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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)

#81

Post by tsunamifury »

gyomu wrote: post #64
tsunamifury wrote: post #56

This essay was my bible at Google. It openly matched internal hierarchy and our own secret GDNA testing results illustrated it directly showing VP and above scored highly on the need to dominate over discover truth etc. The problem was to my existential horror: i couldn’t use this knowledge to get anywhere beyond clueless. Because super large western organizations either purposefully hide information or are full of s…

The safety, if that’s what you wish to attain, lies in living as frugally as you can while vesting your RSUs for as long as you can bear, and GTFO of the rat race.

This is a lie for smooth brains who think they’ve figured out the “hack” to the system.

Usually resulting in living as if you worked a menial job not having a family and essentially working hard to not achieve anything. Then mostly living the rest of your life consuming your own smugness.

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

#82

Post by netfortius »

The "organization evolution" diagram is missing a crucial step, usually happening just before "death": some Sociopaths start trading intelligence (required, to a certain level, if to sustain crucial efforts in producing positive results) for mediocrity, in order to gain full obedience (the Clueless being hired are no longer A+ or A, but rather D, E, etc. level players, fully & blindly dedicated to the "leader"). This step is to be observed today in some governments.

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

#83

Post by wavemode »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #75
BoxOfRain wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca? If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Pol…

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"?

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

#84

Post by betenoire »

bananaflag wrote: post #7

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

> 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.

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

#85

Post by QuercusMax »

sanderjd wrote: post #45
virtualritz wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The translations make no sense to a German native speaker. The list even swap meanings, i.e. between confusion and clutter. Accurate translations are: Verwirrung = Confusion Zwietracht = Discord You swapped i and e; somehow English speakders do this to German words all of the time. The 'ie' in here is a long 'i'. Zweitracht on the other hand would mean a "double traditional costume", if that word existed (it does exi…

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

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

#87

Post by lotsofpulp »

JimmyBiscuit wrote: post #72
tsunamifury wrote: post #56

This essay was my bible at Google. It openly matched internal hierarchy and our own secret GDNA testing results illustrated it directly showing VP and above scored highly on the need to dominate over discover truth etc. The problem was to my existential horror: i couldn’t use this knowledge to get anywhere beyond clueless. Because super large western organizations either purposefully hide information or are full of s…

> Peter Turchins elite over production is my new nightmare The Lamborgini Urus is a sign of the apocalypse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6_Z0yGwtx0

Conveying information via 10min+ videos that people preusmably watch at 1.5x+ speed is also a sign of the apocalypse.

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

#88

Post by mikkupikku »

lionkor wrote: post #33
varispeed wrote: post #32

From what I have observed. Quiet people who speak sense and don't get involved in arguments, never rise to the top, whereas those loud morons almost certainly do. Often because those quiet people think they'll be less shouty, nagging. As long as the quiet ones can get on with the job and the loud pricks don't interfere, it makes the organisation dysfunctionally work. That said, world would be much nicer if these type…

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.

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

#89

Post by gsf_emergency_7 »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #42
gsf_emergency_7 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liked this comment: "If we could convince [any] Sociopath that we were all Losers, we might be able to entice them into spilling their secrets as 'Straighttalk'. (Arguably that's what this book is..)" On one hand Rao doesn't say much about Gametalk (he basically defers to Eric Berne) which is the Loser's sociolect and should well be our default. On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doubles…

> On the other, Rao much more optimistic than Orwell, who declared doublespeak the lingua franca? If time travel were possible, one of the first things I'd do is introduce Orwell to the 'algospeak' of today. This would do two things, firstly it'd show him a decent piece of evidence that Newspeak isn't as effective a tool for limiting human thought as he believed, and secondly he'd have to write another version of Pol…

[dead]

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

#90

Post by system7rocks »

This is why I come to this site. Some of the tech stuff goes over my head and limited skills, but this article was insightful and still so relevant. It probably applies to non-profit organizations that tend to falter after their visionary (aka psychopath) leader retires.

And it likely applies to a ton of churches out there, especially megachurches, where you walk in to the lobby and see leadership books by their star CEO aka pastor about leadership or life lessons or whatever. But those megachurches churn through employees until they find just enough psychopaths (aka executive pastors) willing to be assholes for God, plenty of clueless who are happy to serve as that middle management, and then those who are okay with being loyal and doing just enough week to week for a paycheck.

I've seen it all too often.

Check out the podcast Bodies Behind the Bus if you want a glimpse about what happens to those who actually call some of those megachurches to live into what they say - like actually caring for their neighbors.

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