless they have already got whatever they actually want.
Sociopaths contribute creativity and cold-bloodedness and drive decisions that others are too scared or too compassionate to drive. They are the ones capable of exploiting an idea, killing one good idea to concentrate resources on another at maturity, and milking an end-of-life idea through harvest-and-exit market strategies. They enter and exit organizations at will, at any stage, and do whatever it takes to come out on top.
The Clueless serve as a Cat’s Paw for Sociopaths and as a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. They don’t leave the org until they have absolutely no choice. They hang on as long as possible, long after both Sociopaths and Losers have left. They build up a perverse sense of loyalty to the firm, even though the firm is not loyal to them. To sustain themselves, they must be capable of fashioning elaborate delusions based on idealized notions of the firm.
Losers do the actual work of an organization. They produce, but are not compensated in proportion to the value they create. They made a bad economic bargain and traded freedom for a paycheck. They’ve given up some potential for long-term economic liberty (as capitalists) for short-term economic stability. They enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot. The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players.
Losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning Sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The Losers destined for Cluelessness do not have a choice.
A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows, it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction, rather than a runaway explosion. One of the functions of the Clueless, recall, is to provide a buffer in what would otherwise be a painfully raw master-slave dynamic in a pure Sociopath-Loser organization. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself, and anything of value is recycled by the Sociopaths, according to meta-firm logic.
Continued in Part 2
I like this. A lot to chew on for me. Especially the “optimize for the appearance of suffering” part.
A corollary of this is that when things are too easy (low pain) they are “cheating”, “don’t count”, or somehow “illegitimate”. I may have been making things too hard on myself for just that reason.
There are people who want to be at the top of an organization, for status or money, not because they care about the stated goals of an organization.
By definition, the larger and more successful the organization is the more these types of people will be attracted to it.
Also, by definition, these people are willing to do far more to get to the top than people who only want to “be good” at their jobs.
Given that willingness to do anything to get to the top, they have an edge on hiring and promotions and will eventually succeed.
To ensure they don’t lose their position, they will bring in people that are loyal to them. The only way to prove loyalty is by doing something against their own self interest and/or the interests of the organization. Loyalty means being willing to act dumb.
Over a long enough timeline, the odds that a large organization is led by people who don’t care about the goals of the organization approaches 1. And those leaders will bring in people whose most valuable trait is a willingness to act in a non-productive fashion.
100% Agree.
Similarly, I often force myself to write summaries of books I have read. I often “feel” like I learned something even though I can’t articulate what I learned or what I would do with that knowledge. Summaries help ensure that I’m not just taking that feeling of learning something at face value.
a swollen bureaucracy that’s mis-managing its money or power is a ripe target for politicians.
Politicians certainly rail against bureaucracies, but off the top of my head, I’m not aware of any bureaucracy that had its budget or its power cut.
Even the places where “defund the police” got some traction, it was generally accounting tricks. In many cases they ended up having funding restored shortly after or funding simply came from other sources.
My point being, it’s not at all obvious to me that there are actually repercussions for swollen, mis-managed bureaucracies. But I would very much love to be wrong.
Except blogs have been removed from the internet. And entire, smaller platforms are wiped from the internet.
It’s becoming less true that you can always move to a blog or a smaller platform. That’s what I said. Seems true and not in the article.
But I suppose I will live to fight another day.
Do tell
That is explicitly stated in the post.
Losers recognize that being a wage slave IS a bad deal. As a result, they do the minimum necessary to not get fired and keep collecting their paycheck. Again, this is a reasonable thing to do in many cases. For example, you may be a Loser in your day job so you can pursue your real interests nights and weekends.
As I wrote: that is becoming less and less true.
I’m surprised that that was taken so negatively. I’m not exactly sure why.
I strongly suspect you are incorrect. Having read much of Rao’s work, he pretty explicitly advocates becoming more sociopathic (per his definition). One of his other books is called “Be Slightly Evil”
As far as underperformers getting promoted, Luthans has published work on the difference between successful managers (defined as getting promoted) and effective managers (defined as having high performance teams). The reality is that they do very few of the same things and there is very little overlap between the two. Evidence shows that ‘doing well’ at work is not the best way to get to the top.
https://www.boardoptions.com/successfulversuseffectivemanagers.pdf
Thinking about this some more, I wonder if you could ever get to a place where pundits were looked down on for not making falsifiable predictions.
People with bad records and people who won’t go on record are both treated as second class.
Probably still too much to hope for.
One common issue though is that many intellectuals are trained specifically not to communicate falsifiable predictions. They often try to word things in ways that seem confident, but are easy to argue against after the fact.
Yep.
And most pundits skill is not in accuracy, but in building an audience. Media want pundits to make outrageous statements for clickbait/stop channel changing. General public want pundits to validate their opinions.
If accuracy was actually a concern, they would already be held accountable. There are several fairly easy ways to do it, society just has chosen not to.
It’s not just bending the truth. Being vague also gives you more discretion in decision making.
If you list objective criteria for a decision, then you don’t have discretion to give things out to your friends or deny things to your enemies.
2) If you’re not feeling “hell yeah!” then say no
I’ve thought a lot about this myself.
I think the first thing you have to stipulate is that this helps when deciding on goals, not necessarily the things you have to do to get the goal. You may be “hell yeah” about traveling the world, but not “hell yeah” about packing. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t travel the world. I don’t think Derek was arguing for this level of decision making.
If you buy that, I think the key is that it only works when you have a lot of slack. Derek Sivers is and has been independently wealthy and has way way more options than most people do. It’s a very good sorting move in that situation. If you have few options, you probably can’t use this as universally as he suggests.
It would probably be better described as staying within the Overton window.
It’s a different name, but by definition, this standard means you are not getting new, unorthodox opinions to the public.
OP was trying to figure out how to have respectability follow ‘rightness’. Only talking to people who are already respectable doesn’t help that at all.
Correct. Technology can only solve a problem people want solved. If people are being bullied into silence, the bullies aren’t going to let this happen.
Heck, they already have a way of silencing support for any new plan...
Do you ever find yourself inclined to not work as hard as you could so you don’t have to set bigger goals next week?
I agree with all this and think it can be generalized even more.
Whenever there are multiple ways to define success of a system, the parts of the system need to be aligned on which one they are going for. The whole can be less than the sum of its parts if not.