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No Brilliant Jerks

leadershipnow.com

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Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#31

Post by tomnipotent »

keenmaster wrote: post #25
minitech wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are "No" brilliant jerks? Absolutely none? What evidence is that based on? "No" here is used in the sense of "no pets", "no solicitors", "no outside food or drink beyond this point"

If you don't want brilliant jerks, you are inherently negating their brilliance. A simple chain of logic, extrapolating from that headline, would lead to "if they truly were all around brilliant, they wouldn't act that way. They would be more brilliant if we replaced their non-brilliant side with our brilliant behavioral prescriptions."

> you are inherently negating their brilliance

This isn't how logic works... It's a statement, saying "No Brilliant Jerks Welcome Here". It does not negate their existence, only their company.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#32

Post by [deleted] »

keenmaster wrote: post #25
minitech wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are "No" brilliant jerks? Absolutely none? What evidence is that based on? "No" here is used in the sense of "no pets", "no solicitors", "no outside food or drink beyond this point"

If you don't want brilliant jerks, you are inherently negating their brilliance. A simple chain of logic, extrapolating from that headline, would lead to "if they truly were all around brilliant, they wouldn't act that way. They would be more brilliant if we replaced their non-brilliant side with our brilliant behavioral prescriptions."

[deleted]

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#34

Post by keenmaster »

minitech wrote: post #29
keenmaster wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't want brilliant jerks, you are inherently negating their brilliance. A simple chain of logic, extrapolating from that headline, would lead to "if they truly were all around brilliant, they wouldn't act that way. They would be more brilliant if we replaced their non-brilliant side with our brilliant behavioral prescriptions."

> If you don't want brilliant jerks, you are inherently negating their brilliance. ??¹ > A simple chain of logic, extrapolating from that headline, would lead to "if they truly were all around brilliant, they wouldn't act that way. ???² ¹ Valuing non-jerkiness more isn’t “negating brilliance”. Brilliant non-jerks are available. ² Er, no.

I'm not defending being a jerk. Personally, I try to be kind in all my interpersonal interactions. However, some people are just a package deal. Call it what you want, high IQ and low EQ or whatever, but you can't just accept one part of them and try to get rid of the rest.

Also, with regards to this comment: "Valuing non-jerkiness more isn’t “negating brilliance”. Brilliant non-jerks are available."

Sure, there's no shortage of brilliant non-jerks, but sometimes the most brilliant person for a given company in a given context (by an order of magnitude) is a jerk. You have to apply first principles, systems thinking to determine whether they're right for the company or not, and whether mitigating their jerky behavior is bad for the company or not. I don't totally disagree with the article. Sometimes the measures they recommend are well-advised, and sometimes they would be misguided. I'm cautioning about the latter because it's such a common human instinct to try to cast out or sheer the black sheep. On the margins, group harmony is overrated.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#35

Post by troughway »

hirundo wrote: post #5

I have a problem with Nassim Taleb. On the one hand I think he has been a colossal jerk to many good people who don't deserve it. On the other hand he keeps dropping pearls of wisdom that I value highly. If I were an employer I wouldn't want an employee with his level of toxicity laying waste to morale. But it could be exactly that kind of employee who could make the company profitable with the power of one brain. So…

>colossal jerk

Can you give examples?

In the case of Jobs and Gates, they were both in charge of many people and hence many people's paycheques depended on their whims.

Taleb's twitter rants are, by comparison, a lone voice pounding sand in the middle of nowhere.

I could be wrong, it could be that Taleb is in charge of some hedge fund and he fires people for whatever reasons.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#37

Post by Mirioron »

akudha wrote: post #15
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #2

Not directly related to the content of the article, but... There are jerks everywhere, and there always will be. Like diseases, tornadoes and mosquitoes, they are part of life. I think our energy is better spent creating an env that empowers nice people and encourage them to defend themselves. An env that calls out bad behavior. It's way more durable.

Society has mostly tolerated jerks - Bill Gates was a jerk during his Microsoft days, Steve Jobs too, etc. Hollywood has a long list of jerks, bordering on criminal level behavior. Somehow they were (are) tolerated by society, many people even believe one needs to be a jerk at certain levels to succeed. If a junior person on a team is a jerk, he'll be called out quickly vs a boss who is a jerk. Like everything in lif…

I think society tolerates jerks because they feel that the jerk creates more value than they take away.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#39

Post by luckylion »

DanBC wrote: post #16
luckylion wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unrelated to the content of the comment, but since this comment was immediately dead (saw it at "0 minutes ago"): what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post? I've seen this more and more recently. Is that a new approach to shadow banning? Is that automatically applied when multiple comments are flagged by some amount of people? Are the affected us…

> what's with the new moderation technique of just marking comments of some users as dead from the moment they post? That's not new, and most of those people have been told that they were banned. People can vouch for individual comments (click the timestamp, click the vouch link) to undead them. If you think a person is being unfairly moderated I guess you can email the mods to let them know. dang has spoken about sh…

Thanks, it appears to be the autokilling then and I must have just noticed it more in the past few days. It seemed weird because there's so much that I consider normal/harmless (and where much worse is left alive), but the authors may of course have posted more problematic comments in the past that lead to the flags.

Re: No Brilliant Jerks

#40

Post by golemotron »

akudha wrote: post #15
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #2

Not directly related to the content of the article, but... There are jerks everywhere, and there always will be. Like diseases, tornadoes and mosquitoes, they are part of life. I think our energy is better spent creating an env that empowers nice people and encourage them to defend themselves. An env that calls out bad behavior. It's way more durable.

Society has mostly tolerated jerks - Bill Gates was a jerk during his Microsoft days, Steve Jobs too, etc. Hollywood has a long list of jerks, bordering on criminal level behavior. Somehow they were (are) tolerated by society, many people even believe one needs to be a jerk at certain levels to succeed. If a junior person on a team is a jerk, he'll be called out quickly vs a boss who is a jerk. Like everything in lif…

Society tolerates jerks for the same reason jerks tolerate society. They both get something from the exchange.
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