Reading Notes

The Gervais Principle V: Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

  • Hamartia - fatal error born of unavoidable ignorance
    • Concept from ancient Greece
    • Inevitably leads to destruction when combined with moral flaws
    • Humans are not only cursed by mortality of the flesh, but by hamartia-driven spiritual weakness
  • Nietzsche
    • God is dead - only the flesh is real
    • The only rule governing the universe is the constant grind of entropy
    • Entropy offers everyone a choice: death or reproduction
      • Clueless - choose death boldly
      • Losers - choose reproduction carefully
      • Sociopaths - try to find a way out of the choice
  • Heads I Win, Tails You Lose
    • Abbreviated as HIWTYL (“hightail”)
    • Tendency to grab more than your fair share of the rewards, and less than your fair share of the blame
    • Sociopaths are not interested in individual HIWTYL scenarios - they engineer systems and processes that reliably, predictably and stealthily generate HIWTYL situations
    • Systematically claim paternity for successess and orphan failures
  • The Golden Ticket Reconsidered
    • Golden ticket scenario
      • Idea that initially seems good
      • Seemed to go bad
      • Worked out good in the end
    • How would you try to maximize gains and limit your losses with such an idea?
      • Asymmetric incentives - bonuses for success, no penalties for failure
      • Use committees to distribute responsibility
        • Make sure that the head of the committee is a Clueless
      • Launder your ideas through committees created above
      • If the scheme succeeds, you claim success, distribute a small portion of the reward to the committee and walk away with the lion’s share
      • If the scheme fails, you split the blame three ways:
        • Nominally accountable Clueless chairperson - incompetence
        • Losers on committee - poor esprit de corps - accuse them of not being motivated/engaged enough
        • Processes used by committee itself
      • The processes used to shift blame should also try to reduce the total magnitude of the blame, by making major forseeable screw-ups look like minor unexpected mishaps
    • Three questions:
      • How do you generate HIWTYL situations over large scales and long time-horizons?
      • What happens to the portion of the blame not assigned to anyone?
      • Why shouldn’t we account for blame fairly?
  • The Hanlon Dodge
    • Hanlon’s razor: never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity
    • Use the stupidity of Clueless to mask the malice of the Sociopaths
    • Combine misapplication of Hanlon’s razor with the human tendency to link penalties intent rather than consequences
    • Shift the locus of blame from malice to incompetence to lower penalties
    • Sociopaths use Hanlon’s razor to feign incompetence themselves, or accuse others of incompetence, as necessary
    • Feigning incompetence - ends are justifiable, but means are not
      • Feign your own incompetence to get someone else to come in and do the work for your
      • Can be used to dodge menial work
    • Accusing others of incompetence - means are justifiable, ends are not
      • Engineer execution failures via indirection and abstraction
      • Acheive ends via “lucky accidents”
      • Example: ask employees to do “their utmost” to accomplish a goal
        • Allows Sociopath to keep their hands clean while ensuring that illegal means still get used
    • Seasoned Sociopaths maintain a permanent facade of strategic incompetence and ignorance, rather than just making up situational incompetence
    • Combine this with indirection and abstration in things asked of reports to create HIWTYL scenarios
    • What is the difference between a HIWTYL scenario and a scenario in which a report is given genuine autonomy?
      • If you want to genuinely give people autonomy and room to grow, you allow them autonomy in areas they’re strong
      • When you want engineered failures, you give them autonomy in areas they’re weak
    • Hanlon’s Razor allows Sociopaths to avoid doing unpleasant things themselves, achieve indefensible goals, and maintain plausible deniability the whole time
    • Theater of justification
      • Only Clueless and Losers debate whether the ends justify the means
      • Sociopaths know that there are only ends and justifications
  • Divide and Conquer
    • Losers, as individuals, are too smart to fall for Hanlon Dodges
    • Need to exploit groupthink
    • 2 key features of Loser groups to exploit:
      • Many active fault lines
        • These fault lines are necessary to ensure status illegibility
        • But can be exploited by Sociopaths to turn group members against one another without having to manufacture reasons
        • If enough schisms aren’t there to be exploited, offer incentives to one subgroup and they’ll naturally work to screw over the others
      • Naturally apportion credit and blame in ways that don’t balance
        • Losers will only accept blame in inverse proportion to self-perceived status
        • If everybody (or, at least everybody who is not the Omega) believes themselves above average, everyone will try to assign more of the blame to others and less to themselves
        • Opposite process with success - the higher your self-perceived status, the greater the share of success you try to claim
        • Internal valuations of earned credit are inflated
        • Internal valuations of blame run a deficit
        • Leads to a group overvaluing its strengths and underestimating its weaknesses
        • Sociopaths use divide-and-conquer tactics to create “valuation events” that force a thorough accounting of credit and blame along some axis
        • This causes (illusory) social capital to be destroyed, fissuring the group into to illegible subgroups
    • Loser psychology
      • Losers have a genuine sense of honor
      • Want to apportion credit and blame fairly
      • HIWTYL instincts are buried under a layer of denial
      • Have empathy and natural solidarity - won’t pull naked HIWTYL maneuvers
      • Losers need to dehumanize their victims (or have them dehumanized by Sociopaths) before they’ll pull HIWTYL plays
  • The Gilded Cage
    • Blame apportioned to formal and institutionalized relationships within a community
    • Paperwork (e.g. forms)
    • The purpose of paperwork is not to serve the person who submits it, but to protect the person who processes it
    • The purpose of paperwork isn’t to do what it explicitly says, it’s to allow the organization to pretend that it did what the paperwork says
      • Calvin and Hobbes: “Let’s not and say we did”
    • Reports must not exhibit any autonomy when executing paperwork
    • Autonomy implies responsibility, and the entire point of paperwork is to dodge responsibility
  • Bureaucracy
    • Assumes knowledge of staff vs. line distinction
      • Line: workers that directly advances the core priorities of the organization
        • People who do the things that the organization ostensibly does
        • Think assembly line workers
      • Staff: supports the organization with advisory and support functions
        • People who (ostensibly) help the line workers do their jobs
        • Think support staff
      • HR, accounting, legal, etc are all staff positions
      • Line positions tend to be much more organization dependent
        • Manufacturing
        • Engineering
        • R & D
    • 2 parts of risk management
      • Unpredictable part - handled by line hierarchy
      • Predictable part - handled by staff hierarchy
    • Predictable risk management allows Sociopaths to engineer the organization to generate HIWTYL situations for them
    • This is the true role of bureaucracy
      • Do things that are in the interest of Sociopaths efficiently and competently
      • Do things that the organization is expected to do, but would cut in to the profits of Sociopaths poorly or not at all
      • Obstruct, delay and kill things that might hurt the interests of Sociopaths
    • Sociopaths design systems to extract the easy value from whatever market opportunity motivates the creation of the firm
      • Don’t bother making expensive investments that won’t pay off before the organization hits diminishing returns
    • Bureaucracy is inherently Clueless by design
    • Designed to fail in ways that achieve unspoken Sociopath intentions, while allowing them to claim nobler explicit intentions
    • Members of hierarchy have to play along - bureaucracy is incompatible with autonomy
    • So what happens when the bureaucratic rules dictate clearly inappropriate responses to situations?
      • On paper - appeal decisions or trigger exceptions
        • Only works when decision would benefit Sociopaths
        • Increasingly complicated exception clauses are added to rules to make the process of appeal even slower and more costly for non-Sociopath aligned cases
        • Has the side-benefit of making rules totally incomprehensible - confuses bureaucrats into docility
      • So how do you get the bureaucracy to do something it wasn’t designed to?
        • Stealth
        • Support from high-up Sociopath
        • Corruption and bribery
    • So how does a Clueless-by-design bureaucracy shift blame?
      • Transfer responsibility onto the “system”
      • Can’t blame members for malice, only for being “cogs” or “tools”
    • However, bureaucracy is fundamentally a staff system, rather than a line system, and its Sociopaths merely seek rents rather than active returns
  • The Burden of Organizational Sins
    • Blame is apportioned by Socipaths among the above three groups:
      • Individual Clueless (via Hanlon Dodges)
      • Loser Culture (via divide-and-conquer)
      • Bureaucracy (by design)
    • Sociopaths are highly complicit, but able to deny almost all of the complicity
    • Losers are trapped via divide-and-conquer maneuvers and cannot completely deny their complicity, except to themselves
    • Clueless are least complicit in terms of actual intentions, are put in systems that protect them via their own cluelessness
    • While some accumulate more blame than others, the system overall is designed to be non-zero-sum
    • So what happens to the blame that doesn’t get allocated to anyone?
    • Organizational dark matter
      • Decreasing morale
      • Reinforcement of incompetence
      • Organization itself turns into a byzantine, incomprehensible maze as it pretends to self-correct
      • Systems and processes are clogged with delayed exceptions
    • The organization itself accepts the unaccounted for blame and slowly begins to die for the sins of the people within it

The Gervais Principle Part VI: Children of an Absent God

  • Power from Emptiness
    • David Wallace’s vacuum cleaner is a metaphor for Sociopath lives
    • Generate power from emptiness; allows Sociopaths to turn themselves into forces of nature
    • When Sociopath stories end, the Clueless and Loser stories that continue become bereft of meaning - cargo cult organizations
  • The Quest for Unmediated Realities
    • Sociopath journey begins with a religious dissatisfaction
    • Find that contemporary narratives are too convenient for those with power - prevailing social order is necessary and natural
    • Sociopaths start their journeys to rid themselves of the feeling that reality is more complex than what is being presented to them
      • Suspcious that things hidden are not being hidden for their own good
    • Want to engage reality directly, with no mediation from other humans
    • Stylized for Clueless the Sociopath’s struggle becomes the Hero’s Journey
    • Stylized for Losers, the Sociopath’s struggle becomes religion - absolution for sins and a sign of grace
    • To Sociopaths themselves, the journey is a nihilistic journey into emptiness
  • Finding Amorality
    • Sociopaths don’t fear amorality, they aspire to it
    • Sociopath’s journey is the progressive unmasking of harsher and harsher social orders
    • Morality goes first
    • Then the idea of a benevolent universe
    • Then the idea of predictable relationships between effort and rewards
    • As they keep ripping away layers, Sociopaths find transient meaning but not enduring satisfaction
    • However, surprisingly, they find power over others
    • Sociopaths acquire agency by searching for meaning
    • This allows them to mediate reality for others
  • Gods Who Talk Back
    • Small minds discuss people, average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss ideas. - Elanor Roosevelt (attributed)
    • The distinction between theism and atheism is for small and average minds
    • Sociopaths understand that the true distinction is between gods that talk back and gods that don’t
    • Sociopaths inhabit the Darwinist/Protestant ethic
      • Darwinist is atheistic
      • Protestant is religious
      • But both have the common attribute of a silent god
    • The religions of Clueless and Losers are ultimately religions of happiness
      • Seek a socially mediated relationships with reality - the very thing the Sociopath seeks to escape
      • Gods are always talking back somehow
    • The gods of the sociopath are absent meanings and voices
      • Sociopaths are truly alone in a way that Clueless and Losers aren’t
      • Sociopath religion is a recipe for neurotic self-destruction, with a chance at true freedom
    • When Sociopaths accept the divine roles that Clueless and Losers entrust them with, they rule the realities of others
      • However, any human stand-in for the divine is going to be a let-down
      • The believers are always betrayed
      • Get the Clueless to blame themselves
      • Get the Losers to blame each other
      • Each gives a particular form or religiosity
  • The Rankable Hero-God
    • In solitude, Clueless minds turn to contemplation of their idols
    • Idealized organizations and unreconstructed idols
    • Gods are far-removed but attainable heroes
    • Heroes are distant, but a countable number of steps away
    • Heroes can themselves be ranked
    • Clueless heroes are to be imitated and life in Clueless heaven is not dissimilar from life on Clueless earth
    • Everything in Clueless religion is countable
      • Sins are countable as demerits
      • Rewards are concrete
    • Sociopaths can serve as high-ranking hero-gods so long as the conceal the “elevator” they took to get to a high level
      • Hide social advantages
      • Hide “privilege”
      • Hide out-and-out cheating
      • Even failures don’t demote one from god-hood - only alters ranks within the pantheon
    • Innocent, child-like religiosity
    • When Clueless are betrayed by Sociopaths, they usually react with misguided honor and loyalty
      • Ocassionally try ineffectual revenge
      • Reaction to betrayal is a loss of innocence
      • Very rarely, this turns the Clueless into a Sociopath directly
        • Clueless see the non-legible side of the social order and seek to manipulate it
        • This turns them into a Sociopath
      • Usually what happens is that the Clueless turns into a Loser - loses faith in the organization, becomes a checked-out minimum effort producer
  • Wrangling Loser Spirituality
    • Loser spirituality revolves around social events and the associated changes in status and emotions
    • Losers see themselves as spiritual, but not religious
    • Yearning to be “indivisibly” part of something larger than themselves
    • Belongingness/oneness-with-the-divine
    • No explicit concrete rewards or demerits
    • Balance illegible emotional experiences against one another
    • Overweight social behaviors over material substance
      • Would rather have $10 presented with respect than $100 presented spitefully
  • The Sociopath as Priest
    • Because Losers don’t look to closely at the material results, they’re able to be manipulated by Sociopaths who do
    • Explicitly tying non-material rewards to material rewards generates emotional drama, which Sociopaths use to divide and conquer Loser groups
    • Sociopaths frame their contribution to betrayal situations between Loser groups as necessary and inevitable
    • In the theater of Loser spirituality, Sociopaths add inevitable-seeming events and emotional boundary conditions
    • Because the Sociopaths stand apart from Loser group consciousness, they’re able to dispense absolution for guilt - the one emotion that Losers cannot resolve for themselves
    • Unlike Clueless, Losers are often betrayed in groups
      • Losers turn into Sociopaths by catching a glimpse of unmediated reality during a Sociopath divide-and-conquer play and correctly assign blame to the Sociopath
  • Meaning and Power Through Withdrawal
    • The process of creative destruction in the Sociopath mind creates power, but destroys meaning
    • It is this process that allows them to gain power over others
    • Sociopaths create meaning through the things they subtract, rather than the things they add
    • Subtractive simplification is much easier than creating fake realities and yields just as much power
    • Sociopaths subtract human fraility and fallibility to create heroes for the Clueless
    • Subtract participatory emotion to turn themselves into detached priests for the Losers
    • In each case, the Sociopath withdraws information: personalities and inner lives for the Clueless, and information about specific situations and material realities for the Losers
    • Clueless cannot process anything that isn’t finite, external and countable - gives Sociopath power by allowing them to handle illegible, uncountable subtleties
    • Losers cannot process the material aspect of anything that involves strong emotional content - gives Sociopath power by allowing the material advantage in exchange for emotional absolution
    • Sociopaths do not take power; power is given to them by Losers and Clueless who rely on Sociopaths to process parts of reality that they cannot process for themselves
  • Power Literacy
    • The Sociopath’s process of carving out finite and tractable realities for Clueless and Losers creates layers of social realities that gamify the world
    • Sociopathy is about recognizing that there are no social realities
    • Only masks
    • Social realities are a hierarchy of convenient fictions for those predisposed to believe that humanity is special in some way
    • Any ideas that put humans into a special position (like justice, fairness, ethics, etc.) are raw material for mediated abstractions that can be used to control Clueless and Losers
    • As Sociopaths tear away the abstractions that govern social reality, the process becomes instinctive - power literacy
  • Reality Shock
    • As Sociopaths disassemble social abstractions, they automatically devalue those abstractions
    • The culmination of this process reveals to the Sociopath that there is no god at all - that reality is fundamentally meaningless
    • No special place for humans
    • Visceral, rather than intellectual moment
    • Sociopaths don’t need a non-existent God; one that’s merely disinterested in our universe will do
    • To weather reality shock is to get over one’s terror at an absent god, and awaken to the freedom that condition represents
  • Free as in Speech, Free as in Lunch
    • Free as in speech - Sociopath has creative freedom in scripting social realities for others
      • Manipulate “cherished human values”
    • Free as in lunch - Sociopath has nearly zero accountability, thanks to agency ceded to him by Losers and Clueless
      • “Moral hazard”
      • “Principal-agent problem”
    • Losers and Clueless vaguely sense that the realities being presented by Sociopaths are bullshit - not so much a lie as completely orthogonal to the truth
    • Sociopaths have figured out that amorality is the norm in the universe - that morality is carved out by Sociopaths for the benefit of Losers and Clueless
    • In this way, the lives of Sociopaths are incomprehensible to non-Sociopaths
      • Clueless and Losers have to invent hidden social realities that govern the actions of Sociopaths
  • The Birth of the Messiah
    • Most Sociopaths that weather reality-shock accept their permanent estrangement from non-Sociopaths
    • Some Sociopaths regret their knowledge of the ultimate reality of the universe - ultimate freedom also implies ultimate responsibility
    • These Sociopaths reject their freedom and attempt to rejoin humanity
      • This effort is doomed to failure
      • What is known cannot be un-known
    • These Sociopaths become Messiahs
      • Protect innocence of Clueless
      • Restore the faith of Losers
      • Restore peoples’ world-views after potential disillusionment and ascent (descent?) into Sociopathy
    • Try to participate in Loser behaviors, but the action is fundamentally empty for them
      • Messiahs are “social black holes”
  • Certainty of Nothingness
    • So, what have we learned from all this?

Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution

  • Subcultures are dead
  • Main creative cultural force from 1975 to 2000
  • Why did they stop working?
    • As soon as subcultures start to get interesting, they get invaded by muggles, who ruin them
    • Around 2000 people stopped hoping that subcultures could escape this dynamic and gave up on them
  • The Birth of Cool
    • Before there is a subculture, there is a scene
      • Small group of creators who invent an exciting new thing
        • Musical genre
        • Religious sect
        • Technological advancement
        • Political theory
      • The new scene draws fanatics
        • Fanatics don’t create
        • Contribute time, money, organization, adulation to creators
      • Creators and fanatics are both geeks
      • Distinguishing characteristics of geeks:
        • Love the New Thing
        • Fascinated by esoteric ins and outs
        • Spend all their time either working on it or talking about it
      • If a scene is sufficiently geeky, it remains a geek thing - turns into a weird hobby rather than a subculture
      • If a scene is unusually exciting, and can be appreciated without having to get geeky about details, it draws mops.
        • Original term: MOP (member of public)
        • Alternatively: “casuals”, “tourists”, “posers”
      • Initially geeks welcome mops
      • Mops provide resources that geeks can use
        • Ego boosts
        • Enough financial support that the best geeks can quit their day jobs and go pro
        • These geeks produce more and better New Thing
  • The mop invasion
    • Mops are welcome at first, but when they grow too numerous they dilute the culture
    • Mops don’t really like the New Thing - it’s too weird and complicated for them to process
    • They prefer the diluted version of the new thing, that’s closer to what mainstream culture has led them to expect
    • Rather than talking about the New Thing nonstop, mops talk about normie pursuits, like sports and celebrities
    • At this point the fanatics may become disgusted and give up, leading to the collapse of the subculture
  • The sociopath invasion
    • Creators generate cultural capital
    • Fanatics generate social capital
    • Mops, when properly exploited, produce liquid capital (i.e. money)
    • None of these groups have any idea how to exploit this capital
    • Sociopaths come in and become best friends with selected creators
      • Dress like creators, but a bit better
      • Talk like creators, but a bit smoother
      • Even do some of the creative activity - sociopaths are competent, but not groundbreaking
      • Geeks aren’t fooled - they’re sufficiently in touch with the state-of-the-art to distinguish a sociopath from a true geek
      • However, geeks don’t know why sociopaths are there
    • Mops are fooled by sociopaths
      • Sociopaths are like geeks, but better
      • Quickly gain the adulation of mops that used to be going to geeks
      • Work out how to monetize the subculture
      • Funnel a tiny proportion of the money to creators
      • Enable more creators to go pro, but not so many that the creative product is devalued
      • Hire fanatics as service workers
        • Fanatics resent it, but are also drawn in by the appeal of working full-time on the New Thing
  • The Death of Cool – Unless…
    • After a couple of years, the cultural, social and financial capital of the subculture is used up
    • New Thing is no longer so new as to merit attention
    • Sociopaths leave behind broken geeks - divide and conquer manipulation tactics cause fissures and divisions
    • However, if some of the creators are true geniuses, and they get correct support from sociopaths, they can ascend into “superstardom”
  • Resistance
    • The subculture lifecycle is only problematic for geeks
    • Provides reliable, low-cost waves of novelty for mops
    • Provides easily exploited pools of prestige, sex, power and money for sociopaths
    • Exclusion
      • Create costly barriers for entry
      • Keeps out posers, but limits potential
      • There is usually a conflict between geeks who want the subculture to remain small and ideologically pure, and those who want it to grow and gain power
      • Keeping a 6:1 ratio of mops to geeks is about right
      • Anything higher than 10:1 risks burnout for the fanatics
      • Sociopaths only show up when there are mops to exploit, so limiting mop involvement inherently limits how interesting a group is to sociopaths
    • Eject sociopaths
      • Geeks can recognize sociopaths but are bad at ejecting them
      • Mops can’t recognize sociopaths and wouldn’t want to eject them even if they did recognize them
      • Moreover, geeks need sociopaths if the new thing is ever to grow beyond a niche hobby
  • Be slightly evil
    • There are still new subcultures, but they don’t have the same cultural or social force
    • Fluid mode
    • Be slightly evil - geeks should learn and use some of the sociopaths’ tricks
    • Let go of hope that eternalist hope and faith that subculture will provide meaning forever
    • Also resist sociopaths’ nihilism - it is worthwhile to create new things, even if those things are, in the end, fleeting