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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)

#101

Post by mjburgess »

bloqs wrote: post #25
trojanalert wrote: post #12

To be read in conjunction with the Babbler hypothesis - The amount of time some people spend talking gets them into leadership positions. It doesn't matter what they say, just how much they rant on. I read that, and realised how insanely true it is

This is because extraversion is partially composed of assertiveness (big five), which directly indicates your influence on your nearby human environment

shh, don't explain the correlation. this isn't about understanding, its about pseudo-intellectual envy. "obviously!" the more people speak, regardless of what they say, the more those Other dumb apes will elect them leader. I mean, why, any old fool could read every word from the dictionary and end up CEO!

The Dumb Ape Hypothesis: we are at our most dumb when declaring others so.

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

#102

Post by heresie-dabord »

lupire wrote: post #66
AmericanChopper wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say it's more because companies and other organisations are social systems, and your ability to succeed in a social system comes down largely to your social skills. I think people with poor social skills don't understand the importance of them, and therefor don't understand why the people with better social skills are succeeding, and subsequently come up with these post hoc rationalizations that allow them to…

You have to define "social skills" in a more specific but non tautological way for this argument to carry weight.

I'm not the parent commenter but I like your point.

People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system. It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity.

Social interactions build people's confidence and sense of value in the group, in the individuals, and the work at hand. The challenge grows exponentially as the population of the group scales. Communication is hard.

An individual's discernment and connectedness (a confidence/value score) within the group will reflect potential for success. Communication matters.

The human plot twist is that there can be dysfunctional social systems as well as dysfunctional individuals.

For a very serious discussion, the great writer Primo Levi published his reflections on his harrowing experiences. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primo_Levi

This related article about social systems and connectedness was also recently discussed on HN with much interest: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth...

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

#103

Post by wnolens »

_yb2s wrote: post #54
nkrisc wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“INFJ”, that’s from that workplace astrology, right?

Meyers briggs is not “astrology” - it doesn’t claim to predict anything. It categorizes how people already consciously see themselves with Carl Jungs archetypes. The main point of the archetype concept is to then explore the part of you that is different from how you see yourself- your “shadow” for the purpose of personal development. It’s not mysterious, mystical, or claiming to be science- it’s just a very simple s…

Thanks, this has given me a new perspective.

I went through mbti at a workplace and it was used to give us an understanding of our co-workers.

Your point that it's a self assessment and thus only "how you see yourself" and not.. y'know, how you actually behave, is in retrospect "no shit" but I missed this crucial point.

It kind of changes every conversation with anyone I've ever had about our result.

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

#105

Post by wnolens »

zahllos wrote: post #96
usrnm wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd rather make my work enjoyable than having to suffer 8 hours a day. And you're making an irrational decision because it makes you feel better. Nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't really contradict the essence of the article. If you look at work from the economic point of view, it's just an economic transaction, we are selling our time for money. Selling more of my time for more money or selling less of it fo…

I agree with the parent poster, the author sounds very bitter. Might not be true, they might be trying at humour and I haven't got it. But I think doing the minimum you can get away with is playing with fire. Your colleagues will resent you. You're also sending a signal to everyone that will be remembered. Maybe a colleague will start a business or move to another place one day. Are they going to employ the minimum e…

Even just viewing a job purely as an economic transaction is short-sighted. You are at least making social transactions, and likely also meaning transactions.

Hell, even a commute to work where you're spending time, gas, and risk on the road can serve as a quiet time to process and integrate life's experiences.

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

#106

Post by chongli »

_yb2s wrote: post #77
chongli wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s astrology because it takes unimodal distributions and splits them into two groups above and below the mean. This is a cardinal sin in statistics because it implies the existence of distinct populations that don’t really exist and so any predictions you try to make are no better than a coinflip.

It actually does not do that- each dimension which represents two opposite archetypes (e.g. introvert vs extrovert) is a continuum, and the output of the test isn’t actually a single category but a point on that line for each dimension. The full output is actually a 4 dimensional vector. Importantly- everyone has both traits, it is only telling you which you more consciously identify with. Many people will be near th…

I think you may have missed my point so I’ll give an example:

Suppose you take a random sample of adult humans and sort them by height. What you’ll see is a bimodal distribution which reflects the fact that there are actually two distinct populations represented in the sample: men and women. The sexes can be considered types and you will get reasonably accurate results for predicting height from sex and vice versa.

However, if you instead take a sample of only men and sort them by height you will see a unimodal distribution. If you then try to split this sample into two types above and below the mean, you will find that it doesn’t tell you anything!

This is what I mean when I say MBTI astrology. The archetypes are meaningless! Someone who is at 51% on the extroversion scale will get labeled an Extrovert and someone at 49% will get labeled an Introvert, but in practice these two are virtually indistinguishable and fall squarely within the margin of error. Since the distribution is unimodal the majority of the population clusters around the means, exactly what you would expect to find with the hypothesis that personality archetypes do not exist.

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

#107

Post by d_burfoot »

> Today, any time an organization grows too brittle, bureaucratic and disconnected from reality, it is simply killed, torn apart and cannibalized, rather than reformed.

I actually think the overall argument of the essay makes more sense when you realize the above comment actually isn't true for the large majority of organizations. Universities, government agencies, big tech monopolies, public sector unions, complacent companies in industries that haven't changed in 50 years, etc. Most sectors of the economy just don't experience that much competitive pressure, and that's why there are so many zombie institutions, whose activities resemble a kind of mindless shambling rather than any kind of rational constructive motion.

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

#108

Post by wizzwizz4 »

cushychicken wrote: post #58
HenryBemis wrote: post #55

Dilbert! (I know that Scott Adams got chastised for some views/tweets/whatever and I don't care) Now, to the cartoons. I was introduced to them back in 2000 or 2001 by a colleague. We both loved the Monty Pythons, so we had that in common to begin with. Once I read the first few strips, I got hooked. I starting 'seeing' these chars to my colleagues (and to myself). Dilbert has taught me A LOT about psychology and ope…

Late stage Scott Adams has some pretty icky views, but that doesn’t change the fact that he had some spot on insights about modern office culture. “Spot on” may not be a strong enough term - “timeless” may be a more appropriate one.

As much as I love Dilbert, I'd have preferred if it had ended around 2016-ish. The later Dilberts may have been "timeless" (in the sense that the belief system where minorities are out to get you and kindness is a sin is over a hundred years old), but they certainly weren't "spot on".

Some of them had valid points about how corporate "inclusivity" is often nothing of the sort – a trend dating back to the US civil rights era (see: Letter from Birmingham Jail), which I expect to continue for a hundred years yet – but surrounded by panels and panels of the characters smirking at each other about woke liberal madness as fantastical caricatures play out in front of them, that insight was… somewhat obscured.

Earlier Dilbert, though? Many of the stories were sent in by readers and fans, but wow did Scott Adams adapt them well to the comic medium. It's a real shame how he ended up, and I hope he gets better soon.

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

#109

Post by H8crilA »

anal_reactor wrote: post #23
H8crilA wrote: post #2

Keep in mind that in practice this classification is not perfect, as in you cannot just bucketize people into three categories and declare perfect understanding. You should treat the roles described in the article as archetypes of human behavior.

This is true for any kind of generalization. Having said that, I can really see this at my company. At the beginning I was a high-perfoming loser. Then I realized how things work, and since then I do bare minimum. I wish I could be a sociopath, but I don't have the brains nor the lack of morals to do so. I passionately hate the clueless ones because they stand against everything I believe in. My dream is to save enou…

High performing is the clueless, not the loser. Bare minimum is the loser. Those names are not chosen well, especially the "loser".

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

#110

Post by AmericanChopper »

heresie-dabord wrote: post #102
lupire wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to define "social skills" in a more specific but non tautological way for this argument to carry weight.

I'm not the parent commenter but I like your point. People who have a reason to form a group will cooperate/collaborate best when they have some confidence in one another. People share ideas, projects, and skills, and "read" one another and form bonds. This is a social system . It could be a brief association or have a long duration. It could have a formal context, such as a business or a governmental entity. Social…

You’re reading an awful lot into that person’s question. Social skills are a very basic concept, the wikipedia page for them gives a decent overview. But I’m skeptical that the parent commenter actually misunderstood what I meant, and instead wanted to engage in some debate about organisations valuing the wrong skills or something like that. A debate about the causes of social maladaptation is also not especially relevant to my initial point.
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