The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to "The Office"
74 points - last Saturday at 11:28 AM
SourceThe MacLeod Life Cycle reminds me on the 5 seasons of the illuminati calendar:
Verwirrung Season of Chaos January 1-March 14
Zweitracht Season of Discord March 15-May 26
Unordnung Season of Confusion May 27-August 7
Beamtenherrschaft Season of Bureaucracy August 8-October 19
Grummet Season of Aftermath October 20-December 31
From the book Illuminatus!
bananaflag
today at 10:53 AM
See the Scott Alexander review:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...
orthoxerox
today at 11:41 AM
Scott took it too literally. See also how the broader rationalist community took issue with Sam Kriss for inventing a not-obviously-fake historical figure.
The biggest takeaway for me is that you shouldn't expect to succeed as a manager by meeting (or exceeding) KPIs. It's about as effective as being a "nice guy" and expecting intimacy in return.
The KPIs are there for assigning blame, not for identifying key personnel. You can game them to increase your compensation if you are already doing something that an even bigger manager finds useful and important. Conversely, you can get away with half-assing every official performance indicator as long as you keep delivering the real thing.
gsf_emergency_7
today at 11:03 AM
Liked this comment:
"If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)"
On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default.
On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca?
I guess one day there will be a massive leak of executives chats with their LLMs, and we'll find out what they really think.
OgsyedIE
today at 12:03 PM
The Berne books Rao cites as explanations of Gametalk are solidly good entries in of themselves, although it's probably best to use an LLM to get search results of the best introductions to TA first to see if they've been surpassed.
gsf_emergency_7
today at 12:12 PM
Adhering to the predictable/ritualistic/comfortable nature of "Gametalk",
Here's one question I asked:
"How does Eric Berne's Gametalk as interpreted by Venkatesh Rao signal to the sociopaths that those who engage in them are losers? Distinguish between "channels" that Eric has identified as well as new signals that Rao or others have discovered."
bookhimdano
today at 11:07 AM
This is interesting enough, I’d buy a book about this (audiobook at least).
I’ve tried to limit myself to only the best and most practical books about leadership that didn’t start corporate speak, and I doubt Gervais Principle would be quoted or used in work conversation, so it’s perfect.
What other books did you find in that style?
I liked that model a lot, but it made me a bit sad too.
All my life I was bad at being a loser, somehow I never really felt I fit in. I thought this was because of psychopathic tendencies or something. However, after reading this I realized there was another option and I was just clueless.
Focusing only on the second and top layer of the diagram, I usually call them “the increments and the excrements”.
OgsyedIE
today at 12:00 PM
The most interesting parts of the essay are the ways that Rao (a full proponent of the niche psychotherapy school of transactional analysis) applies his view of psychoanalysis to describe the social dynamics between coworkers with differing levels of nihilism.
He argues that the 'sociopath class' of social-climbing nihilists map 1:1 onto the leaderships of large organizations but it's rare in the real world. Usually there are people of all levels of naiveté and nihilism at all ranks of organizations, with naive true believers mixing with nihilists at the top, the middle and the bottom fairly equally, because the world has too much churn to settle into the kind of density-separation equilibrium he describes.
Anyone else can't scroll on this site?
That was a fun read, and it might even explain why a lot of Gen-z is opting out of any sort of career building, wanting values instead (or next to) a paycheck. They saw their parents do The Office in real life.
Interesting is also that Michael does make a really good arc from season one to when he leaves. He remains clueless, or rather he it dawns on him he does not want to become like Ryan or David (the articles sociopath). Like he says in a later season “Business is about people.”
MachineMan
today at 12:10 PM
The office is the white equivalent of the plantation. Blacks were exploited for their bodies on the plantation, whites were exploited for their cognition in the office. Although the misery of this nearly inescapable drudgery is different in terms of its treatment, it is also nefarious precisely because it looks like a voluntary ordeal. The net effect is no different at all, sheepshearing in the form of lines of code, customer service, sales, finance and HR functions. The sheep wear their earmarks proudly as they are fattened for the slaughterhouse. “My wool is graded by woolmark”, “My wool is kashmir”, as they walk ever so proudly to their doom. The office is the abomination of the 20th century. It turned samurai into salary men into otaku. With the wave of feminism, women became more obedient to their shareholders than their husbands, as their milk is turned to cheese for the 1%. The collective body of knowledge from these societies stolen by the AI overlords like a thief in the night, the weights uploaded to a data center in another country, only to push them into inevitable wars.
Death to the office, may it never return.