The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#2I wonder if there's a vocabulary in some industry, like maybe the gambling world, that can describe the players in this game without loaded words like 'sociopath' and 'loser'. I sort of liken the clueless to a scam artist's potential victims, someone who thinks he can play and win against a scammer but clearly can't, vs. a 'loser' who knows not to bother.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#3I wonder if there's a vocabulary in some industry, like maybe the gambling world, that can describe the players in this game without loaded words like 'sociopath' and 'loser'. I sort of liken the clueless to a scam artist's potential victims, someone who thinks he can play and win against a scammer but clearly can't, vs. a 'loser' who knows not to bother.
but it's only about "winning and losing" from the sociopaths perspective. as mentioned in the first installment, lots of "losers" lead very fulfilling, non-work centric lives.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#4I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people.
I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#5I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people. I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.
> And the third and most important reason of course, is that your moves have to be backed up by appropriate bets using your table stakes, exposing you to real risks and rewards
This is the most important line of the article, in my opinion.
First step to learning how to play this game is setting goals for yourself which will expose you to real risk if you were to try to achieve them in earnest.
In the tech world the most common place this sort of game is played out is the recruiter/engineer relationship. Spineless developers are favorite targets for sociopath recruiters. Next time one of them calls you, treat it like a game in which you are trying to dominate him or her.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#6I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people. I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.
I think a lot of engineering types are out in the cold on this one. what helped me was studying acting (the art of believably imitating social situations).
http://greenlightwiki.com/improv/Status
start reading Robin Hanson's blog Overcoming Bias, he's an economics professor who posts a lot about signaling.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#7Very long article, but very interesting points. Worth a careful read if you've skipped it because of "tl;dr". The first article, "The Gervais Principle", is also very good.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#8It is very good that Venkat(author) is introducing all these words and giving them solid definitions. It brings conversation to this new plane because we now have these words in our vocabulary. Great job, worth a careful read.
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#9I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people. I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.
> And the third and most important reason of course, is that your moves have to be backed up by appropriate bets using your table stakes, exposing you to real risks and rewards This is the most important line of the article, in my opinion. First step to learning how to play this game is setting goals for yourself which will expose you to real risk if you were to try to achieve them in earnest. In the tech world the m…
Are you saying the recruiters manipulate developers into working for them?
Re: The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk
#10I was deeply upset by this on an emotional level, mostly because for all of my life, I have not had an intuitive hold of this kind of communication. Consequently, I have been operating on an entirely separate plane, making it difficult to relate to and understand other people. I would truly appreciate advice from someone who understands my situation. I am not interested in sympathy.
I completely understand how you feel. I've been there.
I think a key takeaway from that article, that the author didn't get around to stating explicitly, is that for a 'sociopath', _everything_ is a negotiation. Everything. In fact, all of Powertalk is subtle positional negotiation hidden in everyday language. (For the security research-minded, I think a helpful metaphor might be covert channel information attacks/information passing).
If Powertalk is negotiation, then learning how to actually negotiate might help. Luckily, there are hundreds if not thousands of books written on the subject. _Negotiation Genius_, by Malhotra, _Bargaining for Advantage, by Snell, and _Negotiating Game_, by Karrass are all seminal works. I've found them helpful.
(Note that these books are usually written from the perspective of someone trying to sell a thing or a service. It takes a bit of a mental leap to figure out how to apply these strategies to the rest of life, but if you're intelligent enough to be a reader of Hacker News, I'm sure it won't be that hard.)