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The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

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Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#141

Post by threatripper »

When we apply the principle "All models are wrong but some are useful." to the Gervais Principle I come to a funny conclusion. It is quite close to reality but mostly useless. It reads funny but is very cynical and it doesn't deliver anything actionable. Neither does it give happiness nor does it empower to change things. It mostly channels anger into cynicism. Well, you may think that you can explain the world in the terms used in the theory and yes, they explain many things quite well. But what then? Resignation?

I would like to know how things are in more neutral terms and know how to fight the calcification (or how you call it) of an organization effectively or, if not possible, how to get the best out of it for myself.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#142

Post by IsaacL »

titanomachy wrote: post #119
IsaacL wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's funny, I was rereading this article and Scott Alexander's review just now, before I saw that it had been reposted on HN. Scott makes some good points but I think he simply lacks experience in the kind of big corporations Venkat describes. I think the Gervais Principle can be observed most readily in large, old-economy firms operating in zero-sum industries. It's probably more predominant on the east coast than t…

“It’s possible that Scott and his friends… are Losers” I don’t know if the term is even applicable to people who don’t work in large organizations. Scott’s a psychiatrist. A lot of doctors work in small partnerships where these dynamics might not play out.

I'd say people who work as solo entrepreneurs or independent contractors are usually either "sociopaths" (of a particular kind) or some kind of sociopath/loser mixture, depending on how mercenary and ambitious they are.

(In this case, as in many others, I don't really like Rao's "sociopath" label, as it has the wrong connotations. "Politician" or "machiavellian" may be better.)

The average, say, independent contractor software dev, the "mercenary" type, is a loser/sociopath hybrid. Unlike typical losers, they forgo the security of a steady paycheck and employee benefits in exchange for a (often significant) income boost and personal freedom. They forgo the slightly paternalistic employer/employee relationship and instead engage with their employer on purely capitalistic terms. On the other hand, they typically avoid internal battles wherever they work and simply follow the bidding of whoever signs the cheques.

Solo consultants who actively get involved in helping management make decisions act more like "sociopaths" out of necessity ("politician" may be a much better word for this case). Indeed there's a whole category of solo consultants/executive coaches who basically exist to act as "consigliere" for senior executives who need political mentoring (dressed up as leadership training, career coaching or whatever).

I don't know much about how Scott's industry functions. One guess: partnerships between two or more independent peers typically consist of approximately-equal "sociopaths". If they're "good" sociopaths, these can be very productive business relationships. All parties know what they're getting into, and everyone respects each other as a peer. Healthy startup co-founder relationships should be similar. (Rao's later essay, "Entrepreneurs are the New Labor", suggests that the tech startup scene was becoming filled with more "clueless" young founders as technology hype and startup boosterism attracted more naive youngsters.)

Anyway, based on many of Scott's posts, it sounds as though much of his job does involve political skills: advocating for his patients' needs against some medical bureaucracy, talking patients out of doing stupid things, and so on. All of these are examples of "good politicking" (and might illustrate why the "sociopath" label is deficient).

(I'm turning into a sightly-less-cranky michaelochurch, heh. I guess every forum evolutionary niche needs to be filled.)

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#143

Post by DoctorOW »

ghaff wrote: post #92
citizenpaul wrote: post #24

>(the office) I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space. Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life. The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It…

Adams did try an animated Dilbert series but it didn't do very well or last very long (and wasn't especially good). There was a time when I really liked Dilbert--probably in part because I worked at a cubicle farm tech company that probably resembled PacBell where Adams worked in quite a few ways. But Adams left (and I left) and, for the most part, Dilbert ended up mostly stuck in a 90s cubicle time warp notwithstand…

> But Adams left (and I left) and, for the most part, Dilbert ended up mostly stuck in a 90s cubicle time warp

This was made obvious during COVID lockdowns to me. He had a lot of trouble addressing it in a way that felt as original and genuine as I was used to from the strip.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#144

Post by ghaff »

DoctorOW wrote: post #143
ghaff wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adams did try an animated Dilbert series but it didn't do very well or last very long (and wasn't especially good). There was a time when I really liked Dilbert--probably in part because I worked at a cubicle farm tech company that probably resembled PacBell where Adams worked in quite a few ways. But Adams left (and I left) and, for the most part, Dilbert ended up mostly stuck in a 90s cubicle time warp notwithstand…

> But Adams left (and I left) and, for the most part, Dilbert ended up mostly stuck in a 90s cubicle time warp This was made obvious during COVID lockdowns to me. He had a lot of trouble addressing it in a way that felt as original and genuine as I was used to from the strip.

Silicon Valley I'm probably close enough to fake even though it's not my day to day thing directly. But college life satire/humor say. No matter how much second and third-hand research I did it would probably be off in a lot of ways.

When you're actually living something, there are a ton of happenings which you can file the serial numbers off, exaggerate a little (or not), and things pretty much write themselves.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#145

Post by aetimmes »

Nomentatus wrote: post #75

I hadn't realized it before today, but Jerry Pournelle (a science fiction writer) pioneered here (with two groups, not three, which is an advance in understanding.) "Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational…

I had been looking for this specific quote for months; thank you for surfacing it!

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#146

Post by hatware »

cercatrova wrote: post #55
citizenpaul wrote: post #24

>(the office) I’ve been unable to figure out what makes it so devastatingly effective, and elevates it so far above the likes of Dilbert and Office Space. Dilbert is a hand drawn comic so it will never have the media reach of TV. It also tends to focus more on the details of the bureaucratic brokenness for people to laugh rather than cry at in daily life. The office is syndicated TV with a new episode every week. It…

Mike Judge is also devastatingly effective. I know people who can't watch Silicon Valley because it's too real.

> I know people who can't watch Silicon Valley because it's too real.

Sounds like they just don't enjoy it.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#147

Post by x86x87 »

ssharp wrote: post #114
citizenpaul wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that is bad. Its like they gave an intern a shoestring budget and told them to make something happen. The voice actors are like they just grabbed the nearest person and told them hey you are gonna voice these characters.

Scott Adams blames the cancelation of his shown on "reverse racism" by whatever network was running it.

Let's decouple the art from the artist. My theory is that Adams knows exactly what he is doing and is making a living by feeding the troll / fanning the flames. I stopped watching his blog / consuming the strip a long time ago (cca 2017) but I thoroughly enjoyed it for years before I stopped.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#148

Post by b3morales »

stu_ wrote: post #110
b3morales wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of the essay is that a truly Clueless would never do that; that's Sociopath behavior. That said, they are just archetypes, and to the extent we take them as valid at all, every real human will have some mix of the traits. (Even the characters in The Office do -- as I recall Angela is referred to as both a Sociopath and a Loser in different chapters of the essay.)

Agreed, but my interpretation of the following line: "The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management." Ie, the competent losers become Clueless. Hence they're capable of jumping ship / or even starting a business if not for their 'delusional loyalty'. (My point being that lots of company brainwashing mentioned by OP attempts to groom Clueless thou…

That's fair, and indeed, going back to The Office, the one Sociopath move that Arch-Clueless Michael Scott made in the entire series was leaving in a pique to found The Michael Scott Paper Company. Which was just successful enough at its core function to let him not only pivot back but actually score points off two seasoned Sociopaths.

Re: The Gervais Principle, or the Office According to “The Office” (2009)

#149

Post by mach1ne »

synu wrote: post #38
michaelscott wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bizarre choice if they were middle management; the running of a kingdom in the Prince is only really directly applicable to highest levels of C-suite management.

I guess it was their aspiration, but they behaved so apallingly to other people that they never went anywhere past middle management.

Well, according to one theory, the Prince was supposed to be a Trojan Horse fooling the reader into acting against their best interests, since Machiavelli wrote it as a gift for his arch nemesis.
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