I think, if in doubt, you could do a lot worse than use this as a list of guidelines for what not to do. It’s designed to sell by masking itself as frightfully hard-nosed realism while actually appealing to the audience’s baser instincts.
What does ‘baser instincts’ mean? Recall that in the Stone Age, life was mostly a zero-sum game. Wealth was mostly foraged, not farmed or manufactured. You spent your life in the tribe you were born in, which was unlikely to grow or find new opportunities except at the expense of another tribe. You couldn’t win except by making somebody else lose. None of these things are anywhere near true anymore, but evolution hasn’t caught up; we still have instincts honed for that environment, against which our main antidotes are a sense of moral value together with a widening of the scope of what we consider our tribe. In other words, if you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like hard-nosed, realistic advice, it’s quite likely that your visceral reaction is correct and the advice is wrong.
“Never outshine the master”? Wrong. A master worth having, would have it no other way. A master not worth having is, well, not worth having.
“Conceal your intentions”? Wrong. Make your intentions clear, then follow through on them. It attracts those who would deal honestly with you, and deters would-be aggressors so that a fight doesn’t have to start in the first place.
“Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit”? Only if you want your employees to be those who know they can’t find work elsewhere. The competent are no longer permanently stuck in the positions into which they were born.
“Learn to keep people dependent on you”? Then you’ll be able to keep them in the mud and your boots on their faces slightly higher in the mud—meanwhile, those who fostered independent allies, will be climbing the highest peaks.
“Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark”? Only if you want to become entangled with suckers. If your own self-interest really matters to you, don’t exploit suckers, just stay away from them.
(Okay, granted there are a few pieces of often-good advice, like “Always say less than necessary” and “Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop”. You can’t literally use this list as anti-advice. But on the whole, it’s bad.)
Caveat: if your life’s ambition is to become chief of your tribe, then to a certain extent you are playing a zero-sum game after all, and perhaps this advice may serve you well. But outside that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where it starts looking like good advice, that may be a warning sign you have stumbled into a zero-sum game. In that case, don’t spend your efforts on becoming good at it. Spend them on getting the hell out of it.
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
In other words, if you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like hard-nosed, realistic advice, it’s quite likely that your visceral reaction is correct and the advice is wrong.
Nonsense. If you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like realistic advice then it is far, far more likely that you are naive, sheltered and yet to escape the moral programming used to keep the lower status folks in check. Or, for most people, the visceral moral revulsion is at the idea of publicly declaring pragmatic behavioural strategies when you are supposed to be speaking bullshit but acting practical.
For approximately the above reasons I consider rwallace’s advice in the parent to be outright toxic for a broad class of recipients. In particular, those that lack talent for keeping actual decision making divorced from signalling beliefs.
“Never outshine the master”? Wrong. A master worth having, would have it no other way. A master not worth having is, well, not worth having.
This isn’t about “Master Yoda”, the mentor. This is (obviously) advice about interacting with employers or equivalent leaders in other social contexts that are important.
A mistake that many intelligent people fall into is in thinking that making themselves look good is always the right thing to do. But a lot of the time that is reckless and short sighted. Most bosses like to look like the impressive ones. Your job is to make them look good in front of their superiors and peers in way that they feel inclined to reward you for. Outshining them is seldom the optimal way to do this.
But outside that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where it starts looking like good advice, that may be a warning sign you have stumbled into a zero-sum game. In that case, don’t spend your efforts on becoming good at it. Spend them on getting the hell out of it.
In general I share this attitude. I am willing to sacrifice some potential status and power in return for freedom from playing the game optimally. I also find that people underestimate the options they have for finding political situations which suit them.
I consider rwallace’s advice in the parent to be outright toxic for a broad class of recipients. In particular, those that lack talent for keeping actual decision making divorced from signalling beliefs.
This class can’t follow the Rules, either. We’re better off being idealists (and out as such, since we’re open books). We get suckered sometimes, but we attract allies because we’re trustworthy and non-threatening, and we can ally among ourselves.
Your job is to make them look good in front of their superiors and peers in way that they feel inclined to reward you for.
you are an idealist to the ingroup and a hard nosed realist to the outgroup. everyone else understands this, when you don’t do it they think there is something wrong with you and deny you ingroup status.
We’re better off being idealists (and out as such, since we’re open books).
So long as you can convey that you are the right kind of idealistic. That is, it is important to be clear that cooperation is conditional. Because it is just a pain in the ass to actually have to @#%# people over when they try to defect. (Even thought it is sometimes profitable!)
Make it obvious that you will not keep being nice to them regardless of what they do. If they ‘defect’ then ‘defect back if convenient’ is the ideal that you hope they will attribute to you.
Your job is to make them look good in front of their superiors and peers in way that they feel inclined to reward you for. Outshining them is seldom the optimal way to do this.
According to some people I know, you should also tell their bosses how much your bosses suck and how much get in the way of your work and how in spite of that your work is the awesomest and you should definitely be promoted to their level or over it.
To which I answered: “But then the climate at work must suck, everyone will hate each other! Plus, if it’s the Standard Operating Procedure on how to treat a boss, how come anyone wants to be boss at all?
To which they answered: “I know, but it’s stablized this way, and there doesn’t seem to be the incentive or impulse to change that”.
I have never actually seen this done in 5 years of experience in management. Yes, you occasionally signal this very subtly to your boss’s boss (mostly happens when you need to extricate yourself from some fix). But mostly you network with and depend on your boss simply because he has a lot more ways and opportunities of representing your work as stupid to his boss than you ever will of doing that to him.
I worked in a manufacturing set up though, where the number of managers in the whole country was about 200 and most of them, including the top management, knew you at least by name. I guess it could be different in a more competitive new economy/banking sort of workplace or a larger organization.
According to some people I know, you should also tell their bosses how much your bosses suck and how much get in the way of your work and how in spite of that your work is the awesomest and you should definitely be promoted to their level or over it.
I advise people against this tactic. Because there is a chance that it’ll work. Then you end up in middle management!
“Learn to keep people dependent on you”? Then you’ll be able to keep them in the mud and your boots on their faces slightly higher in the mud—meanwhile, those who fostered independent allies, will be climbing the highest peaks.
Not incompatible. Strong allies will be independent of more people, but you still want them to depend on you. Dependence isn’t necessarily coercion; it’s hard to keep strong allies by threatening them (prolly why you equated strong and indepedent). Make them dependent by finding what they want and making sure only you can offer that—or better yet, make them want what you can offer in the first place.
The Game of Thrones, right? (Actually in that particular case, given that it’s a Crapsack World, it’s in fact a negative sum game).
I like your post very much, you’re right in that these rules really seem to encourage incompetence and mediocrity. Some of the alternative you suggest feel a bit ShinkiAndWH40k, shounen-manga kind of larger-than-life… but I love that as well.
Yes, I know, but I like the Game of Thrones better: “”Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men...all will play the ‘Game of Thrones’.[...]When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. ” Hence, negative sum. Though DEFCON(i.e. Global Thermonuclear War, the Game) is on an entirely different scale, I guess.
Butbutbut in “the game of thrones” winning is an option, whereas the whole point of the “strange game” quotation is that there is no winning move at all (other than not playing in the first place). It’s not just negative-sum; it’s unwinnable.
(Whether that’s true of actual global thermonuclear war is of course a separate question.)
Do you really think saying less than necessary is good advice? That one seemed intuitively good to me at first glance, but then I thought about it a bit more. If I seek to communicate clearly, I should definitely say as much as necessary.
Well not literally of course, but I consider the useful meaning to be: beware of the intuitive tendency to assume it is necessary to say much, when saying a little would actually suffice. It’s a guideline rather than a rule, not always applicable, but often enough to be of value.
Yeah, but then you end up talking like Roschach, or, less extremely, like Batman. That, in itself, can be felt as very rude by those that talk more openly, especially if their speech methods have a strong aesthetic component besides the bare utility.
Yeah, but then you end up talking like Roschach, or, less extremely, like Batman. That, in itself, can be felt as very rude by those that talk more openly
I think, if in doubt, you could do a lot worse than use this as a list of guidelines for what not to do. It’s designed to sell by masking itself as frightfully hard-nosed realism while actually appealing to the audience’s baser instincts.
What does ‘baser instincts’ mean? Recall that in the Stone Age, life was mostly a zero-sum game. Wealth was mostly foraged, not farmed or manufactured. You spent your life in the tribe you were born in, which was unlikely to grow or find new opportunities except at the expense of another tribe. You couldn’t win except by making somebody else lose. None of these things are anywhere near true anymore, but evolution hasn’t caught up; we still have instincts honed for that environment, against which our main antidotes are a sense of moral value together with a widening of the scope of what we consider our tribe. In other words, if you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like hard-nosed, realistic advice, it’s quite likely that your visceral reaction is correct and the advice is wrong.
“Never outshine the master”? Wrong. A master worth having, would have it no other way. A master not worth having is, well, not worth having.
“Conceal your intentions”? Wrong. Make your intentions clear, then follow through on them. It attracts those who would deal honestly with you, and deters would-be aggressors so that a fight doesn’t have to start in the first place.
“Get others to do the work for you, but always take the credit”? Only if you want your employees to be those who know they can’t find work elsewhere. The competent are no longer permanently stuck in the positions into which they were born.
“Learn to keep people dependent on you”? Then you’ll be able to keep them in the mud and your boots on their faces slightly higher in the mud—meanwhile, those who fostered independent allies, will be climbing the highest peaks.
“Play a sucker to catch a sucker: play dumber than your mark”? Only if you want to become entangled with suckers. If your own self-interest really matters to you, don’t exploit suckers, just stay away from them.
(Okay, granted there are a few pieces of often-good advice, like “Always say less than necessary” and “Do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop”. You can’t literally use this list as anti-advice. But on the whole, it’s bad.)
Caveat: if your life’s ambition is to become chief of your tribe, then to a certain extent you are playing a zero-sum game after all, and perhaps this advice may serve you well. But outside that, if you ever find yourself in a situation where it starts looking like good advice, that may be a warning sign you have stumbled into a zero-sum game. In that case, don’t spend your efforts on becoming good at it. Spend them on getting the hell out of it.
“A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Nonsense. If you feel a sense of moral revulsion when presented with what looks like realistic advice then it is far, far more likely that you are naive, sheltered and yet to escape the moral programming used to keep the lower status folks in check. Or, for most people, the visceral moral revulsion is at the idea of publicly declaring pragmatic behavioural strategies when you are supposed to be speaking bullshit but acting practical.
For approximately the above reasons I consider rwallace’s advice in the parent to be outright toxic for a broad class of recipients. In particular, those that lack talent for keeping actual decision making divorced from signalling beliefs.
This isn’t about “Master Yoda”, the mentor. This is (obviously) advice about interacting with employers or equivalent leaders in other social contexts that are important.
A mistake that many intelligent people fall into is in thinking that making themselves look good is always the right thing to do. But a lot of the time that is reckless and short sighted. Most bosses like to look like the impressive ones. Your job is to make them look good in front of their superiors and peers in way that they feel inclined to reward you for. Outshining them is seldom the optimal way to do this.
In general I share this attitude. I am willing to sacrifice some potential status and power in return for freedom from playing the game optimally. I also find that people underestimate the options they have for finding political situations which suit them.
This class can’t follow the Rules, either. We’re better off being idealists (and out as such, since we’re open books). We get suckered sometimes, but we attract allies because we’re trustworthy and non-threatening, and we can ally among ourselves.
Upvoted.
you are an idealist to the ingroup and a hard nosed realist to the outgroup. everyone else understands this, when you don’t do it they think there is something wrong with you and deny you ingroup status.
Some of them, for sure.
So long as you can convey that you are the right kind of idealistic. That is, it is important to be clear that cooperation is conditional. Because it is just a pain in the ass to actually have to @#%# people over when they try to defect. (Even thought it is sometimes profitable!)
Your cooperation or theirs?
Make it obvious that you will not keep being nice to them regardless of what they do. If they ‘defect’ then ‘defect back if convenient’ is the ideal that you hope they will attribute to you.
According to some people I know, you should also tell their bosses how much your bosses suck and how much get in the way of your work and how in spite of that your work is the awesomest and you should definitely be promoted to their level or over it.
To which I answered: “But then the climate at work must suck, everyone will hate each other! Plus, if it’s the Standard Operating Procedure on how to treat a boss, how come anyone wants to be boss at all?
To which they answered: “I know, but it’s stablized this way, and there doesn’t seem to be the incentive or impulse to change that”.
Then I just shut up and put on a raeg face.
I have never actually seen this done in 5 years of experience in management. Yes, you occasionally signal this very subtly to your boss’s boss (mostly happens when you need to extricate yourself from some fix). But mostly you network with and depend on your boss simply because he has a lot more ways and opportunities of representing your work as stupid to his boss than you ever will of doing that to him.
I worked in a manufacturing set up though, where the number of managers in the whole country was about 200 and most of them, including the top management, knew you at least by name. I guess it could be different in a more competitive new economy/banking sort of workplace or a larger organization.
I advise people against this tactic. Because there is a chance that it’ll work. Then you end up in middle management!
Isn’t that the only way to get to upper management?
Not incompatible. Strong allies will be independent of more people, but you still want them to depend on you. Dependence isn’t necessarily coercion; it’s hard to keep strong allies by threatening them (prolly why you equated strong and indepedent). Make them dependent by finding what they want and making sure only you can offer that—or better yet, make them want what you can offer in the first place.
The Game of Thrones, right? (Actually in that particular case, given that it’s a Crapsack World, it’s in fact a negative sum game).
I like your post very much, you’re right in that these rules really seem to encourage incompetence and mediocrity. Some of the alternative you suggest feel a bit ShinkiAndWH40k, shounen-manga kind of larger-than-life… but I love that as well.
The “strange game” quotation is from the movie “War Games”. (The game in question is Global Thermonuclear War.)
Yes, I know, but I like the Game of Thrones better: “”Kings and queens, knights and renegades, liars, lords and honest men...all will play the ‘Game of Thrones’.[...]When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die. There is no middle ground. ” Hence, negative sum. Though DEFCON(i.e. Global Thermonuclear War, the Game) is on an entirely different scale, I guess.
Butbutbut in “the game of thrones” winning is an option, whereas the whole point of the “strange game” quotation is that there is no winning move at all (other than not playing in the first place). It’s not just negative-sum; it’s unwinnable.
(Whether that’s true of actual global thermonuclear war is of course a separate question.)
Do you really think saying less than necessary is good advice? That one seemed intuitively good to me at first glance, but then I thought about it a bit more. If I seek to communicate clearly, I should definitely say as much as necessary.
Otherwise, I heartily agree with you.
Well not literally of course, but I consider the useful meaning to be: beware of the intuitive tendency to assume it is necessary to say much, when saying a little would actually suffice. It’s a guideline rather than a rule, not always applicable, but often enough to be of value.
Or in the words of William Strunk Jr., “Omit needless words.”
Fair. That’s how I took it at first, and why I liked it more then.
Yeah, but then you end up talking like Roschach, or, less extremely, like Batman. That, in itself, can be felt as very rude by those that talk more openly, especially if their speech methods have a strong aesthetic component besides the bare utility.
Or sexy, mysterious and intriguing. ;)