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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)

#131

Post by ajkjk »

zoeysmithe wrote: post #117
alecco wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I've seen many, many times. 1. business people sold themselves as the best to manage companies and took over companies (just like lawyers do in governments), changing the norm from decades ago when it was more likely for engineers to run companies than some kind of McKinsey guy 2. but they have no idea besides business/money metrics so they quickly become overwhelmed and decide based on who makes the most compel…

This is really ableist. Sociopaths? Most people in charge of running companies from top to mid-level are average people, even if some dark-triad coded people exist. What you're angry at is what capitalism is supposed to do: maximize value for the the capital owning class, that is to say ownership. There was never some engineer owned utopia. Business culture has always been this way, in fact, its only been worse in th…

What's the ableist angle here..?

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

#132

Post by sdenton4 »

pwdisswordfishy wrote: post #104
betenoire wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> arrested development is the dark side of strengths in the sense of Positive Psychology I see some correlation here to hesitancy in adopting LLMs for coding.

Explain.

to hazard a guess: the better your coding model is, the less you have to assess your fundamentals, and thereby suffer arrested development.

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

#133

Post by ajkjk »

pc86 wrote: post #74
nixon_why69 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resonate with your comment but completely reject the conclusion. Death is inevitable, who cares how high you climbed on a ladder you didn't define? Why is that meaningful? Money is nice, dont get me wrong, but to value the climbing itself?

Doing hard things is tautologically good.

Hard war over easy peace, then?

It's more like, good things happen to be harder while bad things are more often easy. So being able and eager to do hard things lets you actually choose (and then hopefully you choose the good stuff).

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

#134

Post by sanderjd »

QuercusMax wrote: post #85
sanderjd wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the reason that English speakers swap ie/ei is that the pronunciations of these is not really consistent in English (at least in the American accent I speak), and I can't think of any words where both orderings exist but have different meanings. So the general impression I have about this is that I know there are supposed to be rules about it, but it seems pretty arbitrary and unimportant semantically.

Frahnken-STEEN vs Franken-STINE

Right, we truly don't have a strong rule about differentiating these in the standard American dialect! Most people say STINE for this one, but if you say STEEN, nobody is gonna be confused or tell you that it's wrong.

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

#135

Post by k__ »

Arubis wrote: post #46
k__ wrote: post #12

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.

It is perhaps crucial to note that Venkat Rao, the author, himself found an escape from the system under study here; he’s been consulting or otherwise feral for about 15 years.

I'm consulting or otherwise feral for about 12 years.

Didn't make me less clueless, I think...

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

#136

Post by rawgabbit »

obviouslynotme wrote: post #102

I have enjoyed this article series many times in the past. Having been in all three classes, he got losers and clueless correct, but he is mistaken on the sociopaths. 1. Sociopaths don't recruit. They build fiefdoms and leverage social ties. How many times have you seen a random guy making minimum wage become senior management? Almost never. The exception to this is people who are hired to be in the running for senio…

My own version has True Psychos at the top, you have to be one to climb your way to the squid games corporations play.

There are at least four kinds of underlings. Most middle managers are a combination. First you have the Douchebags, people who traded their morals for money. Second you have the Punching Bags, mercenaries whose moral code is akin to the mafia. Third there are Teabags, unintelligent Dunning Krueger types who are the shrill mouthpieces of the TP. Fourth you have Poop Bags, people who clean up after everyone else.

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

#137

Post by jamesfinlayson »

mikkupikku wrote: post #88
lionkor wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quiet ones need to learn to speak up when they have something important to add. Just sitting there quietly and not speaking, not participating in discussions, and not speaking up when something is wrong, is NOT noble. "Quiet" people who know when to speak absolutely rise above anyone else, in a professional setting, in my experience.

We've got to pick our battles.

Yep. And some people will just never take it will and do everything they can to sink you if you disagree with them.

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

#138

Post by dasil003 »

alecco wrote: post #130
zoeysmithe wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really ableist. Sociopaths? Most people in charge of running companies from top to mid-level are average people, even if some dark-triad coded people exist. What you're angry at is what capitalism is supposed to do: maximize value for the the capital owning class, that is to say ownership. There was never some engineer owned utopia. Business culture has always been this way, in fact, its only been worse in th…

In case you are serious, engineers were most likely to lead companies until the 70s. In some countries they still are. The negotiated middle ground was engineer + MBA. But even those are kind of going out of fashion and instead there are marketing/HR/accounting + MBA filling up boards and leadership.

It's also a function of young ambitious people just following the money over time. Finance has grown and grown and grown because it's the easiest place to skim the cream. Combine that with the fact that it's transferable from company to company and it's clear why the trend. Obviously the only innovation these people are capable of is financial innovation (repackaging derivatives, ever-more-convoluted deal structures to snow people, etc), but that doesn't much matter as long as there is a sufficient base of enough new companies with actual innovations sprouting up that it provides enough grist for the finance mill.

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

#139

Post by asdfasvea »

wavemode wrote: post #83
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and then I'd show him a news broadcast from last week, where the president of the United States of America literally said "War is peace".

Is the use of "literally" here, and the use of quotes, meant to be taken literally (as in, he literally said this)? Or is this the sense of "literally" which actually means "figuratively"?

I love that we ruined our escape character in language.

We now need a new way to convey to listeners that our words need to be taken literally. Perhaps the VBA method and just double the 'literally's:

I took a flaming shot of tequila and my mouth is literally literally on fire

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

#140

Post by wging »

orthoxerox wrote: post #11
bananaflag wrote: post #7

See the Scott Alexander review: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...

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 personn…

> Scott took it too literally

He does say in section (I):

> I was particularly told to “take it as literally as possible”

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