BE SLIGHTLY EVIL

A Playbook for Sociopaths

Venkatesh Rao
Ribbonfarm, Inc.
First Edition
© 2013 by Ribbonfarm, Inc. All rights reserved
ISBN: 978-0-9827030-4-5
http://ribbonfarm.com
First Edition
Contents
Preface

The Soul of Being Slightly Evil

How Deep is Be Slightly Evil?
Be Somebody or Do Something
Double-Talk and Chaos-Making
No Free Lunch Instincts
Personality Archetyping
Why Does Power Corrupt?
The Perils of Bitter Loserdom
The Unreasonable Man Effect
Shadowboxing with Evil Twins
Rousseau vs. Hobbes Redux
Preparing to Play
Status 101
Should You Show Your True Colors?
Small and Honest Moves
The First Day in Prison
Following the Rules
Observation
An Easy Way to Read People
Candor, Cursing and Clarity
On Cold-Blooded Listening
Orientation
Organizing the World’s Delusions
Status, Harmony and Conflict
Conflict Without Ego
The Basics of Negotiation
Decision
Indifference to Sunk Costs
 Vindictiveness and Revenge
Action

On Petards
Crisis Non-Response
The Hierarchy of Deceptions
The Art of Damage Control
Disrupting an Adversary
On Annoying Others
Derailing the Data-Driven
Rebooting Conversations
Case Studies
The Game of Hallway Chicken
Door-Holding and Illegible Queues
Napping in the Trenches
Pistols, at Dawn
How to Interrupt
On Dodging Decisions
Inside the Tempo

Acknowledgements
Preface
Sometimes, ambitious projects are born of an obsessive-compulsive desire
to tie up loose ends rather than elegant ab initio architectural visions. This
book is one such project: a set of loose ends explored over three years and
fifty-plus issues of the “Be Slightly Evil” newsletter, which I published
between 2010 and 2013. The list grew from nothing to over 2200
subscribers today. I wish I could continue writing it, but the time has come
to wrap up this long journey, put a bow on it, and seek out new adventures.

To pull all the material together, I wrote one, final ambitious essay
specially for this book, “Inside the Tempo,” a rather demanding 5000-plus
word piece that pulls together much of the material covered in the last three
years into one capstone idea to help you navigate the treacherous world of
adversarial decision-making.

I originally intended to publish this piece as the final issue, but a

newsletter called Be Slightly Evil wouldn’t live up to its name if it didn’t
pull at least one slightly evil move on its readers. This is that move: you
have to buy the eBook to get the Grand Finale essay.

The loose ends that I explored and tied up in the BSE list came from
two sources: my first book Tempo, and the “Gervais Principle” series,
which is now available as an eBook.

Tempo was a book about decision-making based on a rather ambitious

Grand Design that covered a lot of territory I was already familiar with. But
I consciously left out the problem of adversarial decision-making under
competitive conditions because I sensed the material was beyond the scope
of the Tempo Grand Design.

“The Gervais Principle” was a series I wrote on ribbonfarm.com about

organizational politics and decision-making. Since that series evolved as a
close-reading of the TV show, The Office, I had to leave out many
interesting questions and ideas that I could not fit into that framework.
Again, there was a Grand Design, this time one derived from the big themes
in the show.

So I was left with a large, messy dark continent of rich ideas for which I
did not have a Grand Design. An email list seemed to be the natural way to
explore this continent bottom-up, and so I began writing the Be Slightly Evil
email newsletter.

Over the course of three years, the newsletter explored questions big
and small, silly and profound, deeply interlinked and stubbornly isolated.
Thanks to the dozens of email and in-person conversations with readers
sparked by those newsletters, I was able to explore the dark continent to my
satisfaction. While I cannot say that I have truly mastered this space of
ideas, I certainly feel like I’ve surveyed and explored it pretty extensively.

So as a compilation of bottom-up explorations in the dark, this

collection inevitably has plenty of rough edges and significant variation in
the quality of the pieces. It also lacks a pleasing and clean architectural
scheme. But what it lacks in consistency, polish and high-modernist design,
I hope it makes up for in sheer, slummy favela variety and direct
applicability. In contrast to most of my writing, I have not avoided specific
prescriptions in these essays.

While there was no Grand Design informing this book, Jane Huang,
who helped edit and produce it, suggested an excellent overarching
structure that we’ve been able to retrofit here. In reviewing the archives, she
noticed that the newsletter issues each seemed to naturally fit into one of the
elements of John Boyd’s famous OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act)
model, which you’ll encounter early in the book. So we partitioned the
material that way. The partitioning is not perfect, and many pieces sprawl
and leak outside their “home” sections, but overall, we think we’ve created
a more useful navigation structure here than a lazy chronological ordering
based on the newsletter sequence.

While the book is still more of a random-access collection than a tightly

sequenced end-to-end read, we think you’ll get more out of it if you read (or
re-read, for newsletter subscribers) in the suggested sequence.
 Where do we go from here? I hope, for you, the reader, the future holds
many occasions for refining your own Slightly Evil thinking and decision-
making skills. If you discover any particularly clever ideas, I hope you will
share them with me.

As for me, my interest in the Slightly Evil space of ideas has forked
down two paths.

One leads to what I hope will be a future Grand Design distillation of

the ideas here. If I ever get there, you might see a new and expanded edition
of Tempo covering adversarial decision-making in a few dense new
chapters. Or perhaps a whole new book. Or a James-Bond-Villain scheme
to take over the world.

The other path leads to practice and application. More than anything
else I’ve written, the ideas here are ones I’ve tried and tested in real life a
great deal. I hope to continue to do so. I’ve come to think of this as a special
practice within my consulting business: the Slightly Evil Practice. An
approach to business problems that isn’t all win-win and Happy Culture.
Not all my clients are willing or able to adopt Slightly Evil approaches to
business problems, but those who do generally find it to be a very fertile
framework. Since they tend to have a great sense of humor, Slightly Evil
clients are, to be honest, my favorite ones. They are just fun to work with.

So if you’re in need of some support for your Slightly Evil scheming

needs (anything from designing your own personal Evil Laugh to figuring
out how your business can outfox the competition), you know whom to call.
I can be reached at [email protected].

And in closing, a big thank you to all those who kept me company on
this three-year journey. I hope this rough playbook for living a Slightly Evil
life serves as a worthwhile prize.

See you around on ribbonfarm.com and elsewhere on the Internet. And

don’t forget to check out the companion Gervais Principle eBook.
The Soul of Being Slightly Evil
How Deep is Be Slightly Evil?
Is there more to Be Slightly Evil philosophy than just an adolescent
attraction to being a bit of a bad-ass?

I picked the name mainly because it seemed like a good joke at

Google’s expense. “Don’t Be Evil” smacks of a certain paternalistic hubris
that even that well-intentioned behemoth of a company should be wary of. I
believe that at that scale of immense power, self-policing is simply too
dangerous, and only checks and balances constructed out of outside forces
pursuing different ends can curb true evil.

But enough about the inspiration. What about Be Slightly Evil, the little
baby antithesis at you-and-me scales? Yes, it is mostly tongue-in-cheek, but
to me the phrase also stands for a few philosophical ideas, and keeping it
constantly in front of me helps me remember those ideas.

The universe isn’t here for our benefit: As best as we can tell, the
universe is not a benign environment.

Advantage Determinism: Known and as-yet-unknown unknown laws

govern more of natural phenomena, including human behavior, than
we like to admit.

Humility: Towards nature and the unknown that is. Not humility in a
social or interpersonal sense.

Acknowledge “Evil”: I can’t define good and evil, but I do know that
if the concepts are meaningful at all, we have at least a little bit of each
in us. Acknowledgement beats denial.

These ideas overall, add up to a pragmatic truth-driven philosophy of

moral minimalism. Every new “true” thing I learn seems to shrink the
domain where I can hold useful moral opinions. There is no point having a
moral opinion about the law of gravity. So truth is also about increasing
moral minimalism. As you learn more, you should have less need for moral
opinions. Or as the French-Swiss novelist Madame de Stael once said,
“When you understand everything, you can forgive everything.” We may

never reach that asymptotic state within our human lifespans, but

every little bit of pointless moral “responsibility” you can shrug off helps.

But perhaps the biggest deep idea behind Be Slightly Evil is

thermodynamics. I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of entropy. It
suggests that not only is the universe indifferent to our presence, it is at least
mildly hostile to it. We are low-entropy creatures trying hopelessly to swim
upstream in a universe that’s gradually winding down towards a maximum-
entropy heat death. So the universe itself is, in a sense, Slightly Evil. So by
some sort of fractal logic, as little subsets of the universe, our true nature is
probably slightly evil as well. Of course, this is a wild metaphysical leap in
the dark, but something about this conjecture appeals to me at a deep level.

One principle this philosophy gives me is what I call my amorality

heuristic: an idea is Slightly Evil only if it is, in principle, equally valuable
to both good and evil people. Anything that works better only if you are
good, is naturally suspect in my mind.
Be Somebody or Do Something
To maintain plausible deniability, I try to focus on the how of the Be
Slightly Evil theme, rather than the why. Besides filtering out means that
are not justifiable by any ends, I leave means-ends justifications to you. I
assume you have good reasons to be interested in the subject, but I’d rather
not know. I adopted this principle as a basic precaution, but I had no idea it
would actually be tested. An anonymous reader once emailed me asking for
help with a whistle-blowing decision, and included details of his situation.
Fortunately, he kept identifiable details, such as names, to himself. I hastily
pulled back from the brink of becoming an accessory. I only like messes if I
am being paid to handle them.

Anyway, the incident got me thinking about why people turn to Slightly
Evil manipulative behavior in the first place. Why can’t you just stay on the
straight-and-narrow, pay your dues, and live an honorable life? I found a
great answer in Robert Coram’s fascinating book, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot
Who Changed the Art of War, which has now bumped Robert Greene’s 48
Laws of Power to the #2 spot in my Be Slightly Evil reading list. You
should also check out Chet Richards’ Certain to Win, an application of
Boyd’s ideas to business.

The answer is a decision that Boyd challenged each of his acolytes to

make: in life you eventually have to decide whether to be somebody, or do
something. Whistle-blowing is one of those situational decisions that can
precipitate this bigger existential decision. But everybody eventually comes
to their own personal be somebody/do something fork in the road. I hit
mine in the summer of 2000.

Ask yourself what you want your life to have been like, when you are
on your deathbed. If you instinctively envision yourself in the future, at the
peak of your life, you are a be somebody person. If you instinctively
envision the impact you might have had, and are fuzzy on what you
personally will be like, you are a do something type.
 Now for some background on Boyd before we dive into the idea, and
interpret your answer.

Who was John Boyd?

Like most aerospace engineers, I had a passing familiarity with Boyd’s

work before reading the book. I knew of his development of something
called Energy-Maneuverability theory, which is the modern approach to
fighter combat analysis and warplane design. I knew of his famous OODA
loop.* But I had no idea that these were just the tip of the Boyd iceberg.

Since Boyd never wrote down his ideas in book form, but spread them
almost entirely through classified briefings, he is not very well known
outside the military. But in terms of both depth and impact, his ideas were
arguably more profound than those of better-known military thinkers such
as Clausewitz, Schelling and Mahan.

Coram claims that Boyd should probably be considered the greatest

military thinker since Sun Tzu, and once you understand the Boyd story and
the magnitude of what he achieved, you realize this is not an overstatement.
Boyd was a virtuoso practitioner (the best fighter pilot of his generation), an
incredibly creative idea guy, and an incisive philosopher to boot. Few
people manage to be even two of those things, let alone all three. Boyd was
a modern military Da Vinci. But perhaps the most fascinating thing about
him is that he did not just change the way wars are fought. He actually used
his ideas to win battles inside the military, running rings around the
Pentagon bureaucracy, and building a cadre of acolytes who went on to
transform every corner of the American military. Though his ideas helped
win several actual wars, the greatest victories they helped script were won
inside the military establishment itself.

In fact, Boyd’s story reads like a real-life version of Yes Minister and
Yes Prime Minister, which we’ve talked about before. Except that Boyd,
unlike Jim Hacker, took on the bureaucracy and won. The story has its
humorous moments, but it is ultimately a sobering story. The victory came
at a huge personal cost to him and his fellow reformers.
 I’ll probably mine Boyd’s work for more ideas in the future, but let’s
start with the be somebody or do something life decision.

The Right Answer

If you converged on a “be somebody” answer like CEO, tenured professor,

or simply rich and famous, you are in for some hard introspection, because
Boyd had a definite “right answer” in mind: do something.

Here’s a curious paradox: the more you insist on sticking to a straight-

and-narrow path defined by your own evolving principles, rather than the
expedient one defined by current situation, the more you’ll have to twist
and turn in the real world. The straight path in your head turns into
spaghetti in the real world.

On the other hand, the more your path through the real world seems like
a straight road, defined by something like a “standard” career script, the
more you’ll have to twist and turn philosophically to justify your life to
yourself. Every step that a true Golden Boy careerist takes, is marred by
deep philosophical compromises. You sell your soul one career move at a
time.

If you are driven by your own principles, you’ll generally search

desperately for a calling, and when you find one, it will consume your life.
You’ll be driven to actually produce, create or destroy. You’ll want to do
something that brings the world more into conformity with your own
principles. As Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the
conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding
conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Uncompromising private principles that you do not seek to justify to

others are necessary but not sufficient. To actually keep moving forward,
you’ll find that you need to twist and turn. Your terrain is the tortuous maze
of truth-avoidance paths worn out by the “be somebody” types, and paved
by the medal-awarding priests. Your mission is to tackle head-on, the truths
that they work hard to avoid. Your own twists and turns are about avoiding
or outmaneuvering those who want to deny truths and defend obvious
falsehoods.

At some level, the be-somebody types dimly realize that their

apparently straight career paths are actually the philosophically convoluted
truth-avoiding ones. That’s why the moves made by slightly evil types seem
like “shortcuts” to them. They don’t get how somebody can get someplace
meaningful faster, without being on what seems to them to be the straight-
line path, and without awards to measure progress.

Because ultimately the straight and narrow path defined by your own
principles, grounded in truth-seeking, despite its apparent twists and turns
in the real world, is the faster road to meaningful destinations.

Legacies of Being versus Legacies of Doing

If you are reasonable, and decide to simply be somebody, you can achieve
your “be somebody” objective and wrap up your very successful life,
having offended nobody, and with nobody caring that you actually lived.
Display your certificates, medals and trophies proudly, and retire happy. Try
not to think too much about the fact that you’ll be forgotten the week after
you die, your certificates, medals and trophies mothballed in boxes in attics,
to be eventually gotten rid of by an indifferent great-grandchild.

If you are unreasonable, even if you actually manage to find a calling

and do something that you will be remembered for, chances are high you’ll
die destitute and unrecognized, after a lifetime of maneuvering, fighting and
making implacable enemies and loyal-to-the-death friends at every turn.
Instead of medals that nobody cares about, you’ll collect the detritus of
failed and successful battles.

And interestingly, people will scramble anxiously to preserve and pore

over your unfinished junk.

Boyd died in near-poverty, depressed and anxious about his legacy. He

spent his last years battling cancer and worrying about all his papers.
 He died a nobody by some reckonings. But he died having done
something.

When he died in 1997, his acolytes scrambled to make sure his work
was preserved. Boyd’s papers are now preserved at the Marine Corps
Research Center at Quantico. He never rose above Colonel, but he will be
remembered, and his briefings pored over, long after the medals of the
generals of his time are auctioned off by their descendants on the Antiques
Roadshow.
Double-Talk and Chaos-Making
Here’s a philosophical challenge for you: you’ve got a 2x2 matrix, with
evil-to-good on the x axis and pessimism-to-optimism on the y axis.

Try and think of people to pigeonhole in each of the four quadrants. Now
what about each group leaps out at you? Are any of the quadrants empty? If
you had to label each with an archetype, what would you call it? Try and
think of the most famous person you can for your labels, because our
mental models of famous people are caricatures that work well for this sort
of thing. Alternately, you can try labels based on motifs or metaphors of
some sort.

With every 2x2 view of the world, the challenge is of course to see if
you can break the dichotomies involved, at least locally for your own
situation, even if you cannot invent a philosophy that entirely transcends the
2x2 perspective. This is much harder than it might seem. I am always
amused by clumsy thinkers who latch on to a subtle idea like “dichotomy
breaking” and assume that breaking an age-old one like good/evil or
optimist/pessimist just requires an airy dismissal and some trite substitution;
if it were that easy we should all be much happier.

Let me see if I can offer some food for thought around this unnamed,
unlabeled 2x2, and break the dichotomies locally to prise Slightly Evil
thinking out of its obvious location just south-west of the origin.

Surveying the Four Quadrants

Historically, optimistic-evil has been associated with grand social

engineering projects. The Nazis were associated with soaring eagles, 1000-
year visions of a perfect society and so forth. Communists have been
surprisingly similar despite nominally being the political antithesis of the
Nazis.

Optimistic-good is the stuff of New Age visions and traditional religion:

on the Left, they believe in vaguely comforting and fuzzy ideas about
generativity, positive-thinking, abundance and general all-around
benevolence in the universe that just requires great intentions to succeed.
On the Right, they believe in roughly the same things, but with specific,
rather than vague, religious trappings.

Pessimistic-good is often associated with a deep sense of justice and

concern for protecting good (in particular, already-achieved putative good)
from the threat of evil. Dedicated cops, doctors and military types have this
sort of pessimistic good mentality. The pessimistic good usually see
themselves as protectors of the childlike innocence that characterizes the
optimistic good. In their youth, they are often guided by a strong but
unexamined and untested social values. But as they age, and experience
things like war and crime-fighting, which they are naturally drawn to,
disillusionment with the naivete of most social values sets in, and a set of
private values takes over. Clint Eastwood has played many such characters,
from the classic Dirty Harry to the more recent Gran Torino, (the Dirty
Harry movies were basically vigilante movies designed to pander to gun
nuts, but the stock character evolved into a much more subtle one by Gran
Torino).
 And finally, there’s the last quadrant: pessimistic-evil. This quadrant is
most often associated with a narrow, selfish sense of fatalistic and
hedonistic individualism. It is a gloomy world view that sees human nature
as eternally flawed and unchanging. To act according to this mindset is to
look for zero-sum exploits and social hacks to prey on the other three
quadrants. Crime is distinguishable from political ideologies like fascism
and communism primarily by the fundamental pessimism that informs
behavior. There is no perfectability of man for Tony Soprano.

In movies, complete disillusionment turns the pessimistic-good into the

pessimistic-evil (comic-book super-villains like Two-Face in Batman are
examples). There is some truth to this trope. Most who walk this path of
disillusionment, however, end up bitter and ineffective rather than actively
evil.

Realism and Pragmatism

There is some evidence for something called “depressive realism” – the

idea that pessimists are genuinely more realistic than optimists, but it is
decidedly shaky (not least because “real” is primarily a philosophical
question, not a psychological one), so it is safest to assume that no quadrant
has a monopoly on realism. You might also choose to go all the way to
solipsism and decide that realism is impossible.

Realism is a way of viewing the world, pragmatism is the related way of

acting within it. So where do realist-pragmatists fall on this 2x2? You might
be tempted to think they hover somewhere around the origin, but I have
come to the conclusion that pragmatism and realism are somewhat
meaningless concepts in relation to this 2x2.

This is because people in each of the four quadrants view themselves as

pragmatic and realistic and the others as hopelessly unrealistic.What’s
more, they can all be right.
 This is because pessimism and optimism aren’t really attitudes about
real things, which makes “realism” moot. Good and evil are about
intentions, so realism is mostly irrelevant there as well. Optimism and
pessimism are attitudes about possibilities when there is no empirical basis
for assuming anything. It is possibly to be realistic about facts in all four
quadrants, but be optimistic or pessimistic about possibilities and good or
evil in terms of intentions.

Naive realists are people who are avoiding taking a position about
possibilities altogether. Their attitude helps them win when events are
outside human control, but they tend to miss out on opportunities involving
human beliefs that rely on social proof. Things that become social truths if
enough people believe in them. Beliefs that create social capital rather than
truth.

Naive pragmatism is similar. It is the desire to act in realistic ways to be

effective. Naive pragmatists abhor empty gestures and obviously futile
endeavors. Again, this works in their favor when it is the actual outcomes
that matter. When “making an effort” has its own social-signalling value,
naive pragmatists miss out. An example of this is a politician making a
brave and futile attempt to solve some impossibly wicked problem, and
earning brownie points just for trying. Naive pragmatism is for bureaucrats,
not effective politicians.

Naive pragmatists are people who choose to act only when there is a
realistic chance of being effective. This often makes them the most
unrealistic people around, since they forgo all the fascinating possibilities of
symbolic creative failure and its social rewards.

I recently read a piece in The Atlantic by James Fallows analyzing

whether Obama has been a chess-master or a pawn in his first term. My
own opinion is that the question itself is naively pragmatic (so it makes
sense that a very seasoned journalist like Fallows, who has been covering
American presidents since Carter, should ask the question). When you add
social capital into the equation, you could say that in the beginning Obama
was something of a bureaucratic naive-pragmatist. Through the first term,
he has turned into more of a real politician, capable of manipulating social
capital with symbolic failures and declarations of belief in what seem like
prima facie ludicrous positions to naive realists. Fallows sees this as tactical
brilliance in the Truman mold, but this doesn’t quite capture the
transformation.

But ironically, the country itself has gone from an optimistic (“Yes, we
can!”) to a naively pragmatic, bureaucratic view of his presidency (hence
questions based on chess metaphors, which sort of miss the essence of
social capital dynamics). We evaluated Obama as a politician when he was
a bureaucrat, and now that he has turned into a politician, we are evaluating
him as a bureaucrat. Time lags are strange things.

Personally, I resolve this particular dichotomy by thinking of realism as

a desire to see the world realistically, and pragmatism as a desire to be
effective. Believing you have achieved either desire is probably a sign that
you’re actually trapped within one of the quadrants. It is skepticism and
doubt that mark sophisticated realism and pragmatism, and distinguish them
from quadrant-locked attitudes and behaviors.

Attitudes Towards Change

When you look at the compare good and evil optimists, you realize that
both believe in change and the idea of “progress.” The optimistic evil, when
they really get going, tend to put everybody who disagrees with their idea
of progress into concentration camps.

The optimistic good pursue a softer version of the same strategy: they
seek out like-minded people with whom they can achieve positive
resonance, and avoid people or thoughts they label “negative,” a label they
apply to any kind of non-scripted dissent. When they pursue action around
fundamentally ugly realities, they still look for “heart-warming” and
“inspirational.” They are fundamentally what Barbara Ehrenreich has
labeled “Bright-Sided” people. Whether or not the realize it, they put people
they disagree with on the sidelines in cultural concentration camps where
their voices are drowned out by positive cheerleading. This is a “tyranny of
the vocal minority” consequence, since the optimistic-good (both Right and
Left varieties) are so vocal in singing the same tune. Voices of dissent do
not harmonize as well.

There is a certain merit to this heuristic. Serious change requires

collective action, motivation and energy. Negative thoughts and people do
drain this energy. But the heuristic gets dangerous when it turns into an
unchecked, runaway sort of self-reinforcing positivism.

Equally, the bottom half of the 2x2 is associated with apparent inaction
and lack of change. For the pessimistic good, it is stability maintenance
against the forces of evil. For those who use established social values as a
proxy for “good” it is natural to consider destabilizing forces evil. Again
you can find distinct Left and Right varieties.

For the pessimistic evil, ideas like balance of power and eternal patterns
of exploitation have a natural appeal. The aesthetic of acting without
actually changing anything appeals to both classes. In a way, they too act in
ways that make stability and changelessness self-fulfilling prophecies. They
are less likely to recognize this compared to self-declared progressives who
instinctively understand the dynamics of self-fulfilling prophecies.

Given these divergent attitudes towards change, it is no wonder that

pessimists view optimists as ignoring the darker consequences of change,
and optimists view pessimists as purely inertial forces.

Being Slightly Evil

I sometimes think I should have named this philosophy “Do Slightly Evil.”
Because Slightly Evil is to my mind, a do-something philosophy rather than
a be-somebody philosophy. But oh well, the name is locked in, and the
Google joke is too good to give up.

On the optimism/pessimism axis, Slightly Evil is an agnostic

philosophy, but unlike naive naive realism/pragmatism, it is not an inactive
one when social proof and signalling through empty and futile gestures are
in the picture. It recognizes the value of social capital movements around
obvious falsehoods and ineffective behaviors. There is a certain inevitable
level of doubletalk involved here, in that stated intentions and beliefs will
not match the ones actually held. But doubletalk is at least better than
doublethink.

On the good/evil axis, Slightly Evil drives towards action whether or

not the consequences are clearly good or evil upfront, and starts with the
assumption that simply acting for the sake of acting (otherwise known as
creative destruction), and choosing churn over stability, is central to life.
This is not “good” because it does not equal a belief in change as progress.
But it is also not “evil” because it is not a belief in value-driven stability.
Action for the Slightly Evil favors chaos creation.

But this is only a partial, local override of the powerful dichotomies we

are talking about. You can see how hard it is to actually get beyond these
age-old divisions: the best I’ve been able to do to justify Slightly Evil is to
label it as “double-talking chaos-creation.”
No Free Lunch Instincts
When you have a philosophy called “Be Slightly Evil,” people are
inevitably going to connect the dots to things like the pick-up artist (PUA)
movement, neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and all those clever ideas
and techniques being constantly invented and refined by Internet marketers
and big names on the speaker circuit.

I’ve had several conversations about these sorts of things with people
who are convinced that I should talk or write about them and also apply
them to my own business. They think I should be making a lot more money
than I do. I totally agree; I just have problems with their suggested route to
that outcome.

So I’ve been spending some time examining my own unease with this
whole body of thinking. Why am I at ease with conversational jiu jitsu,
organizational politicking and sociopathic philosophical attitudes, but
reluctant to embrace things in this bucket of practices that I’ll call
“subconscious brain hacking” of other humans? Is it just a kind of moral
squeamishness? Hypocrisy? Some misplaced sense of honor and fair play?
Rationalization of lack of actual skill in these skill-intensive domains?

Because these ideas are certainly effective. Without a doubt, there are
valuable skills here, that can be learned and applied. If you are interested in
cutting-edge thinking in this department, you might want to try the work of
people like Ryan Holliday, advisor to people like Tim Ferriss and Tucker
Max.

Hidden Costs

In situations like this, where my instincts tell me to stay away from

something even if I cannot figure out why, I always find out later that there
are hidden costs that I did not understand consciously, but my gut was
reacting to. I call these my no free lunch instincts. These instincts are driven
by a common belief among people with a certain sort of scientific
sensibility: that all true knowledge is expressible in the form of constraints
or conservation principles. So if someone tells me that there is a free lunch
somewhere, I make the default assumption that someone (or something),
somewhere is paying/will pay costs corresponding to my gains. And until I
am sure that someone isn’t me (or someone/something I care about), I am
not ready to use that partial knowledge, even if it is true. Even if I am taken
advantage of in the meantime.

So to your list of “subconscious brain hacking” acronyms (PUA, NLP,

SEO) you can add another one: NFL. No Free Lunch. If you cannot figure
out who is paying for the lunch, you might want to reconsider eating it (or
in a more pessimistic form, if you don’t know who the sucker is, it is
probably you).

In the case of subconscious brain-hacking skills, the costs are fairly

obvious, once you think them through. Consider an example.

Let’s say you learn a few clever techniques to close sales. You know the
sort of thing I mean – using words that have subliminal persuasive effects,
specific gestures or facial expressions, priming, cues unrelated to the sale
like sexual imagery – things like that. Things that hack the overt intentions
of whoever you are interacting with, and bring unrelated desires into play.
You’re dangerously close to playing with the psychological equivalent of
roofies.

Let’s say you’ve been making sales based on non-hacking

communication before, with a success rate of 1% of cold calls leading to
sales. Suddenly, your effectiveness explodes. You are now closing 10% of
all sales. A 10x improvement.

The costs are obvious: by hacking the other person’s brain this way,
you’ve put the valuable intelligence informing their intentions and decisions
out of play. Or to put it more crudely, there’s a good chance you sold sex to
a monkey that wants sex, instead of (say) graphic design skills to a
company that genuinely needs it. And lost a chance to make the world of
business a slightly smarter place.
 I am of course, caricaturing the value proposition here. Most
practitioners insist that you can be “ethical” about such practices. That you
can take on the burden of making sure you don’t sell people what they don’t
need. In other words, you are trusting yourself to navigate conditions of
moral hazard with seriously incomplete information.

There is one situation where this assumption is completely justified:

outright conflict. When you are genuinely in a fight, you don’t want a fair
fight if you can help it. You should prefer a dumb enemy over a smart one.

But most everyday situations are only partly adversarial. To the extent
that they are not, you should assume that there is value in having the other
party’s fully engaged intelligence in play. There are non-
adversarialsituations when this assumption is justified, for example in
parenting very young children, making certain, very limited kinds of
decisions that affect the lives of (say) poor and uneducated people, or when
you are a doctor attending to a patient. But even in these situations, it is
generally unwise to completely put the other party’s intelligence out of play.
Parenting, urban planning and the practice of medicine all benefit from
intelligent engagement on the part of everyone involved. Moral hazard is a
hazard because you can be tempted into rationalizing things that benefit
you when you take on the burden of representing the interests of others.

Which means, if you hack someone else’s brain to get your way, there is
a very good chance that you will be tempted into acting in ways that are
against your best interests, as defined by a broader appraisal of the degree
of alignment between your intentions and the other party’s.

The Slippery Slope

Let me be clear that there maybe a free lunch for you personally, which you
can cash out in the popular currencies of sex, money or power. In our sales
example, if your selling effectiveness increases 10x, but 8 of those new 9
customers doesn’t actually need what he/she bought and realizes it later,
and quits, you can still come out ahead if you’re in the sort of business
where long-term customer retention is of no value and you expect to make a
million bucks off a short-lived fad. You’ll get your mansion, and chances
are the suckers who bought things they didn’t need will not find it
worthwhile to react, but instead write the experience off as an unpleasant
and expensive lesson learned.

But you’ll be on a slippery slope. And quite apart from costs paid by
others, you’ll pay the sorts of deeper costs immortalized in fiction through
various “pacts with the devil” type stories. In other words, easy rewards
may come with deep costs.

How slippery is this slope? A reader from Chicago, who was recently in
town, shared his view (which I think is correct), that once you start, you get
addicted and turn to increasingly unconscionable uses of your skills. He
made the point while describing a toxic company he once worked for: “a
company that starts down the road to evil in even a small way will end up
totally evil.” His point reminded me of one often made in Agatha Christie
novels by Hercule Poirot: that a murderer who has killed once finds it
increasingly easy to kill again and again. In one novel, Death on the Nile,
Poirot gravely tells a character, do not open your heart to evil.

The Dehumanization Loop

It took me a while to reconcile this conjecture with my own belief that it is

possible to be Slightly Evil in a stable way. But I think I’ve got it now. You
can only stabilize at Slightly Evil if you make sure you always “pick on
someone your own size” in a general sense. I don’t advocate fair fights
entirely for moral reasons. I advocate them for the same reason physical
trainers have you train with weights of increasing resistance. It is the only
way you can grow. If you get too used to fighting below your weight class,
your muscles will shrivel to match.

Hacking someone at a subconscious level presents the danger that you’ll

get addicted to regarding everybody as an adversary, and further, reducing
them to opponents who cannot fight back. Not because they are
fundamentally worse than you in the particular battlefield, but because
you’ve picked up some skill they haven’t (yet) learned to defend against.

This is an impoverished view of interpersonal relationships at two

levels: you’ve lost the richness of non-adversarial relationship dynamics,
and you’ve lost the pleasures of interacting with fully human people. It’s a
loop of dehumanization, and ultimately a path to deep estrangement with
the rest of the human species.For those of you who have read my
ribbonfarm post, The Gollum Effect, †this is what gollumization looks like
on the Mad Men (or Sauron) end of the game.

There is a special case here. If you hack yourself, using self-suggestion

techniques and other ways to deliberately delude yourself, this loop of
dehumanization works much faster. Your most important relationship – the
one with yourself – can get infantilized. Self-gollumization is the fastest
kind there is.

So if I had to draw a boundary around Be Slightly Evil I’d have to say

this: it stops being “slightly” evil when you start impoverishing your non-
adversarial relationships in any way, particularly the one with yourself. In a
conversation with a marketer friend recently, I phrased this idea as “keep
your customers fully human.”

This isn’t an easy boundary to recognize, understand and respect. But

then, if it were that easy, we’d all be billionaire saints leaving the world a
better place than we found it. One good heuristic is to ask: after an
encounter that you “win” in some sense, does the other person feel like they
learned something valuable at a reasonable price or that they were played
for a sucker, or paid too high a cost for the learning?

This only works if you haven’t already dehumanized the person in your
own mind. One way to test for rationalization via dehumanization is to ask:
would you want to win that way against a spouse, friend, child, pet or
parent? (Actually, having an empathy calibration scale is valuable in a lot of
situations, not just this one).

A quote I recently encountered, attributed to Victor Papanek, captures

this philosophy of persuasion very well: “in persuading people to buy things
they don’t need, with money they don’t have, in order to impress others
who don’t care, commercial design is probably the phoniest field in
existence today.”

After a half century of this mindset, we have today’s consumer culture.

That philosophy of persuasion is being rapidly ported to the Internet,
experience marketing and social media, and vastly amplified in the process.
Bigger no-free-lunch forces are being unleashed than were ever unleashed
by the Industrial Age.

The Costs and Rewards of the Hard Way

When you choose to do certain things – liking building a reputation in

business, a trusted clientele or a solid personal relationship – the hard way,
the costs and rewards get flipped. Instead of easy rewards and deep costs,
you end up with easy costs and deep rewards.

An easy cost is a cost that is easy to pay. Money is the perfect example.
It is the easiest way to pay for things, and also the easiest thing to give up,
beyond a certain point. As many people like to say, money is a problem to
be solved, not an end in itself. Once you’ve got yourself “problem solved”
levels of money (corresponding to the lifestyle you want), giving up more
money is far easier than (say) giving up a potentially rewarding lifelong
relationship that you are tempted to exploit for immediate gain, simply
because you can.

The rewards, on the other hand, are the deeper ones. A sense of deeper
understanding of how the world works, and a sense of gradually increasing
peace with my place in it, is the main one for me.

Playing the game of costs and rewards this way is a self-reinforcing life
choice. If you accept deep costs, you will become shallower as a way to
insulate yourself. It is part of your self-dehumanization. If you start to
appreciate deep rewards, you will naturally become a deeper person,
capable of enjoying those rewards.
Personality Archetyping
Why Does Power Corrupt?
There is a fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer in the Wall Street Journal
about the dynamics of how power corrupts called The Power Trip.‡ It
describes recent research that suggests that it is actually the nice guys rather
than the jerks who get power. Apparently though, the old “power corrupts”
idea is true. It is getting power that turns people into jerks (which is
different from being evil, slightly or totally). Here’s an extract:

...This result isn’t unique to Berkeley undergrads. Other studies have

found similar results in the military, corporations and politics. “People give
authority to people that they genuinely like,” says Mr. Keltner...

Now for the bad news, which concerns what happens when all those
nice guys actually get in power. While a little compassion might help us
climb the social ladder, once we’re at the top we end up morphing into a
very different kind of beast.

“It’s an incredibly consistent effect,” Mr. Keltner says. “When you give
people power, they basically start acting like fools. They flirt
inappropriately, tease in a hostile fashion, and become totally impulsive.”
Mr. Keltner compares the feeling of power to brain damage, noting that
people with lots of authority tend to behave like neurological patients with a
damaged orbito-frontal lobe, a brain area that’s crucial for empathy and
decision-making. Even the most virtuous people can be undone by the
corner office.

Fascinating though it is, I think the research is a little narrow in its

focus. It does a good job of describing what happens, but not why it
happens. This is a common failing in certain kinds of psychology and
neuroscience research.

The “why” of any sort of behavior is usually a mish-mash of situational

realities, conscious and subconscious self-interest, and distorted echoes of
unexamined distant hunter-gatherer behaviors (a.k.a “evolutionary
psychology.”)

So there is a flaw in the “people give authority to people that they

genuinely like” premise in the article. This is only one of the reasons people
give others authority in real life. It is an important one though, as the person
who forwarded me the article thoughtfully pointed out:

The popular mandate authority is more “natural” and “primal” [than

other reasons] though. Even Chimps and Macaques have “democratic”
leaders, not elected by ballot, but by a mix of “clannish” power inheritance,
Machiavellian alliance-making, and the results of fights/aggression etc.
When such a “troupe leader” transgresses authority by being an
ass/rapacious/stupid/overbearing, or when the leader’s “total power” (a
convolution of inheritance, alliances and approval) goes below the
threshold of other “potential” leaders (who also have inheritances, alliances
and muscles), there is usually a large fight (with bloodshed, murder, and
killing of the babies of the loser clans), to replace the alpha monkey.

But there are at least two other reasons. We also have the pre-social one-
on-one kind of authority dynamics: A gives B authority if B can beat him
up (physically or psychologically). This has historically been declining in
importance for thousands of years. But it is still sometimes a factor, when
situations force a lot more 1:1 interactions than one to many, such as in
sales.

But perhaps the most interesting reason is an extremely recent one in

human history: we give people authority even when we don’t like them and
are not afraid of them if they possess valuable information or skills.

There are many such “authority-earning” skills, but one of the most
important is the ability to see reality as it really is, in minimally-deluded
ways. Democratic votes can be overturned when somebody is able to see
and convincingly frame realities in ways that turn matters of opinion into
matters of fact. If a bunch of people are marooned on an island, who are
they going to elect as leader? The jerky survivalist who is the only one who
can keep them alive, and is likely to walk away and just take care of himself
if crossed, or the nice guy?
 In that vein of thinking, my favorite definition of a CEO’s job is from
A. G. Lafley: “A CEO’s job is to interpret external realities for a company.”

I have met many people who’ve gained power and authority due to this
particular trait, and it might conceivably be part of the explanation why
power turns people into jerks. Reality is usually somewhere between neutral
and slightly unpleasant, so most of the time, the “interpret external reality”
job is a delicate balancing act on the leader’s part: you need to keep your
people connected enough to reality to be effective, but not so connected that
they are demotivated and demoralized.

In other words, the “interpreting reality” part of leadership is rather like

parenthood. Call it “information parenthood.” You have to sustain a happy
bubble for others. At the same time, as a leader, your own parent is reality
itself, and it isn’t a very nurturing one. Drunk and abusive Father Reality,
not nurturing Mother Nature. Constantly facing the doubts and uncertainties
of unfiltered realities, while protecting others, can be brutal. When things
get hard, you will want to scream, “Why am I the only adult around here?”

This is also the reason leadership is often described as a lonely job. Your
job is to survive a lack of incoming empathy and generate a positive
atmosphere and empathy for others under your “information protection”
umbrella. You yourself become the reservoir of harsh reality information
that is yours alone to handle. Reserves of empathy can get drained,
resentment of the demanding children can turn into sadism and justification
for abuse. In the worst cases, the stress of being alone with the filtered-out
realities that you cannot share, can break you. You can regress into child-
like behaviors because you decide to take your turn at being the “child.”
You are tired of being the adult, and you’re going to abdicate for a bit
whether others like it or not. A great deal of executive coaching, such as the
excellent advice from Marshall Goldsmith§ , is really about increasing your
endurance at the “information parenthood” game.

And this is why, finally, it can be so rewarding, and such a huge relief,
to find people to work with who are tough enough that they don’t need to be
protected in order to be productive. This is why startup founder teams of
two are better than solo entrepreneurs. Two people who can be brutally
honest with each other, knowing that the other can take it, is a very
powerful combination.
The Perils of Bitter Loserdom
I read an interesting piece in the HBR magazine, a guest piece by Rosabeth
Moss Cantor titled “Powerlessness Corrupts.”¶ It is short and pointed, and
makes a single interesting point: that there is a kind of corruption that can
come from bitter, angry middle-management types. She describes the type
as follows:

Powerlessness is particularly apparent in the middle ranks. When

companies slash midlevel positions, they often increase the burden on the
remaining people without increasing their efficacy and influencea
combination likely to arouse risk-averse rigidity. Hemmed in by rules and
treated as unimportant, people get even by overcontrolling their own turf,
demanding tribute before responding to requests. They vent frustrations on
others who are even more powerless. Its like a cartoon sequence: The boss
chastises a worker, who curses his wife, who yells at the child, who kicks
the dog.

In the Gervais-Principle based language we’ve been using, this is a case

of the clueless finally getting clued in, and recognizing their exploited
status. But it’s too late to do anything about it. They’ve already been
trapped into the clueless-pawn world. This is how petty bureaucratic tyrants
are born. Unlike losers, who never rise to this level, and normally retain the
producer-skills required to move around in the economy, this type discovers
loser-level clarity a little too late. And turns vicious. I’ve met a few.
Normally, I run a mile. Unlike the regular clueless, they cannot be easily
manipulated.

Call it bitter, trapped loserdom. They are losers caught in clueless

positions, with eroded individual contributor skills. They can’t move up,
they can’t move down. They’re too much company men/women to easily
leave and find other jobs. They only leave if fired or laid off. So they
silently endure as more work is piled on.
 Why is this dangerous? This is the beginning of the end for
organizations. In this state, smart people start exiting from both top and
bottom as and when they are able to engineer exits.
The Unreasonable Man Effect
The Idealist-Tragedian Paradox

A key schism in the universe of ideas concerning the question of how

humans should live their lives is the one between idealist and tragic views.
Let’s call the two associated types of people Idealists and Tragedians (a safe
overload of the term in theater).

Idealism is based on a belief in the perfectability of humans. There are

innumerable philosophies, religions and self-improvement theories that
derive from the idealist stance. In fact the very term self-improvement
reveals the core idealist assumption that improvement is possible. The more
recent term, personal growth, conveys that assumption even more clearly.

Idealist views (and strains of religion) represent mainstream thinking

today, especially in America.

The tragic stance on the other hand, is based on the assumption that
human beings are unchanging. That they have constant natures that are
deeply limited and flawed, that cause them to fail in predictable ways
(hence the connotation of tragedy). Historically, it has been been at least as
popular as the idealist stance except during one very exceptional century:
the twentieth. Thanks largely due to the global influence of American
culture, and the dominance of idealism in America during the twentieth
century, the tragic stance has been a minority stance.

“Slightly Evil” of course, like all vaguely pop-Machiavellian

philosophies, belongs in the tragic camp.

The common belief in America that Democrats are idealists while

Republicans are tragedians, is a fundamental mistake. In America, all
politics and religion has been idealist for the last century. Hippies and
evangelical Christians alike, have been idealists. Main Street middle class
types and hipsters both tend to believe in some variant of the American
dream, though they often won’t admit it.

Now here is the paradox: idealism believes in change and creates

unchanging human beings. Tragedism (to coin a word) believes humans
cannot change their fundamental natures, yet believing in it actually
transforms humans far more radically than the idealist view.

This isn’t a deep metaphysical paradox. It is a superficial semantic and

social paradox. While idealism at its best can be very deep indeed, in
practice it mostly loses its way in its pursuit of deep “growth” and ends up
as superficial adaptation. A group of disenchanted cubicle dwellers may
discard their suits and laptops and go form a commune based on vague New
Age values, but they will almost certainly take their psychological baggage
with them. I am constantly amazed by how such idealists are able to ignore
the obvious similarities between the corporate politicking that they have
nominally left behind, and the internal dynamics of their own “new” groups
with supposedly healthier cultures.

That is why I call it adaptation. Idealist models of human change

merely help believers conform (often via cosmetic rebellion or deep
socialization) to their environment. Nothing changes around them, and deep
down, neither do they. Hence the commonly-observed irony: believers in
“progress” (of both Republican and Democratic varieties in America) often
help maintain the status quo by occupying stable marginal positions. The
revolution never comes.

I am biased of course, but I find the tragic end of the paradox far more
interesting.

The Unreasonable Man Effect

The tragic stance on the other hand, brings about deep change in a
roundabout way. If you stubbornly stick to the idea that humans cannot
change, then improving your life means changing your environment. As
Shaw noted, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the
unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

The best illustration of this “Unreasonable Man” effect is William

Whyte’s portrait of the sociopath-executive who refuses to conform to the
Organization Man mold. I have quoted this passage elsewhere before:

Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most
suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him,
it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents
yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip he
wants to dominate, not be dominated...

But consider what happens if you behave like this: you trigger deep
processes of creative destruction in the environment that turn around and
transform you. Unwittingly, you end up being transformed by attempting to
transform the world. Unlike the conformist adaptations of the idealists,
tragedian change involves real self-destruction in the sense of Nietzsche,
before resurrection can happen. You know this if you’ve ever taken on a
major, challenging project. Finishing it doesn’t just create the output you
had planned on, it transforms you.

Among the major pop-psychology/self-improvement classics, the only

one that hints at this process is Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist, which has at
its core a gem of an idea: that seeking the philosopher’s stone to transform
base metals into gold ends up transforming you. The protagonist of the
book isn’t an angsty, tortured soul looking for personal growth, he is on a
mundane quest for literal treasure, like your average entrepreneur in Silicon
Valley. The transformation is a side effect.

Resolving the Paradox

So can human beings change or not? I like to think about this question in
terms of Lego blocks. We are, each of us, particular accidental constructions
made up of a set of blocks. The whole thing can be torn down and rebuilt
into a different design, but you can’t really do anything to change the
building blocks. The building blocks of personality are abstract
consequences of the more literal building blocks at the biological level,
genes. They constrain, but do not define, who we are or can be.

So yes and no. We can change, and we cannot. The Idealist-Tragedian

dichotomy has the same contours as the Nurture-Nature dichotomy. Both
are false, both can be dissolved through reframing in terms of constrained
design spaces, building blocks and path-dependent expression of the
possibilities of that space.

So why do I consider Tragedian change to be deeper? To continue the

Lego metaphor. I often find that Idealists are reluctant to tear themselves
down. They prefer to only build up. Which means growth must build on
what already exists.

Idealists trap themselves into these cul-de-sacs of incremental change

partly through life choices and partly through a metaphysical own-goal.

The life choice is simply the act of focusing directly on change rather
than challenging external projects. The idealist goes off on a Zen retreat
looking directly for change. The tragedian starts a business or writes a book
and then resists and ultimately accepts the change as an inevitable
consequence. Good or bad, it is a rebirth. That is why you cannot call it
“self-improvement.” Tragedian patterns of deeper creative-destructive
change are fundamentally risky. A successful book or business may end up
sending you into a spiral of drugs and depression, while utter failure may
end up getting you to a moment of enlightenment far faster than the
earnestly meditating Zen students.

The metaphysical own-goal is much simpler: idealists often elaborate

the idea of perfectability into a doctrine of continuously evolving perfection,
which declares that you are perfect as you are, at every point on your path.
You can only become more perfect (it is revealing that the words “more
perfect” occur in the American constitution). This has the effect of making
it impossible for you to backtrack from a given path or admit that
something was a “deep” mistake capable of causing real regret, damage or
death.

In fact the concept of “mistake” is rendered toothless in idealism

through conflation with safe learning in the sense of schooling. “It’s a
learning process” is a fine way to view mistakes until a mistake bankrupts,
kills or psychologically destroys you.

The Importance of the Tragedian/Unreasonable Man Stance

Adopting the tragedian stance has several consequences (many of them

rather harsh). I’ll explore some of these in future issues. But just to get you
started on your own, here are a couple of such ideas to mull:

Idealists revere non-zero-sum “win win” thinking over zero-sum “win-

lose” thinking. Tragedians are neutral and objective about both, and
pick the framing the suits the situation.
Idealists revere long-term thinking over short-term. Tragedians focus
on the appropriate time horizon for a given situation.
Idealists seek “sustainability” or worse, “sustainable growth.”
Tragedians believe both concepts to be fundamentally vacuous.
Idealists often seek to be kind and end up being unwittingly cruel.
Tragedians are often low-empathy sociopaths, but paradoxically end
up doing good without meaning to.
Shadowboxing with Evil Twins
Let’s tackle a question of the existential “what am I doing with my life?”
variety. We’ll examine the case of a ribbonfarm reader named Lee.

The background, in brief, is as follows (bold highlights mine):

Lee grew up as a middle child, with an elder and younger sibling, in a

high-achieving immigrant Tiger Parent Asian family. Somewhere halfway
through college at an Ivy League institution, he decided to rebel. He
dropped out and became a social worker in the developing world for a
decade, doing very rewarding and fulfilling work and making a real impact
on people’s lives. At some point, however, he realized he wanted a path
with more personal growth and financial stability, so he returned to the US,
got himself a master’s degree, and switched careers. He now does HR work
at a big company. As he approaches his mid-career years, Lee frames his
life challenges as follows:

How to avoid (manageable) fits of anxiety related to my

career/financial expectations.
How to find the appropriate balance between the professional
aggressiveness inspired by my goals/abilities/etc. and the patience I
need in order to get along at work.
How to determine the appropriate balance between conventional
work activities and alternative ’life-hacking’ pursuits outside of the
workplace.

This is a surprisingly common life-and-career pattern these days, as is

the reverse pattern of suddenly quitting a traditional career mid-stream to do
something that feels more meaningful, like social work. In fact, the reverse
pattern describes my own life pretty well.

There are two ways to read such stories. Both are important, but neither
is sufficient by itself.
The Pragmatic Reading

The pragmatic reading makes such scripts seem banal and cliched to the
point that it is tempting to laugh at them. They seem like formulas for bad
TV movies. Yet, if you’re actually in such a story, it feels anything but
banal, and not just because it happens to be your life. There is genuinely
more drama in each such story than the superficial appearance might
suggest. Many people process such stories purely at the banal level,
comparing their stories to others’ stories, swapping notes, occasionally
stumbling upon an insight or two after the third drink on Boxing Day (see, I
knew I could work in a seasonal reference). You can find many such stories
in Dan McAdams’ excellent book, The Redemptive Self. The narratives in
the book are primarily useful as data though. They did not strike me as
representing particularly insightful or self-aware processing by the people
experiencing them.

We naturally default to the pragmatic framing because it feels non-

threatening inside our heads, and is also easy to communicate to others.
Within the pragmatic version of the narrative, situational details and
problems loom large as is clear from Lee’s concerns: managing career and
financial expectations, goal setting, getting ahead vs. getting along, work-
life balance, and so forth.

But in my experience, fixes developed entirely within such situation-

specific readings of your narrative tend to be temporary band-aids. You
might, for instance, take up a hobby to achieve better work-life balance, and
look to local opportunities and friends’ recommendations to pick a hobby.
You might decide to start a food blog and build an Arduino-based robot
simply because that’s what others in superficially similar situations seem to
be doing. Or move to Bali to do Internet Marketing. Again because that’s
what a lot of people are doing.

The problem is that such situational readings don’t really get at the
individual psychology of what is going on, so you get trapped into imitative
life scripts that may not work for you. After all two people might
experience roughly the same situational narrative and yet end up with
entirely different perceived quality assessments of their lives. Your journey
from hell to heaven might be the very definition of a fall from heaven to
hell for me.

This brings us to what I call the Shadow reading of your life story: a
way to make such thoughts more precise.

The Shadow Reading

Before I can explain how to create a shadow reading of your own life and
how to work with that reading to get to interesting insights and decisions,
I’ll need to cover some background.

Thanks to some very interesting recent reading and conversations (with

fellow blogger Gregory Rader of On the Spiral in particular), I recently
learned to think in terms of the Jungian concept of a shadow. Looking back,
without realizing it, I’ve been thinking in terms of “engage your Jungian
shadow” for a very long time, but now that I have learned a precise
vocabulary for talking about it, I find that I can think much more clearly
about certain problems, and express certain ideas in very succinct ways. For
instance, this whole “slightly evil” part of my writing life, which started
with my Gervais Principleand Evil Twins posts, is simply about me sparring
with my own shadow. I’ll explain in a minute what that means.

Now I am an amateur at this stuff, and I am sure others can explain it

much better, but here’s the basic idea. Your personality can be understood
as comprising two parts: a self and a shadow. The self represents the parts
of yourself that you accept, and are attached to. You see those parts
primarily as strengths. The shadow represents the parts of yourself that you
reject as weaknesses, and have developed an aversion to. It is, for the most
part, subconscious or unconscious. You can generally only see your shadow
by projecting it onto external realities. Especially other people. These
people are, at a first approximation, the ones who feel like your evil twins:
what is in your shadow is in their conscious self, and vice-versa. Your
shadow persona manifests itself in your own behavior only under
conditions of either extreme stress, or extreme relaxation.
 Your self and shadow are not independent, but overlap. The intersection
consists of those parts of yourself where you have engaged your shadow
consciously. These are the parts that you understand neither as strengths,
nor weaknesses, but simply elements of your true nature. So they actually
represent your freedoms. The parts outside the intersection are addictions
and aversions respectively, which enslave you to greater or lesser degrees.
Here’s a Venn diagram representation.

In this very simple model, your life journey can be described in a very
succinct way: it is about integrating self and shadow, and getting the
overlap zone to grow and cover your whole personality. If you want to
figure out a crude map of your own self and shadow make-up, go to the
Wikipedia article for your Myers-Briggs personality type and scroll down to
the part that says “cognitive functions.” The first four functions represent
your self, and the last four four are your shadow functions. Within the
Myers-Briggs model of Jungian archetypes, everybody is just a particular
ordering of these eight functions (with some constraints, so you only get 16
types rather than 8-factorial types).

Check out your list before you proceed. I am willing to bet you’ll
recognize how you frame the first four in positive ways as strengths. If
you’re past 30, chances are you’ll also have some insight into how you
relate to your shadow functions.
 The shadow reading of stories like Lee’s is very simple: sudden and
dramatic career switches are often a case of moving from self-work to
shadow-work or vice-versa. You either get so stressed out by working with
your shadow personality (recall that it takes stress or relaxation to bring out
shadow traits, and usually it is stress) that you flee towards self-expression.
Or you find that purely indulging your self has costs that require you to
muster up courage and tackle your shadow. That’s why the phrases self-
expression and going over to the dark side are so often used to describe
such career transitions.

So what can we do with this crude model? We can shadow-box. Instead

of big, sudden career shifts, we can work with self and shadow in more
fine-grained, and less drastic ways, continuously.

Shadow Boxing with Your Evil Twins

What do I mean by shadow boxing?

As a simple example, I am a Myers-Briggs INTP. The Jungian cognitive

function known as extroverted feeling is fourth on the list for me, so it is on
the cusp between self and shadow, and an Achilles heel that I am aware of.
It manifests as conflict avoidance and harmony-seeking in social situations.
I don’t like parties or scenes or any situation where shared emotions run
high, be they positive or negative. I rationalize this trait to myself as a
strength, “I am good at peace-making.” But really, what I do is calm down
group situations that upset me, even when it might be productive to let a
“scene” unfold.

I recognized this about 12 years ago unconsciously, and deliberately

started to resist the “peacemaking” temptation. I taught myself to gradually
get more comfortable in situations of overt conflict, with people yelling and
screaming. This made me less susceptible to being manipulated by people
who rely on creating scenes for leverage. I wouldn’t say I am entirely
comfortable with my shadow in this department yet. I still can’t yell and
scream and create a scene myself. I still don’t like raucous dance parties or
nightclubs. But I can now ride out storms created by others, without
attempting to pour oil on the troubled waters. I can also get aggressive on
occasion, in controlled ways. For short periods, I can even get on an
ideological high horse and browbeat people the way Bill O’Reilly does (an
American right-wing talk show host known for bullying people he
interviews). It feels so toxic though, that I have to quit very quickly.

Where is the “evil” bit here?

Chances are, in your personal processing approach, shadow behaviors

that you recognize in others appear almost as the definition of evil to you. I
do perceive people who behave in uncivil ways, or create disharmony
through inconsiderate behavior, as being morally objectionable, not just a
practical nuisance to deal with.

On the other hand, my evil twins are typically people who are very
comfortable with overt conflict and morally object to something I am good
at: managing perceptions and realities on separate tracks (which they view
as the moral sin of lacking “authenticity”). The trait they prize as a strength
(“authenticity”) can of course, equally well be viewed as naivete and
incompetence at a certain class of useful behaviors (deception of all
varieties, from telling a kid Santa Claus is real, to telling a sick person
things that will make them feel better even if untrue, to pulling a fast one on
adversaries).

So to truly explore your shadow, yes, you need to tiptoe into behavioral
territories that feel slightly evil to you . This is dangerous business.

One good safety belt you can wear is to actually engage real evil twins
rather than an abstract understanding of your own shadow. If you can find
people who seem like evil twins in terms of the values they model through
their behaviors, but are generally viewed by a broader population as
valuable people, engaging them helps you understand your shadow, and
limits the dangers. For me, one such evil twin is the author Nicholas Nassim
Taleb. Reading his new book Antifragile is almost physically painful for
me. I have to deliberately put on what I call my evil twin filter to get value
out of the book (which certainly does contain some good ideas and
insights).
 But I don’t think I could stand a face-to-face meeting with the guy. He
probably couldn’t stand me either: I am practically the definition of
everything he appears to hate, even though we think about very similar
things and reach very similar conclusions (that’s the “twin” part). I suspect
if the opportunity arose, I’d simply shake hands, exchange a couple of civil
pleasantries, and walk away.

Face-to-face interpersonal interactions with evil twins can be pretty

stressful, so if you decide to try that, you need to choose people who are
only “slightly evil twins,” so to speak. A substantive encounter with a full-
blown evil twin can be so toxic that it takes years to get over it. Worse, if
you fail to get over it, the encounter can grow into a deeply resentful “us vs.
them” philosophy of life, built entirely on top of one encounter.

I’ve almost been down that road. Twice. Each time, thankfully, I
stopped myself in time, retreated, and went down healthier paths.

But slightly evil twins are good for you. In fact, this realization helped
me understand my consulting practice in a whole new light. Often what I do
is simply serve as a slightly evil sparring partner for somebody who is
processing a business problem that requires grappling with shadow traits. I
cannot do this for everybody obviously, only with people who are in my
own slightly evil zone. But the more the intersection on my self-shadow
Venn diagram grows, the more people I find I can help.

Sparring with a slightly evil twin, like all practical actions, happens in
the banal world rather than the shadow world.

Translating the Shadowy to the Banal

To truly realize the power of shadow boxing though, you have to translate
the intense drama of your private life back into the banal situational script.
Because that’s where the action actually unfolds. Ultimately, you have to
manifest your abstract decisions (such as “curb extroverted feeling”) in
concrete settings. You have to pick friends and hobbies. You have to angle
for promotions. You have to pick some projects and drop other projects.
You have to decide how to behave at specific meetings or parties where
specific things are happening. You have to pick authors to read.

For people like me, this is the boring and tedious part. For people like
my evil twins, who prefer situated realities to abstracted ones, I suspect it is
the interesting part.

This translation is a problem-solving skill. Your ability to successfully

solve situational problems by translating them to and from the shadow
world is what shows that you haven’t just acquired a vocabulary, but a full-
blown narrative analysis and enactment language.

For starters, try something simple, like picking a new hobby by

accessing your shadow.

Here’s an example. I’ve long wanted to get myself a pair of binoculars

for bird and ship-watching. But I never got around to it, partly because I
never thought through the psychology behind my attraction to the hobby,
and appropriately prioritized it.

Now with my new-found shadow analysis lens, I think I understand the

impulse. The function known as extroverted sensing (basically the ability to
pay attention to external sensory detail) is a deep shadow function for me
(something that is seventh on my list of eight functions, which is why I am
not a graphic designer). But when I am very relaxed, I enjoy exercising that
function. As a kid in high school, I got into amateur astronomy partly
because the subject interested me (a self-expression motive), but mainly
because the physical act of quietly observing the night sky was very
relaxing to me (a shadow-expression motive).

Here in Seattle, where I now live, the night sky is visible perhaps two
nights in a year, but there is plenty to observe out on the water: bird life,
ships, waterfront activities.So I finally got myself a pair of binoculars last
week, and went on my first birding walk along the waterfront yesterday. It
was very satisfying. You might want to apply that heuristic to your last-
minute gift-giving this year, if you happen to know the Myers-Briggs type
of your giftees. But be careful. Don’t accidentally give them a shadow-
based stressor instead of a shadow-based relaxant. I made this mistake once
and the person in question has disliked me ever since.

And getting back to Lee’s life situation problem, I only have one simple
suggestion: he needs to re-narrate his situation in self/shadow ways, and
then ask the question of what to do in terms of integrating the two.
Rousseau vs. Hobbes Redux
Suppose you are a well-known gunslinger in the lawless Wild West, widely
regarded as a powerful but benevolent and enlightened being who can draw
faster than anybody else, but does not crave worldly things. Everybody
knows you don’t interfere with ordinary human affairs or use your powers
directly to influence events. You only strive to create peace and harmony
through indirect means.

One day you come across a situation that is just short of a Mexican
stand-off: two guys are facing each other. There is a sack of gold between
them, that they found simultaneously. Both are unarmed, but clearly
preparing to start a fist-fight over the gold. It is not clear a priori which of
the two is stronger, but both are prepared to risk injury to find out.

You come up with two options that you think might lead to a peaceful
and harmonious resolution of the standoff:

You could toss a gun to each, creating a true Mexican stand-off, and
hope that the escalated cost of the conflict (risking death rather than
mere injury) encourages the two to negotiate a peaceful sharing of the
gold.
Or you could appeal to their noble and selfless instincts and get them
to share the treasure, trusting that neither really wants to fight if he can
avoid it.

What would you do? Would the size of the bag of gold affect your
answer?

Okay, this is a very contrived situation, but it is the simplest one I could
come up with to illustrate two fundamentally opposed axioms about the
nature of human beings. These axioms relate to a thought experiment in
political science known as “man in the state of nature,” an imagined
original human condition that is assumed to have existed before civil
society took root. This original condition is presumed to be egalitarian. The
civil society that emerges from this condition is decidedly non-egalitarian,
but provides certain benefits to all. How does this happen, conceptually? Is
it good or bad for humanity, overall, that we left the State of Nature?

Thomas Hobbes made a fundamentally pessimistic assumption: that

humans in this state of nature are fundamentally competitive, violent and
corruptible (tending to become more evil or wicked if left to themselves).
For Hobbes, evil is natural, good is an aberration. Hobbes’ is a tragic view
of the human condition.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau on the other hand made a fundamentally

optimistic assumption: that humans in the natural state are fundamentally
harmony-loving, cooperative and perfectible (tending to become more good
and noble, left to themselves). For Rousseau, good is natural and evil is an
aberration. Rousseau’s is an idealist view of the human condition.

Both Hobbes (1588-1679) and Rousseau (1712-1778) were channeling

the pre-Darwinian intellectual environment of their times, the early period
of modern state formation after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. The two
are evil twins,∥ and end up telling very similar stories about how political
order emerges, but provide very different interpretations, and very different
prescriptions about how to govern. Today’s conservatives are intellectual
descendants of Hobbes, while today’s progressives are descendants of
Rousseau. Sadly, both lineages have gotten increasingly dumb. What was
once a powerful idealist-tragic dialectic is today an ossified detente that
produces no political innovation. Each intellectual tradition has become
inbred and anti-intellectual. The State of Nature experiment has run its
course and ended up on a civilized plateau.

Returning to my Mexican stand-off question, you could say that Hobbes

would toss a gun to each, while Rousseau would try appealing to higher
instincts (modern politicians would argue about what to do until it was too
late to do anything).

Today, if we had to reconstruct the ideas of Hobbes and Rousseau, we

would abandon good and evil and turn to evolutionary biology. Francis
Fukuyama does precisely that in his excellent new book, The Origins of
Political Order. Turns out, the key change required is to think of extended
kinship groups and tribes as the fundamental units among which egalitarian
conditions reign. So “kin-groups in the state of nature” or “tribes in the state
of nature” is a more accurate description of the likely conditions from
which civil society emerged. Both Hobbes and Rousseau assumed the
individual as the right unit of analysis. Turns out they were wrong. The
modern notion of individualized person-hood did not really emerge till
around the 13th century, in England. So as an approximation of real history,
the thought experiment has the wrong units.

But overall the Hobbes/Rousseau foundational pair of assumptions,

appropriately adapted to reflect the ideas of evolutionary psychology and
generalized to basic units other than individuals, still applies.

So what determines which aspect of our natures is dominant? Today a

rather naive belief is doing the rounds that whether we compete or
cooperate depends on whether we believe in scarcity or or abundance. In
terms of our hypothetical Wild West situation, there are those who believe
that the size of the sack of gold matters. It makes sense on the surface. If the
bag of gold were sufficiently huge, there would be no point fighting over it.
There would be enough to make both gunslingers rich beyond their wildest
dreams.

But as both Hobbes and Rousseau recognized, abundance/scarcity is

only part of the story. Above a certain minimum size, the bag of gold is
partly just an excuse for engaging in a fight for recognition. Each party has
an urge to force the other to recognize him as worthy, via submission (an
inherently quixotic urge, since recognition from a defeated adversary is
devalued by virtue of the defeat). Ceding the gold would be a mark of such
submission. Modern identity politics is often about recognition-seeking
rather than a fight over resources, with or without guns.

For Hobbes (and Hegel, and Nietzsche and Fukuyama) this struggle for
recognition is a necessary and unalterable aspect of human nature, while for
Rousseau and his idealist descendents, it is an unnecessary pathology that
can be cast by the wayside on humanity’s quest for perfection.

I have oversimplified a lot of key ideas here, but if you want to develop
a more nuanced understanding of the Hobbes/Rousseau tragic/idealist
dichotomy, I recommend two key texts: the show Deadwood, which was
written specifically to tell a Hobbesian story, and The Dark Knight, which
was written to capture a Rousseauish story. In the latter, despite the Joker’s
best efforts to prove a Hobbesian theory of humanness, a Rousseauish
outcome is achieved. You could also read Hobbes and Rousseau in the
original of course (personally, I’ve only read second-hand summaries and
sampled the originals).

I’ll conclude with one thought to justify the “redux” in the title. Even
though the major human political story among nations has ended in a vapid
detente of sorts, a new Hobbes vs. Rousseau experiment is starting today –
on the Internet. This one is in fact closer to the original thought experiment,
since individuals have never been more powerful in relation to kinship
groups, tribes and states. The Internet is also more of a blank political
canvas compared to the physical Earth, with its continents, mountain ranges
and oceans.

So ask yourself: would you bet on Hobbesian or Rousseauean dynamics

to better explain the evolution of the virtual world?
Preparing to Play
Status 101
Status is a big and foundational subject. Fortunately, the thin slice of it that
we need to bootstrap Slightly Evil behaviors is of manageable complexity.

This is the breakthrough question: “how do I know what status to play in a

given situation?” If you haven’t asked this question, it is very difficult for
me or anyone else to teach you anything about status. Until you ask this
question, you are in a locked-status mode, where the status you feel is in a
predictable and unchanging relationship to the status you play. You cannot
“play” it because you don’t have control. Your status behaviors are in
firmware rather than consciously programmable software.

Here’s a quick and dirty conceptual framework to help you understand

“locked status.” Don’t push this too far, since I’ve simplified a lot of things
to fit the 101 level treatment, but it is a handy starter model.

Felt status, played status and perceived status have almost nothing to do
with each other at a fundamental level. Any relationships among these three
variables are therefore quite arbitrary. A beggar, waiter or doorman can feel
and play high status, while being perceived as low status. A CEO may
constantly and anxiously seek approval in cringe-inducing ways (felt and
played low, perceived high). Let’s ignore “perceived” for now and focus on
felt and played status, since these are the ones you control. There are four
status patterns: feeling low, playing low (LL), feeling low, playing high
(LH), feeling high, playing low (HL), feeling high, playing high (HH). If
the root cause of the fixedness is intrinsic and psychological, the same
stable pattern will appear in all situations. This is absolute fixedness: you
adopt the same pattern towards all. If the root cause is extrinsic and social-
psychological, you will use a different pattern based on perceived relative
status, which is the difference between the perceived status of the other, and
your felt status. Both absolute and relative personalities are predictable. You
just need more data to model relative personalities.
 You can easily detect the 4 patterns, but it takes deeper analysis to
figure out whether you are seeing an absolute or relative use of the
pattern.The classic sign of LH, for instance, is “being rude to waiters.”
Somebody who is feeling low, but playing high will feel the need to
“prove” the played status by lording it over somebody nominally lower,
who is too constrained by situational rules to bite back effectively. The
reason this is particularly useful to look for in a date or an interviewee is
that those are situations that commonly bring out LH patterns.

LL might seem odd: why would anyone want to act low status without
manipulative intent or a payoff? Turns out, for some people, life is so
messed up that constantly validating an “I suck” life position, and enjoying
moments of perverse vindication, is easier than doing something about it.
This is normally done through game playing (in the sense of Berne’s Games
People Play). A simple-to-detect symptom is the inability to graciously
accept a compliment: “Your lasagna turned out great!” “Oh, it’s a little too
salty.” Be careful to tease individual LL positions apart from cultural norms
though, since self-deprecation in the face of a compliment is considered
polite behavior in many cultures.

HL is also easy to detect; the classic sign is what we normally perceive

as “gracious” behavior, where someone is considerate, polite, scrupulously
nice, and on the lookout for every chance to make you feel good. But it still
feels like “reverse flattery” or noblesse oblige because they are perceived
high, and typically don’t intend to truly act low in completely convincing
ways (Dicken’s Uriah Heep is a notable exception). Opening a door for
someone else is a symbolically a low status thing to do, but can be an
effective HL behavior if done the right way (door opening is probably the e.
coli of status science; I could write a whole essay just about that. Maybe I
will at some point).

True HH is actually the rarest type. Typically only spoilt children and
leaders/emperors in ceremonial situations will play HH. Beggars will
sometimes act HH (a case of “nowhere to go but up.” If they can make you
feel “low” by pushing buttons, they win psychologically, whether or not
you give them money). Doormen,** bouncers, waiters and others who enjoy
derived high status through a uniform (representing someone else or a
group with true high status) can also act HH.

To tell scope, there isn’t really an easy formula. You have to observe the
same person’s behavior across multiple situations, and their interactions
with many others of varied relative status.

Now, here’s why all this is important. Status is a variable whose

importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you gravitate to preferred locked-
status patterns, then you will expend energy preserving those patterns. You
can be manipulated. Status matters if it matters.

Conversely, if status doesn’t matter to you, it becomes available to you

as a situational control variable when dealing with those to whom status
does matter. We all start out in a locked-status mode, but if you start
breaking locked felt-played patterns then a curious thing happens: felt status
of any sort weakens. Turns out felt status needs the nourishment of being
hooked to a projected (and perceived-as-hoped and validated) status in
order to survive. If you spend enough years breaking patterns in
unpredictable ways, felt status starts to vanish altogether, leaving a sort of
“status vacuum” inside you. The designated part of firmware dedicated to
status seems to decay. The variable can nearly completely vanish. I suspect
this happens to really good actors, like William H. Macy, who play a large
status spectrum convincingly. This is one reason I don’t consider Denzel
Washington a good actor: he never seems to play convincing low-status
roles.

When two status-vacuum people meet, they typically recognize each

other and abandon status-based manipulation altogether and spar with other
weapons.

There is a subtle failure mode here: if you break locked patterns in

predictable ways, you simply lock in new patterns. I knew a guy who
figured all this stuff out, but then got hooked on “pushing buttons” and
enjoying the reactions. That reinforced a “felt high” pattern rather than
shriveling felt status to a vacuum. He could be manipulated by hooking his
button-pushing instincts. The best way to break patterns in random ways is
simply to play situations in ways that suit your situational objectives. Your
objectives and the related optimal patterns, will generally be in a random
relationship to any locked patterns.

Now, on to the opening question: what status should you play in a given
situation? Depends on what you want out of the situation, doesn’t it? What
do you want the other person to do?

Whatever you want, getting it involves correctly adapting to their

predictable status behaviors. You can threaten their projected status, in
which case they’ll move to defend it. You can validate it, in which case
they’ll may move to express gratitude or ignore you. You can combine the
two moves by first attacking and then validating. This is the familiar “give
people a way to save face” sequence.

Be careful of one thing though–how they react to your machinations

depends on the way they perceive your status. You want to pick a position
relative to the one they want to hold on to. Which side, and how far above
or below, depends on whether you want to attack or validate, and how. You
can’t shift too much because locked-status people can’t parse status-shifters.
You’ll just evoke suspicion, distrust or confusion. Pick a good position and
stick to it for the situation; shifting status in mid-situation is not a 101 level
skill. Both distance and sign matter. For instance, if you want to validate the
other’s status via compliments, you can’t be too far below (flattery won’t be
valued) or too far above (you risk seeming patronizing). And you also have
to pick a position you can credibly hold given the status signs that are
important to the other. If the other person is only capable of seeing and
reacting to how you are dressed, you can’t do a whole lot if you happen to
be dressed like a slob. At least, not at 101 skill levels.

How important is it to play status right? Overwhelmingly important.

You can do everything else right and play status wrong and you’ll fail. You
need to constantly practice status playing skills, and even then the game
gets tougher all the time as you meet more complicated people, in more
demanding situations. You will play things wrong often, so you need to
spread risk over multiple situations and people.

Can you choose not to play? Yes, if you find a group of people whose
locked-status patterns are complementary to yours (either via co-dependent
game-playing patterns or more productive patterns), and stay within that
group, and within a small universe of situations, as much as you can. If your
life involves constantly meeting all sorts of new people, in unfamiliar
situations, and getting all sorts of different things from them, you don’t
have a choice. Play status or crash. Even if you aren’t being played
yourself, the mere randomness of complementary/toxic status collisions
with a changing cast of locked-status people will eventually make you
crash. The unmanaged, baseline “complementary” hit rate will be too low.

Hope that’s enough to get you started, for those of you who needed this
primer. One warning. If you decide to go down this path, there is no turning
back. Once your status firmware starts to shrivel, you can’t easily re-
invigorate it. Being a status-player is also not an easy thing to hide in the
long term, so you will be known for what you are, by people you interact
with a lot. The best way to manage this perception is to openly
acknowledge it and make sure your underlying values are understood and
accepted by others. If you don’t make that clear, you’ll end up being viewed
as an opportunistic, two-faced politician, and that perception is highly
dangerous. Project your values clearly, and you’ll come across as “worldly
wise,” a much safer perception.
Should You Show Your True Colors?
There are two types of movie villains, the kind that starts out obviously evil
from minute one, and the bad guy who “shows his true colors” at some
pivotal scene. Even if you are only slightly evil, you need to pick one of
these two styles; obvious wolf, or wolf in sheep’s clothing? I recommend
“obvious wolf,” but done intelligently.

Pretending to be all sweet and nice usually backfires badly in the long term,
because long-term acting is hard, painful and ultimately pointless, and when
you are unmasked (as you ultimately will be),

the repercussions are awful, even if your unmasked character isn’t

particularly bad. The mere fact that you put on a show is a hanging crime,
socially.

But if you are afraid that “showing your true colors” limits your influence,
you are mistaken. Done right, it actually amplifies influence. Here’s a little
story (possibly apocryphal) I once heard, that illustrates the point.

On the sets of The Hunt for Red October one day, Sean Connery lost it.
He exploded at some unfortunate stage hand for a trivial reason; the whole
unit was on edge. That’s when they shot the scene when Sean Connery’s
character first strides onto the command deck. All the other actors tensed
up. Connery himself was calm and relaxed.

Sean Connery actually lost his temper on purpose. That way he got the
other actors to act in a way that made his presence seem a lot more
commanding. At some point, you too have probably been around someone
influential who is known to have an explosive temper. Everyone walks
around on eggshells, people watch what they say, and there is tension in the
air.

Now, I don’t know if that story is true, but I’ve seen enough similar
episodes in real life to extract a general lesson. To wield influence, it pays
to appear predictable in very simple ways around others. Fly your true
colors high. For most of us on the slightly evil path, this is a
counterintuitive idea. We’ve all learned, through observation and practice,
that it pays

to be either a low reactor, or that it pays to become whatever the situation

demands, like the boggarts in Harry Potter novels. Expressing “your true
self” is for naive, self-absorbed and self-indulgent idiots, right?

Not quite. Trying to be yourself and expressing your true personality in

every situation certainly is a very adolescent thing to do. Expressing
yourself completely is downright childish. That amounts to publishing all
your buttons for anybody to push. But if you identify the right, simple
subset of your most natural behaviors, and become very predictable to
specific groups of people, you will be vastly more effective. What kind of
behaviors should you deliberately publish? The ones others are afraid of
triggering. In other words, the only buttons worth publishing are the ones
others are afraid to push. Publishing buttons that others want to push leads
to being manipulated, flattered or worst of all, an invitation to a co-
dependent, mutual-reward-button-pushing loop.

Temper is the most obvious one, but it is a pretty blunt instrument. You
can also gain a reputation for predictably asking specific types of questions,
such as “do you have data to back that up?” and a reputation for mercilessly
skewering people who don’t respond the right way. Do it once or twice, and
people get the message. So long as it is a self-aware kind of predictability,
you will also be able to over-ride your own default published responses on
occasion if necessary.
Small and Honest Moves
How do you know your car mechanic isn’t over-charging you? How do you
know your doctor isn’t ordering unnecessary tests and procedures?

Such situations are what economists call “principal-agent problems.”

Basically, these are asymmetric situations where the party you are paying
for a service is also the knowledgeable party who can determine what
services are actually necessary, and how much to charge. The agent has a
strong incentive to cheat the principal by padding the bills, either by doing,
or pretending to do, unnecessary extra work. Such cheating is rife,
especially in car repair. More than once I’ve doubtfully forked over money
for work I suspected was unnecessary. Once, I actually caught an extra
listed service, and when I pointed it out, the mechanic’s reaction made it
clear that it wasn’t an accident. He blustered, but it was clear he’d tried
padding the bill, assuming I was more ignorant than I actually was.

Much advice is often offered to principals on how to deal with the

problem, but I’ll offer you a slightly evil tip: how to win the trust of a
suspicious principal if you are an agent.

A month or so ago, my car developed a slow oil leak. Since I’d recently
driven over a big rock that hit my under-carriage, I was worried there might
some serious and expensive damage to my transmission. I mentioned the
incident as a possible cause while dropping the car off, and I expect my
anxiety over a potentially huge bill must have been evident. When it comes
to car mechanics, I don’t bother with a poker face. After all, these guys get
to read dozens of customer faces every day while you and I only dance with
auto mechanics a couple of times a year.

To my pleasant surprise, when I picked up the car, the mechanic told me

he was just charging me for an oil change. The problem was an old and
cracked oil pan cap (if I remember his words correctly), a cheap part he
replaced for free. So I got a $35 bill where I had mentally been preparing
for something in the hundreds or thousands.
 This is what I call a small, honest act. He could easily have met my
anxious expectations and done unnecessary and expensive repairs.

In this case, I believe the small, honest act was part of an overall honest
operation. But it immediately struck me that such moves can be used by an
unscrupulous agent to lull a suspicious principal into a false sense of
security. An agent can easily gain trust with small, honest moves, and then
make out like a bandit later when a better opportunity presents itself.

Most uses of this tactic I can think of would be outright evil rather than
slightly evil, so the main value in knowing the trick is to guard against it.
But I suspect there are probably good slightly evil cases where you can use
the tactic and still sleep at night. Especially if the principal is a jerk who
deserves it. A fictional example is Andy DuFresne’s actions in the
Shawshank Redemption. I won’t spoil it for you if you haven’t yet seen it.
The First Day in Prison
I hope you never do anything that sends you to prison, but there are
interesting things to be learned from prison culture. One of my favorite
prison ideas is the best known one: you should beat somebody up on your
first day in prison. Otherwise, so prison-lore has it, things that happen to
you will be even nastier than they need to be.

Like many, I believe that all organizations are psychic prisons. Unlike most,
I also believe that apparently open and non-institutional social systems or
networks are also psychic prisons. There is a saying in the modern cult of
happiness that “happiness is other people.” I’d add to that, “prison is other
people.”

So you should expect to see some variant of the “beat somebody up on

your first day” dynamic in most social contexts. Parties, blogosphere
niches, Facebook groups, soccer games: every kind of social context has
certain prison-like elements.

In regular workplaces, opportunities come up regularly because the

moment you decide to do something significant, you’ll run into opposition.

There are three ways of dealing with opposition.

The recommended and stupid way is to directly engage it in a

cooperative spirit. This never works unless there is genuinely some sort of
misunderstanding that can be easily clarified. This is the well-known “death
by consensus seeking” phenomenon where you try far too hard to make
everybody happy and end up slowing down your effort to a glacial pace.
You also burden it with so much crud put in to please others, it will likely
die under the weight of unreasonable expectations if it ever gets through.
Consensus-building has its place in the slightly evil playbook, but it is
rarely a useful obstacle-avoidance technique.

The smart way is to acknowledge the reality of true conflict and

judiciously decide, for each obstacle, whether to go through it or around it.
Going through means confronting somebody openly and trying to either
win them over to your side without conceding much in return, or getting a
more powerful decision-maker to rule in your favor. Going around means
picking from among your favorite slightly evil moves in the playbook, such
as misdirection, distraction, pre-emptive neutralization before they know
what you are up to, sidelining, flattery, stealth, divide-and-conquer,
momentum judo (accelerating their efforts to failure rather than resisting
them) and strategic leaks.

I almost never go through, and most effective people I’ve met also
never go through. Going around is generally cheaper and less damaging.

But there is one situation where going through is useful, even if you
would normally judge the situation to be a go-around situation. This is
when you are new to a place. Plowing through an element of opposition
demonstrates a willingness to fight when necessary, force of will and social
intelligence in navigating status hierarchies. In other words, you have to
make an example of some unfortunate opponent.

But this only works if you pick the right target and demonstrate “going
around” behaviors and consensus-seeking behaviors in parallel (to show
your competence at all the plays is to make sure you don’t get labeled a bull
in the china shop who only knows how to go through).

This means you must generally pick on someone nominally bigger than
you (older, bigger paycheck, nicer title, more successful track record) who
isn’t particularly well-liked or connected. But not so much bigger that open
conflict would be viewed as unhealthy for the organization, even if the
specific target is viewed as deserving of a beat-down. In other words, you
have to set up and win an underdog fight, where you’re not too much of an
underdog. You must also anticipate and plan for neutralizing collateral
damage, and make sure the right audience is watching. Be careful not to
take on staff bureaucrats. “Going through” is almost never the right strategy
when dealing with staff. You must pick somebody with line responsibilities.

Lastly, you shouldn’t be the one to start the fight. You should wait for an
excuse, a legitimate provocation. Ideally you should pick as your excuse an
instance of a pattern of behavior that everybody objects to already. Email is
often the perfect medium for such skirmishes. So a good strategy is to wait
for a provocation over email, and then produce a calibrated over-reaction.
Be careful not to rope in the people you expect to act as judges on your
side: you need to show such judges that you can handle confrontation
unaided and that impressing them isn’t really the point.

And make sure you pick weapons you know how to use. Email is a
good medium, but if you suck at email-fu and the art of delivering civil and
understated surgical strikes with words, it would be very dumb indeed to
pick email.
Following the Rules
Let’s steal an idea from the playbook of the labor movement: following the
rules.

How much do you think depends on trust, initiative and good faith, for
things to run smoothly in a business? Or to turn the question on its head,
how intentionally evil do you actually have to be, to disrupt business
operations? Do you need to break rules to mess things up?

Turns out, the answer is not even “slightly evil,” let alone “outright
evil.” All you have to do is play by the rules. EXACTLY by the rules.

Playing exactly by the rules is a powerful form of industrial collective

action known as “work to rule,”†† in which workers stick religiously to their
job descriptions, defined policies and procedures. You don’t stop work. You
don’t deliberately slow down. You don’t try extra-hard to be incompetent or
make errors. You don’t even indulge in creative passive-aggressive
obstruction.

You just follow the rules.

And as the history of the labor movement shows, it is often enough to

bring things to a standstill.

The reason this works is that under normal circumstances, employers

and employees alike conspire to maintain the fiction that a corporation is a
set of defined, rational roles that are filled by people with acceptable levels
of skill, executing rational policies and procedures that are sufficient to get
things done and turn a profit.

In practice, nothing would ever get done if everybody did this. The rules
aren’t a minimum definition of the profit-making business of a corporation.
They are well below the minimum. Even disengaged minimum-effort types
(“losers” in the Gervais Principle‡‡ sense) do more than this under normal
circumstances.
 The effectiveness of “work to rule” methods underlines the extent to
which workers must normally improvise, bend, break, extend, and work
around formal roles and rules to keep a business running. It also explains
why petty bureaucrats (the “clueless” in the GP sense) are basically
parasites, because they lack the creativity to go beyond roles and rules in
productive ways. They are effectively (and usually without any malicious
intent) in “work to rule” mode all the time, and only earn their keep during
events when others use them as pawns. Michael on The Office is worse than
this, since he does go beyond roles and rules, but in ways that make things
worse (for example, trying ham-handed conflict resolution that increases
conflict, or attempting to boost morale in ways that actually lower it).

The dynamics behind “work to rule” explain why the following are
among the most dangerous threats (intended or unintended) a worker can
make:

“Not in my job description.”

“I am just following the rules.”
“Our policy is...”
“We are not allowed to work on weekends.”
“I am not authorized to do that.”
“I don’t know what the policy is on that, I’ll have to ask my manager.”

The last one is particularly good at choking corporations. Since there is

so much that is undefined, the default rule kicks in: if you don’t know, defer
to your boss. If enough people resort to that rule often enough, the boss will
get choked.

Rules are most often designed to protect and insure rather than enable
and create. The only time best-faith people bring up the rules is if their
protections are being threatened by unreasonable demands, or they are
being asked to take on unreasonable risks. If these lines are trotted out at
any other time, you have a micro-level “work to rule” situation.

The Yes Minister series is an extreme example. It showcases roles and

rules that go way beyond the ones in private corporations; they are actually
designed to slow things down.
 These dynamics also explain why, outside of collective action
situations, sticking to the rules is one of the easiest ways to block, slow
down or disrupt things others are trying to do, that you disagree with. If you
can’t sustain an overt battle over something, don’t fight; merely execute
strictly according to the rules. Due diligence is a powerful weapon.

For someone on the receiving end of this kind of action, a response is

very difficult, since you can’t be easily fired or disciplined for following the
rules. Disciplinary or punitive action will have to be based on less
defensible notions like “bad attitude.” This is another driver, besides big
macro-economic ones, why layoffs are such a popular mechanism: you
don’t need reasons.

These dynamics can also work for you if you are trying to increase
productivity in a team rather than block things. You need to build trust and
goodwill by demonstrating a willingness to protect a “sphere of
improvisation” for your reports: a safe zone where you’ll let them operate
slightly beyond the roles and rules, in order to get things done, and accept
the blame and responsibility. In other words, give others the benefits of
going beyond the rules, while taking on the risks. If your team can’t escape
certain consequences when things go wrong, by saying “my manager said it
was okay,” you are not doing enough for them.
Observation
An Easy Way to Read People
Confirmation bias is the tendency of human beings to preferentially seek
out information that confirms their existing beliefs. This can actually be a
good thing. But we’ll worry about the good and bad of it some other day.
Today, I want to point out a fairly obvious inference from this that you may
not have paid much attention to: one of the easiest ways to figure someone
out is to look at the information they choose to consume.

Let me share another pearl of wisdom from the Yes, Minister book, and Yes,
Prime Minister series that illustrates this point. In the episode, A Conflict of
Interest, for once the clueless Jim Hacker knows more about something
than his sociopath Permanent Secretary, Humphrey Appleby. Here’s a
brilliant bit:

“With respect, Prime Minister,” replied Humphrey impertinently,...

“The only way to understand newspapers is to remember that they pander to
their readers’ prejudices.”

Humphrey knows nothing about newspapers. He’s a Civil Servant. I’m

a politician, I know all about them. I have to. They can make or break me. I
know exactly who reads them. The Times is read by the people who run the
country. The Daily Mirror is read by the people who think they run the
country. The Guardian is read by the people who think they ought to run the
country. The Morning Star is read by the people who think the country
ought to be run by another country. The Independent is read by people who
don’t know who runs the country but are sure they’re doing it wrong. The
Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country. The
Financial Times is read by the people who own the country. The Daily
Express is read by the people who think the country ought to be run the way
it used to be run. The Daily Telegraph is read by the people who still think
it is their country. And the Sun’s readers don’t care who runs the country
providing she has big tits.
 This is actually scarily accurate. And Hacker is right. While both he and
Appleby understand the principle that newspapers pander to their readers’
prejudices, only Hacker has realized the importance and implications of the
principle.

You are likely better at this game than you know. If you are American,
test yourself right now: who reads the New York Times, Washington Post,
Wall Street Journal and Utne Reader? What sort of person likes Ayn Rand?
If I told you someone really loves the Lord of the Rings, Robert Jordan
novels and the History Channel, what image comes to your mind? If you
are not American, pick your own examples.

Examine your own reading tastes, and the books you quote most often.
How do you think you appear to others?

This is not blatant stereotyping, it is blatant archetyping. A subtly

different (and morally more defensible) approach to typecasting people.
Sure you’ll go wrong sometimes, but you’ll be right more often. Drawing
conclusions from people’s reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the
most robust ways to read people. It is really hard to fake your personality on
this front. You can dress differently on occasion, and adopt various sorts of
convincing mannerisms and body language to project certain personalities.
But it is really hard to talk convincingly about books, television shows and
ideas you know little about. If somebody watches a lot E! and TMZ, but
pretends in a job interview that they watch a lot of History Channel and
read biographies, it is easy enough to ask them to talk about shows/books
they’ve recently watched/read. Even if you haven’t watched/read them,
you’ll be able to tell whether they are faking very easily.

Most people are far too cautious about making such judgments out of a
sense of political correctness. Don’t be. The more you use this tactic, the
better you’ll get at it. So don’t feel guilty about doing this. Go ahead and
use the tactic and boldly jump to conclusions. Be prepared to self-correct if
necessary.
Candor, Cursing and Clarity
Many newbie slightly evil types obsess about lying and lie detection.
Seeing deceit everywhere, and preparing to battle a world based on lies,
helps bolster a romantic self-image of “gritty realist in a tough world which
eats innocents alive.” This is dumb for two reasons.

First, lying and lie-detection are extremely non-trivial disciplines. To lie at a

level that can fool experts who are used to being lied to (such as cops or
polygraph machines), or to lie-detect at that skill level, takes years of
practice. Acquiring either skill is a waste of time if you are basically honest
and aren’t in law enforcement or in the spy business. In the everyday world,
both lying and lie-detection skills are much weaker, and your current skill
level will probably do. Investing more in those skills is like buying assault
rifles and barricading yourself in your home in a dull, safe suburban
neighborhood with no crime. A waste of time and money.

Second, in case you hadn’t noticed, very few well-adjusted people

(“well-adjusted” is not a compliment in my book) lie outright about
anything consequential. The risk of being caught out in a lie is too high.
They usually mumble, talk in circles, avoid certain subjects, act evasive,
deflect or equivocate. All these behaviors are easy enough to detect and
challenge if you feel inclined to do so. Here, the skill to be learned isn’t
how to detect, but how to challenge such behaviors without provoking the
person to anger. We’ll deal with that another day.

The point is, the everyday social world is not a harsh and dangerous one
built on widespread deceit. It is mostly a slightly timid, risk-averse and
benign world, full of people who are uncomfortable lying about anything
serious. The lying happens at the extremes: lots of little white lies on one
end, that don’t matter and don’t snowball, and a smaller world of
professional, risk-managed, money-making lying on the other end, that
includes marketers, cops, con-men and spies. And of course, there is a
handful of big institutional lies that are in a class by themselves.
 For everyday use, being able to tell apart people who are telling the
truth from people who think they are telling the truth, is a far more
important skill than lie detection. There are two important pseudo-truth-
telling behaviors.

The first behavior is candor. When somebody leans back, opens with
something like “let me be completely honest here,” and says things in a
very sincere, disarming and open way, chances are they believe what they
are saying. People who routinely start conversations this way can’t even
handle the pressures of evasion, deflection or equivocation. For them,
candor is a way to relieve the stress of keeping emotionally loaded ideas
bottled-up inside. They are being candid not because the situation demands
it, but because they can’t bear the stress of not being candid. Truth-telling
requires you to first calmly separate your feelings from the facts and tell
yourself the truth before you tell others. Candid people often fail to separate
things this way and blurt out unprocessed thoughts. If there is truth in what
they say, you’ll have to figure it out by guessing their feelings and
correcting appropriately. You have to listen like a therapist.

The second behavior is cursing. When somebody gets mad and offers an
opinion interspersed with curses. (“Look, let’s just admit the fucking truth
here okay? That asshole was out to screw us all along! We got played.”)
Again there is a failure to separate facts from the emotions associated with
the facts, and an easy slide into aggressive posturing, under threat. The
narrative that is offered is designed to bolster sagging self-confidence, seek
validation and unconsciously simplify unpleasant realities in self-serving
ways (being “blunt” blunts the truth). Opinions offered with a seasoning of
curses will usually lack all sorts of key details.

Both pseudo-truth-telling behaviors arise from internal narratives that

are grounded in unprocessed denial, rationalization and the like. You are
being invited to participate in a fiction they’ve unconsciously constructed to
protect themselves. It is very easy to be tempted because all the signs of
truth-telling are present.

So what does genuine truth-telling feel like? It feels like clarity. When
someone has processed their thoughts, separated fact from feeling,
separated what is already known from what is new or as yet unknown, and
is offering up something they’ve deduced as being both true and unknown
to you (and hence worth sharing), you’ll experience at least a momentary
sense of expanded clarity. Candor and cursing on the other hand, will
provoke emotional responses from you, rather than moments of mental
clarity.

Or if you enjoy using old-school rhetoric as a lens for such stuff, simply
separate the logos from the (unconscious) ethos and pathos.
On Cold-Blooded Listening
Glengarry Glen Ross is one of my favorite movies of all time (even though
I only watched it this year, after having had it on my to-watch list for years).
The story (spoiler alert!) revolves around a group of real-estate salesmen,
some promising new sales leads, and a plot by a couple of the salesmen to
steal the leads locked in the manager’s office, make it look like a burglary,
and defect to a competing firm, where they expect to get a good price for
the leads.

My favorite scene in the movie involves the tired, aging, former star
salesman Levene (Jack Lemmon) and Williamson, the sociopath manager
(Kevin Spacey). The scene illustrates a fantastic “slightly evil” listening
strategy I call “cold-blooded listening.” Cold-blooded listening is, for
slightly evil sociopaths, what nice, good-natured “active listening” is for
losers.

This scene occurs the morning after the robbery when Williamson is
busy helping the police. Roma (Al Pacino), the most successful salesman,
who knows nothing about the plot, has just yelled at Williamson, because
the burglary has caused him to lose a certain sale, and stormed out. Levene
(who is part of the plot), currently the least successful salesman, who has
just managed to close a sale the previous night, after a long time, decides to
join in the fun and yell at Williamson too. All the pent-up anger and
resentment comes pouring out, as Levene uses his rare opportunity to tell
Williamson exactly what he thinks of him. Here’s what happens:

LEVENE: ...excuse me, nothing, you be as cold as you want, but you
just fucked a good man out of six thousand dollars and his goddamn
bonus ’cause you didn’t know the shot, if you can do that and you
aren’t man enough that it gets you, then I don’t know what, if you
can’t take some thing from that... you’re scum, you’re fucking white-
bread. You be as cold as you want. A child would
know it, he’s right. You’re going to make something up, be sure it will
help or keep your mouth closed.

WILLIAMSON: Mmm.
LEVENE: Now I’m done with you.
WILLIAMSON: How do you know I made it up?

LEVENE: What?

WILLIAMSON: How do you know I made it up?

LEVENE: What are you talking about?

WILLIAMSON: You said, ”You don’t make something up unless it’s

sure to help.” How did you know that I made it up?

LEVENE: What are you talking about?

WILLIAMSON: I told the customer that his contracts had gone to the
bank.

LEVENE: Well, hadn’t it?

WILLIAMSON: No. It hadn’t.

LEVENE: Don’t fuck with me, John, don’t fuck with me...what are
you saying?

WILLIAMSON: Well, I’m saying this, Shel: usually I take the

contracts to the bank. Last night I didn’t. How did you know that?

One night in a year I left a contract on my desk. Nobody knew that but
you. Now how did you know that? You want to talk to me, you want to
talk to someone else...because this is my job. This is my job on the
 line, and you are going to talk to me. Now how did you know that
contract was on my desk?

LEVENE: You’re so full of shit.

WILLIAMSON: You robbed the office.

See what happened here?

Williamson listened in a completely cold-blooded way to Levene’s rant

(Spacey of course, plays this brilliantly, in his usual low-reactor way). The
insults and ad hominems roll right off him. He is completely confident in
his own assessment of himself, and feels no need to defend himself against
Levene’s rant, or even acknowledge it (he does the same thing in response
to Roma’s rant in the scene just preceding this one).

But he does listen. He picks up on the one piece of actual information

accidentally let out by Levene that is useful to him, the one piece that
reveals that Levene knows something about the burglary. And suddenly, the
tables are turned. Levene, who is being unusually cocky based on a sale (a
shaky one that Williamson knows won’t stick, incidentally, since the
prospects are known mind-changers) tried to do some high-status crowing
instead of low-status whining and groveling for a change. But he is simply
not as tough as Williamson, and the tables get turned.

This is a fantastically valuable skill to learn. And a very difficult one. It

goes well beyond thick skin. It is hardened-cop-style “anything you say can
and will be used against you” listening. To get there takes a very special
kind of personal growth:

Get beyond thick skin: the only way to get to total impassivity in the
face of strident criticism and insults is practice. And I am afraid this
means developing a certain capacity for contempt. Williamson is
clearly contemptuous of Levene’s opinion here.
 Beyond-thick-skinned, contemptuous listening means you don’t take
what is said about your personality as serious feedback worth
responding to. But this does not mean you don’t listen. You listen in a
sort of objective, clinical way, like a researcher observing an angry
animal in a cage. Your radar is primed for information that is useful to
you, not information that the other party thinks you ought to know (and
is maliciously delighted to be able to give you).

And remember, listening does not mean agreeing or debating. You can
choose to listen, draw your own conclusions, and walk away, or steer
the conversation so it proceeds on terms that are useful to you (as
Spacey did). You don’t have to convince the other person of your
conclusions. Or even share them. Notice how Williamson doesn’t
reveal his “you robbed the office” conclusion until after he’s done
testing it as a hypothesis by following the clue and watching Levene
fumble. Levene has no clue why Williamson is asking about the “made
up” line, and Williamson doesn’t bother to explain. He just assumes,
like any good alpha, that he doesn’t have to explain himself to Levene,
and that he’ll get a revealing response without having to explain the
question.

I have to admit, I am not at the Spacey-Williamson level yet, but I have no

problems admitting that I do aspire to it. I believe in responsiveness,
empathy and listening. I also believe the world is phenomenally full of
morons who are too full of themselves, whose opinions on most subjects
can be ignored. Especially their opinions on your personality (heck, you are
shooting for “slightly evil” anyway, which means you are shooting for
effectiveness. Do you really expect to be liked as well?).

This is not a defense mechanism we are talking about here. When

criticized, too many people fall into one of two basic errors. The first is to
take the criticism as true on the face of it, without analysis, and earnestly
attempt to change. That’s just dumb. The second is to assume the criticism
says more about the criticizer’s personality than about yours. This is the
“explain it away” defense mechanism. No, we aren’t talking about either of
those reactions here. The first is born of low self-esteem; the second is born
out of a denial. What we are talking about here can only be practiced by
people with a high degree of self-awareness and self-acceptance. This
means

most conversations can be processed in transactional terms (looking for

information of value in the immediate situation, the robbery being
navigated in this case) rather than getting sidetracked protecting your
fragile ego from poisoned barbs being shot at you by inconsequential
people.

Had Williamson been in that mode, he might have missed the clue to the
burglary while his mind was furiously occupied defending a self-image.

Watch Glengarry Glen Ross. You won’t regret it, I promise.

Orientation
Organizing the World’s Delusions
Since the core value of Ribbonfarm Inc., Be Slightly Evil, is transparently
based on mangling Google’s goody-two-shoes core value, I figured I’d go
ahead and mangle their mission statement as well to create one for my own.
You can copy it if you like: To Organize the World’s Delusions.

To understand what it means to organize delusions, recall this classic bit

from Catch-22:

“I really can’t believe it,” Clevinger exclaimed to Yossarian in a voice

rising and falling in protest and wonder. “It’s a complete reversion to
primitive superstition. They’re confusing cause and effect. It makes as
much sense as knocking on wood or crossing your fingers. They really
believe we wouldn’t have to fly that mission tomorrow if someone would
only tiptoe up to the map in the middle of night and move the bomb line
over Bologna. Can you imagine? You and I must be the only rational ones
left.”

In the middle of the night Yossarian knocked on wood, crossed his

fingers, and tiptoed out of his tent to move the bomb line up over Bologna.

In Catch-22, Yossarian operates at the highest level of artistry in

organizing delusions. It is a kind of extreme method acting; call it ironically
absurd behavior. Yossarian manages to maintain a happily schizophrenic
state of mind where he is simultaneously messing with the system, and
participating in the delusions himself. Sometimes he messes with things
consciously, for the hell of it. But at other times, as in the case of moving
the bomb line, he manages to be ironically absurd without being random,
organizing and benefiting from delusions, and actually believing in them,
by playing metaphysical confidence tricks on himself that would have made
Kierkegaard proud.

Organizing delusions is at the heart of all manipulation, but you have to

start at much simpler levels, and work your way up to your Yossarian belt.
The Hierarchy of Delusion Organization
Getting out of the way: The most basic level is based on avoiding
challenging others’ delusions, and factoring them into your own
thinking. The “organizing” merely involves arranging matters so
things and people you care about are moved out of the way of an
impending train wreck.
Creating a sandbox: At a more advanced level of practice, you
catalyze, encourage and sustain delusions that benefit you.
Organization gets a little harder: you have to create a safe sandbox so
the delusion can survive a little longer than it would if reality were
allowed to hit it too early. The benign example is of course, parenting.
Geeks often call this a “reality distortion field.” Assuming that pseudo-
technical labeling equals inoculation is a delusion pattern peculiar to
geekdom.
Pouring fuel on the spark: At the next level – it’s called PR – you fuel
and amplify stabilized delusions on a more massive scale. All large
organizations practice this. Both mass media and 1:1 word-of-mouth
social media are your friends here. The polite term is “managing
perceptions.” The less polite term is “managing the optics” of a
situation, a phrase that more clearly links to smoke-and-mirrors
metaphors.
Manufacturing Delusions: At the most complicated level, you
manufacture delusions. This is a last-resort approach, and requires far
too much creativity to be worth it unless the returns are really high. It
is usually far better to amplify and domesticate delusions that you find
in the wild.

Simplicity and Scale

When it comes to straightforward falsifiable delusions, the more
widespread it is, the quicker it will die. To counteract this, you have to
simplify delusions as you scale.
 You can sustain elaborate fantasies for a single person. For a large
group, you can usually only sustain a few key beliefs. At the level of human
civilization, you can only sustain extremely simple, but very fertile fill-in-
the-blanks delusions, such as “the Universe is here to do your bidding” (it’s
called The Secret, and the one thing the authors of that movement get right
is that it is an age-old and very widespread delusion).

Believing Your Own Delusions

So far, we’ve implicitly assumed we’re talking about brittle, falsifiable
delusions. Dabbling in such delusions is dangerous precisely because when
they collapse, the orchestrators are unmasked as deliberate manipulators.
You are at risk of being accused of crimes ranging from simple
manipulation through silence, through comparisons with Michael Moore or
Karl Rove, all the way to being a Goebbels or Stalin. A good defense
against the latter, by the way, is to simply cite Godwin’s Law*. John Stewart
and Stephen Colbert, for example, are masters at making fun of Fox News,
using Godwin’s Law type criticisms. They do it so well, we often forget that
they orchestrate their own delusion complexes, built out of a much more
dangerous raw material: humor.

But opening yourself up to such accusations at all is the amateur way to

play it. The way to really protect yourself is to adopt George Costanza’s
law: it’s not a lie if you believe in it.

This is obviously hard to do with hard facts and falsifiable statements.

Method acting only goes so far. The smart way to do this is to rely on
unfalsifiability.

To be a professional organizer of delusions, you need to focus on

delusions that it would actually benefit you to believe, at least temporarily,
and then figure out how to adopt them for just as long as they can serve
you.
 Your overall goal is to create plausible deniability, even within your
own mind, to defend against the accusation that you don’t believe
something that you are pitching to others. Your lifeline back to reality is
your capacity for doubt, which prevents plausible deniability from turning
into a pattern of denial that persists long after the expiry date on the
delusion.

It is much easier to do this if you discipline yourself to only work with

delusions that are a sufficiently complex mix of metaphysics, morality
arguments, metaphor, narrative and facts.

This is why you get the most fundamental axiom in delusion

organization theory: the bigger the lie, the easier it is to sell, and the biggest
ones, bigger than even the civilization-scale ones, are the ones you
deliberately sell to yourself.

Big lies are necessarily complicated constructs made up of the elements

I mentioned: metaphysics, morality, metaphor, narrative and facts. If, for
your own reasons, you deliberately funded an idiotic venture where all the
numbers indicated that the market wasn’t there, nobody can fault you later
if you hide behind the assertion: “I invest in people, not ideas, and this guy
really had passion, so I trusted him to figure it all out. Looks like I was
wrong. Well, it’s a numbers game.

But ultimately, even plausible deniability, based on hiding inside a

jungle of unfalsifiable metaphysics, is not enough.

To win the Yossarian belt, you have to genuinely graduate to ironic

absurdity, and traffic in delusions without getting attached to them. Without
a sense of absurdity, you’ll just fall off the slightly evil path and turn into
yet another greedy hack, peddling subprime mortgages.
Status, Harmony and Conflict
An interpersonal interaction is open if both parties are seeking to trade or
discover information. It is closed if even one party is seeking status
validation, conflict or harmony instead. This means, unfortunately, that
most interpersonal interactions end up being about such social intentions,
since either party can unilaterally close an open interaction.

We generally understand conflict in for-and-against terms. You are either

with me or against me is a raw conflict framing of an interaction.We general
understand status in pure above-me-below-me terms. You are either better
than me or worse than meis a raw status-framing of an interaction.These
pure situations, however, are fairly rare in adult life. Usually, only children
play pure conflict or status games.

Adults are more likely to mix a conflict/harmony intention with a status

intention. So you get the following four basic types of attitude informing an
interaction:

Condescension: I am better than you and for you

Contempt: I am better than you and against you
Supplication: I am worse than you and for you
Insolence: I am worse than you and against you

It is very useful to learn to recognize these four attitudes. It makes you

twice as effective as most people, who are usually only conscious of one or
the other dimension (status or conflict/harmony). The four basic

attitudes create six basic types of interaction. I’ll let you work out the
combinatorics, but here is an example of condescension butting up against
contempt:

A: So what’s going on with the project? (neutral)

B: We’re mostly busy dealing with that situation with the new client
that the VP mentioned. (neutral)
 A: Well, I really don’t have time for this, but I guess I could help you
out. (condescension)

B: Oh I wasn’t asking. We deal with this at the program level. You’ll

hear about what we decide at the next meeting. (contempt)

The interactions between the characters of Al Swearengen and George

Hearst on the show Deadwood contain many examples of another common
pattern: condescension versus insolence. Many “Odd Couple” television
shows are based on a stable pattern (usually condescension meeting
supplication), but wander for variety into one of the other five patterns. At
the other extreme, mutual contempt is usually a recipe for immediate
breakdown and

disengagement, so drama can be created when people who hold each other
in contempt are forced by circumstances to work together. Many buddy
movies start with this premise, and end with mutual contempt transforming
into mutual supplication.

The fun really starts when the overt attitudes dictated by the situation do
not match the actual attitudes. Imagine a nominally harmonious
patronizing/supplicatory interaction like an entrepreneur pitching to a VC
where the VC is actually in supplicatory mode, fishing for approval,
because the entrepreneur happens to be the new “It” guy/girl.

Or a young, poor and ugly male teacher feeling threatened by the

wealth and looks of amale high school student, and being insolent while the
student is being supplicatory (asking for a higher grade for example).

Mixing and matching status movements with conflict/harmony elements

is one of the most fun ways to both read and imagine little conversation
scripts. For the student of Slightly Evil philosophy though, such status-and-
conflict games are generally time-wasters (though you should learn to play
them because you can be forced into them by external factors).

Wherever possible, you should attempt to move the conversation to an open

one that is about generating or exchanging information, or disengage if that
turns out to be impossible.
Conflict Without Ego
Consider a conversation that proceeds along these lines:

A: We really need to prioritize the new version of our successful

Widget and consolidate our marketshare lead.
B: I think we really need to consider a new Super Widget. There are
some trends that marketing identified in the last review. We need to
respond to them.

At this point, A and B are headed for conflict and both have become aware
of it. It is A’s move and what he/she says will strongly influence what
happens next. Here are some options:

I disagree, the stuff they called out in the review was bullshit.
Well, what’s the cashflow picture for the next few quarters? That’s
going to ultimately determine how much spare cash we can throw off
for a new product initiative.
Well, so long as our revenue from Widget doesn’t decline until at least
2015, I am open to anything.
Which specific trends did you think needed a response?

These responses represent firing a warning shot across B’s bows (1),
framing a zero-sum discussion (2), cautiously opening negotiations with
some pre-conditions (3), a no-strings-attached invitation to debate (4) (note
that 4 can also be a feint, to draw out intelligence to inform a more precise
attack than 1, but this post isn’t about maneuvering tactics, so let’s ignore
that subtlety).

Which of these responses do you think is the smartest one?

The Importance of Context in Conflict

The correct answer is insufficient information. We are missing data about

context. If A is the product manager of the Widget product and B is the
manager of the R&D laboratory, you should immediately suspect that this
conversation is about protecting budgets by any means necessary. If A is the
CFO and B is the CEO, the conversation means something else entirely
(and the extent to which their respective salaries are related to the stock
price adds another layer of complexity). If both are in sales, but A enjoys
babysitting old customers while B enjoys the challenge of pitching a new
product to new customers, you’ve got another interpretation. If the sales
role involves a commission structure, that changes things as well.

What is common across all these contextual issues is that almost all of
them are about individual motivations of A and B. Missing material facts
that have no a priori coupling to individual motivations represent basic
ignorance. Unless A and B are idiots, if that is an issue, they will very
quickly agree to reconvene after they have the missing material facts.

Why Motivations Get Buried in Context

So as a first approximation, it is safe to say that what is buried in context is

individual motivations; specifically the relationships between your
motivations and those of others you are in conflict with. Which is surprising
because everybody understands that conflicts arise from competing
motivations. You’d think they’d be more visible, given their obvious
importance.

Buried motivations can be further broken down

intoextrinsic(motivations that are a function of the environment, such as
role and incentives) andintrinsic(those that arise from ego issues, defense
mechanisms, status dynamics and so forth).

Things break down this way because in modern culture we expect

conversations to be based on facts and a posture of objective analysis.
Nobody is supposed to want anything other than the “truth” in some
procedural sense of the word. This is true even in close personal
relationships.
 The result is that in most conversations end up being a theater of
superficial objectivity sitting atop a mountain of consequential context. You
can imagine a sort of 3-layer model. The top layer is the overtly
acknowledged objective stuff.

One level down you have extrinsic social motivations. Sophisticated

conversationalists are usually able to gracefully foreground and
acknowledge these as being either relevant or not, so that the overt
discussion becomes more substantial. For example, in the A-as-CFO case,
A might preface each of the possible responses with “I am not just saying
this because I am coming at it from the CFO perspective,” a discounting
move that may or may not work completely, but will definitely deepen the
conversation.

But the hardest piece of the puzzle to take into account is buried in the
third layer: intrinsic individual motivations. These might be so deeply
buried through denial and repression patterns that they might not even be
consciously accessible.

For example, assume that we’re talking about the product

manager/R&D manager extrinsic context. What are the sorts of intrinsic
motivations that might lead to response 1?

1. A might have been snubbed at the last party by the chief marketing
officer and is subconsciously grabbing an opportunity to discredit
marketing.
2. A might have deep insecurities around being considered “boring”
compared to the people in R&D who are perceived as “exciting and
interesting.”
3. A might have a chip on his shoulder about undue importance given to
childish silliness going on in R&D while his group does the real work
of bringing in the money.
4. A might have deeply repressed associations of anxiety relating to the
kind of plaid jacket that B happens to be wearing,because a sadistic
teacher in primary school used to wear such jackets.
 5. A might be female. It might all be unacknowledged gender dynamics
and the idea that she needs to be assertive so she’s not taken for
granted as a woman.
6. The whole thing might have an undercurrent of sexual tension.
7. The whole thing might have to do with a sense of violence in the air
(perhaps A is a powerfully built athlete while B is a scrawny weakling,
and bullying instincts are kicking in).

How can you possibly navigate all this potential complexity? It might
seem like I’ve defined an impossible problem.

Emotions About Facts, Facts About Emotions

It turns out though, that the key to cutting through this complexity isn’t this
sort of detailed dissection and analysis (though that is useful too, on
occasion, if done offline and explicitly for the purpose of learning). The key
is to work towards what martial artists like to characterize as “conflict
without ego.” Here, “ego” is shorthand for all intrinsic individual
motivations, known and unknown.

The key to conflict without ego is the observation that you cannot get
mad at facts. The sun rises everyday. Things fall to the ground. You need to
pay employees.

If there are emotions in play, they necessarily relate to individual

motivations. Even when the facts are about people. You cannot get mad at
the fact that some people are more attractive than you. You can only get
mad over desires relating to things that being attractive gets you.

Extrinsic motivations can and should be foregrounded because they play

a role in objective analysis. In this process of foregrounding, you can also
drain these extrinsic motivations of unhelpful emotions, because
fundamentally they are outside you. This requires increasing skill and
sophistication in conversation. Response 2 from A is actually an example of
this. It is a move that brings an unacknowledged extrinsic motivation
(“don’t touch my cash flow!”) to the discussion table, and quantifies the
role it plays in a way that assuages nameless anxieties (the new Super
Widget product is no longer a horrifying existential threat to A’s cash flows,
but a quantifiable one amenable to trade-off computations). This takes both
a certain level of domain-specific experience, as well as conversational
skill.

But you cannot do this to intrinsic motivations. Even when you are
aware of them, it may not be socially possible to talk about them. In the
case of 7, what is A going to say? “I want to whip your scrawny ass, but
since we’re adults, I cannot do that, but I am going to yell at you to
intimidate you”? And in the case of things like 4 (the plaid jacket), you
might not be able to dig out such factors even with years of expensive
psychoanalysis. And there are thousands of such little tics buried deep in
your psyche. You cannot possibly surface and compute with all of them
consciously. More to the point, most of them are almost certainly irrelevant
to the point under contention anyway (smart people will usually recognize
truly logical connections quickly).

For these, the key is to acknowledge and bracket emotions and

consciously let them go. Some emotions are easier to handle this way than
others, such as anger and pride. Others are harder: an emotion might have
no name, and manifest very weakly as a slight tension in your lower back.
The only way you can process is to become aware of it and let it go, even if
you don’t understand where it came from or what it represents (plaid jackets
perhaps; but you don’t need to care about root causes, only manifestations
that you become aware of). And because they are likely irrelevant anyway,
it is safe to let them go for the purposes of the conversation.You can always
have a different conversation of course, but so long as the nominal and
overt topic of conversation is a genuine one, you can let irrelevant things
go.

All this should be of no surprise to those of you who have tried

mindfulness meditation or related disciplined practices. But even without
disciplined practice, just being aware of the way these things work is half
the battle. In an undisciplined, ad hoc way, you will slowly become better at
grappling with the hidden realities of your psyche. That path is the path to
conflict without ego.

Ideas and The Nature of Violence

But why conflict at all? If you can truly approach interpersonal interactions
in this ego-less way, with intrinsic motivations handled, and all objective
facts and extrinsic motivations on the discussion table, shouldn’t you be
able to avoid conflict altogether?

I came up with this formulation: Violence is a necessary consequence of

unavoidable ignorance on the part of systems that lack infinite wisdom. You
cannot avoid it, or enlighten yourself out of it.

But for a long time I wasn’t able to translate this into a form more
usable in everyday interactions. Only recently did I come up with an
articulation that I sort of liked: The ideas of your friends are not always the
friends of your ideas.

What does this mean? It means that even when two mindful and egoless
individuals have adequately let go of emotions relating to buried, irrelevant,
intrinsic motivations, and are dealing with the relevant facts and extrinsic
motivations in sophisticated ways, and properly identifying and reacting
appropriately to areas of ignorance, you will still have conflict.

You cannot force complex intelligence to emerge on your schedule. We

try to create complex intelligence by pursuing things called “ideas” that
seem right to us, rather than mechanically working out inferences from
facts.

And our idea-pursuit instincts may not lead us along the same paths as
those of others. Because every person spots and pursues ideas in complex
situations differently, based on past experiences, learned pattern recognition
skills and vast amounts of prior knowledge. You can only dimly understand
what idea or pattern another person is pursuing through what they say.
 And when these paths of idea pursuit diverge, you must either capitulate
and follow, or fight. If you like to wax spiritual about such stuff, you can
tell yourself that you are just one tiny bundle of atoms that is part of a
universe that is slowly figuring itself out and getting enlightened. You
might have to fight today so that the whole world is slightly more
enlightened tomorrow.

This understanding of violence and conflict also reveals something

about friendship, and an Eleanor Roosevelt quote captures it beautifully:
“Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds
discuss people.”

But jumping straight to discussing ideas does not make yours a great
mind. Discussing ideas is only a sign of great minds if events and people –
both matters of context and motivation – have been adequately dealt with.

When a friendship can stand the test of sometimes-diverging,

sometimes-converging pursuit of individual ideas, it acquires great depth.
Relationships based on false harmony and denial of ideas, or worse, one
party cravenly abandoning their own ideas in the interests of preserving the
relationship, are fundamentally weak, and not worth very much.
The Basics of Negotiation
I learned the basics of routine, everyday negotiation by noticing something
very puzzling. The people who seemed to negotiate most successfully
looked and acted nothing like the tough, ice-cold types you see in
Hollywood movies. One guy couldn’t hold eye contact, stuttered, and
smiled too much. He aggressively played lowball and won every time.
Another time, I observed a thoroughly scatterbrained and frivolous-seeming
woman (it was not an act), who chattered and whined incessantly, trying to
work a deal. She won big.On the flip side, I’ve met people who look and act
like Kevin Spacey in The Negotiator, but end up blowing sure-fire great
deals (while retaining their pointless icy calm of course).

When you negotiate based on how you think you should look and act,
based on Hollywood stereotypes, you end up like George Costanza on
Seinfeld. He attempts to put on a professional swagger and play hard-ball
negotiator to close a deal with NBC. His swagger ends up trapping him into
accepting a deal with less money than was originally being offered.

People make this mistake for a simple reason: in routine negotiations,

almost all the work is done away from the actual negotiating table, and
before the critical face-to-face encounters. In many cases, the pre-work is so
effective that the negotiation doesn’t happen at all, or if it happens, is a
matter of ritual. The kind of tense, openly-adversarial zero-sum negotiation
with a ticking clock that we see in movies is a very exceptional kind of
negotiation. The kind of dull pre-work that is possible in routine
negotiations is not possible, and there are artificially hard near-term
deadlines. This puts a lot of tension and pressure into the live situation. The
most common negotiations on the other hand, are the ones that don’t
happen at all because a skilled person prevented things from getting to the
table at all. Dull pre-work is substituted for live negotiation work, and
instead of a fixed deadline, you get a smart person cherry-picking an ideal
time to start the negotiations.
 Dealing with extreme negotiation situations is a very specialized skill
that is very expensive and time-consuming to acquire, and completely
worthless for everyday situations. When it comes to negotiation, bringing a
gun to a knife fight is as pointless as bringing a knife to a gunfight. And
bringing any sort of weapon to a negotiation that could be just a handshake
is beyond stupid. Those professional level skills don’t apply to everyday
situations, for exactly the same reasons that a surgeon can cut open your
head and perform miracles, but can do nothing to get you to eat healthy and
exercise. The surgeon’s solution – stomach stapling – is an extreme,
exceptional intervention for those who fail to solve the problem of
preventive health maintenance at an everyday level. And just as you
wouldn’t attempt surgery on yourself when necessary, but hire a real
surgeon, when you are actually faced with a “gunfight” negotiation, you
should probably consider hiring a gunfighter rather than trying to become
one through a weekend seminar.

So how should you negotiate? There are only four basic elements you
need to understand: information, creativity, trust and BATNA (“Best
Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement,” the only technical term you really
need to know). Here’s how they work together:

Information is simple. The more there is that can be mutually agreed

upon, the less there is to negotiate. This is the main reason unlikely people
walk away winners. Good pre-work trumps good table-work every time.
When you move one bit of information over from the “to be debated”
column to the “common ground” column, you make the table-thumper one
bit less effective. Part of the reason hostage negotiations are hard is because
there is so little information, and so little time to discover it. The best way
to avoid negotiation altogether is to do so much pre-work that you
understand the other parties’ options, costs and benefits better than they do,
and can actually work out the “best for everybody” solution before you
even get to the table.

What does the information pre-work actually consist of? Definitions and
technical analysis. You define all options, and use all the data to model the
risks and rewards properly. Decision theory, game theory, statistics and
Excel skills are all tools here. It is basically tedious gruntwork. Apparent
“human” factors can be turned into data this way. One example is using
discounting-based analysis of future payoffs to replace loosey-goosey talk
of “win-win” outcomes with hard numbers.

Creativity is harder. Given a pile of relevant information, and as much

dull technical analysis as you can manage in the time available, you may
still be left with far too much uncertainty about the different options and
their relative desirability, leaving too much room for “he said she said”
types of conflict and debate. Being creative means coming up with new
options that make better use of the information available by lowering
uncertainties all around. A classic example is to turn a conversation about a
big 10-million-dollar deal into one about a short-term $100,000 deal by
proposing a “pilot engagement.” Dating before marriage is another
example. Again, if you do your creative thinking ahead of time, you’ll come
up with solid and believable new options. Otherwise you will end up
involved in the sort of annoying game of real-time creative storytelling that
I described in my post “Bargaining with Your Right Brain.”

Trust is harder still. Wherever possible, the smartest way to negotiate is

to do a whole bunch of “discovery” pre-work conversations that serve two
purposes. First, they help tease out what people know, and haven’t yet
shared, all around. Second, you get a read on basic mutual trust levels
among all parties. The key here is to not even attempt the negotiation until
you’ve raised trust levels all around to a sufficiently high level. In your trust
pre-work, you need to figure out several things. Who is negotiating in good
faith, and who is negotiating in bad faith? Who is being free with
information and who is being secretive? Who are your allies, who is
hopelessly intransigent and needs to be neutralized, and who needs gentle
persuasion over multiple interactions to come around? How much of all this
trust information is common knowledge? You may need months of
meetings (1:1, small groups, full groups) ostensibly dedicated to discovery
and information sharing, before trust is sufficiently high that you can start
“negotiations.” These can range from informal lunches, to parties to
seminars aimed at “knowledge sharing.” Finally, you need to figure out one
crucial thing: which parties are going to be dealing with each other
extensively for an indeterminate amount of time in the future, and who is
going to exit the picture? About the only firm truth in negotiation is that
people who are going to terminate all relationships and walk away very
soon behave very differently from people who aren’t sure how much they’ll
be dealing with each other in the future. Some part of this assertion can be
codified, quantified and proved through game theory (it’s the basic insight
behind the famous “iterated prisoner’s dilemma” theory of cooperation).
But the phenomenon is much richer than the game theory models, and it is
generally more useful to think of a situation in terms of the pasts and
futures of all the interpersonal stories involved.

The information, creativity and trust pre-work take time, and costs
money. If the deal isn’t worth the pre-work, that’s one reason to walk away
on Day 1. The fourth element, BATNA, doesn’t take much pre-work time
(often only a few minutes if it isn’t blindingly obvious), but is the hardest
element to master, because it is generally about walking away after putting
in lots of expensive pre-work.

Defining your BATNAs is therefore the hardest kind of pre-work, since

they represent a potential cost that is more than the other three elements put
together. As Kipling said in his classic poem If:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

...

you’ll be a Man my son!

When you bargain for a cheap watch at a street market, you know that
Being Willing To Walk Away (BWTWA) is your single most powerful
weapon. BWTWA is the simplest example of a BATNA. More complex
negotiations have other BATNAs, but all are forms of “walking away.” In
the best case this simply means a lost opportunity (for a mutually-beneficial
trade agreement for instance). In the worst case, it can mean armed conflict
and real, as opposed to psychological losses. You can’t walk away from a
mugger. Your BATNA for the “wallet for your life” deal offered by the
mugger is to either run (and hope to get away) or fight (and hope to
win).For a salary negotiation, your BATNA is to quit (possibly with the
added cost of lost recommendations). For an entrepreneur who doesn’t like
the terms offered by a VC, the BATNA may be to just shut down the
company. BATNA is very hard for most people because the BATNA is
always about a willingness to lose something, sometimes your life.

There are BATNAs for every situation, but there are also life BATNAs:
your baseline commitments to yourself that allow you to cheerfully walk
away from anything. Here it pays to keep in mind that your ultimate
BATNA to the whole “deal of life” is actually fixed and unchangeable: you
are going to die (because your negotiating opponent, nature, is infinitely
more powerful than you). If you are going to die anyway, it makes it much
easier to accept “death” as a BATNA for specific situations. And since
nearly all other BATNAs are preferable to death, that attitude makes you a
very strong negotiator.

The one BATNA that is worse than death is of course, torture, as

illustrated by the booga-booga joke. Two men are shipwrecked on an island.
The sadistic native chief offers each a deal: “Booga booga or death?” The
first guy picks booga-booga, and is immediately subjected to hideous
tortures, and finally let go, nearly dead. The second man decides he prefers
death.“Fine,” says the chief. “Booga-booga him to death!” (A nice use of
sadistic OR-XOR bluffing by the chief here!)

Without a defined BATNA, negotiations are toothless. BATNAs are

what make all negotiating at least “slightly evil.” You can add deceit, bad
faith and bluffing to make the game as evil as you like, but even the
baseline best-faith type of informed negotiation is “slightly evil” because
your BATNA is a unilateral option that has consequences for others that
they will be forced to live with. Anybody can accept consequences for
themselves. It takes a slightly evil attitude to be willing to force potentially
unpleasant consequences on others, regardless of what they want.

Information, creativity, trust and BATNAs. That’s all there is to the

basics.
Decision
Indifference to Sunk Costs
Slightly evil people often appear to be extreme risk takers to others. This is
actually far from the truth. They are often more conservative. One of the big
factors that creates the illusion of the slightly evil being daring gamblers is
indifference to sunk costs.

Here’s an example. Suppose you’ve put in eleven months of work into

building a piece of software. You have one month left to finish when you
suddenly discover a fantastic open-source equivalent that you can work on
tweaking for two weeks, and produce a better outcome than if you
persevered and finished your own design. At this point, the fact of you
having put in eleven months worth of hard work is basically irrelevant.
You’ll deliver a better outcome faster if you were to just throw away your
own work and use the open-source equivalent. And that’s the path the
slightly evil decision-maker will invariably take.

At least that’s the rational story. Or what appears to be a rational story.

Actually, despite what the behavioral economists say, there is no absolute
here. Nobody can tell you what subjective value to place on an outcome
(women know this better than men; this is the generalization of “don’t tell
me how to feel”). If the primary value you get out of your software projects
is the ability to tell stories of how you delivered things under time pressure,
having one more war story to tell is more valuable than delivering earlier,
better and cheaper. If this is hard for you to understand, consider a different
example. You are climbing up a mountain with no road to the top. Halfway
up, you discover that there is in fact a road, and a passing driver offers you
a lift. Do you accept or do you continue on your climbing path? There are
many roads to the top of the mountain, and the view is not the same.

Where it gets irrational is if you tell yourself one story to make the
decision, but another to live out the consequences. If you make the
“rational” decision but suffer the regret for the rest of your life of not
achieving closure, completion and the addition of another software war
story to tell your grandchildren, you are being irrational. And vice versa.
This sort of irrationality is what motivates the process of “rationalization” at
the individual level. At the collective level, rationalization is triggered by
conflict between the stories told by different people.

Let’s call consistency between the decision-making story (expected

value of a decision) and the experienced ever-after story (realized value of
the consequences) relative rationality, to distinguish it from the absolute
one-size-fits all kind that behavioral economists like.

When your personal relative rationality is a strong function of your

subjective experiences, the decisions of those whose relative rationality is
heavily weighted towards external realities will seem unduly risky to you.
That’s because they’re callously throwing away things that seem valuable to
you.

In the sunk costs case, you will end up asking the slightly evil decision
maker, “how could you throw it all away?” or “didn’t you feel like finishing
just for the sake of closure?”

The answer is that sunk costs only have a seductive appeal to those who
are attached to their subjective past. They do not like the thought that the
person they were, two days ago, was possibly engaged in futile activity.
They want to behave in ways that redeem their past days.

Slightly-evil people, either by nature or through cultivation, are simply

incapable of thinking this way. They place the most value on external,
tangible outcomes.

Where this creates issues is in collaborative work. Slightly-evil people,

through their sunk-costs indifference, can appear insensitive and callous to
others with more subjective relative rationalities. Newbie slightly evil types
often make the absolute-rationality mistake and attempt hopelessly to
lecture their colleagues on why sunk costs don’t matter.

The more sophisticated ones carry their analysis one step further: if your
team-member’s subjective relative rationality causes him/her to react to
decisions in ways that create real outcome issues for you, it will now cost
you as well.
 In the software example, let’s say two people were involved, you and a
friend. If you are slightly evil, while your partner is heavily attached to
closure and “finishing,” he may try very hard to make up rationalizations
between your objective-weighted story and his subjective-weighted one
(“we can’t use that open source thing; we haven’t tested it enough...”). If
you make the sunk-costs-indifferent decision anyway, he may resent you
and cause problems down the road.

To the slightly evil, the answer is simple. Do the future real costs of the
resentment for you outweigh the benefit of making the sunk-costs-
indifferent decision? If so, it is worth humoring your colleague. If not, make
the sunk-costs indifferent decisions and deal with the fallout.

In this simple, made up example, most people would probably be

capable of acting slightly evil. As things get more complex and subjective,
objective and social consequences blend together into messy stories that are
very hard to analyze. In such situations, sunk-cost indifference turns into
that philosophical attitude we know as realism.
Vindictiveness and Revenge
Is it rational to practice revengeful behaviors? The very thought is anathema
to positive-thinking win-win types, and at a very superficial level of
analysis, revenge is an irrational thing. It seems worse than doing nothing in
response to a provocation – you waste time and effort causing pain to others
and pay the opportunity cost of not doing something more positive/win-win
with that time/effort. So is there ever a good reason to do something so
apparently stupid?

Revenge emerges when you add up two traits: an innate tendency

towards vindictiveness and a capacity for long-range planning.
Vindictiveness is simpler and much more fundamental. In tribal societies it
leads to vendetta dynamics. In civilized societies, it leads to revenge
dynamics.

And strange as it may seem, vindictiveness and vendettas are quite

rational, but revenge is not.

So the slightly evil lesson is this: to the extent that the society you are in
is tribal, being vindictive and indulging in vendettas is rational in objective
terms. To the extent that the society around you is civilized, these behaviors
will backfire. Revenge on the other hand is never objectively worthwhile,
whether the society is tribal or civilized. This is rather ironic, since it is
actually revenge that takes the most intelligence and rational planning.

Real-Time Vindictiveness

Vindictiveness is a natural tendency to immediately and instinctively push

back when pushed, as hard or harder than you were pushed. If you cannot
push back immediately, you remember the slight for as long as it takes, and
push back at the first opportunity. Let’s talk about the immediate case first,
and the remembered case (vendetta) later.
 Vindictiveness is a hard-wired operating assumption that if somebody is
initiating a conflict with you, they are probably in the wrong. Road rage
provides a good illustration. So when somebody honks loudly at you and
gives you the finger as they pass, there are two possible reasons:

They did something wrong, like trying to speed, that led to a

dangerous situation, and are blaming you.
You did something wrong, like making a dangerous lane change, and
they are punishing you.

If you instinctively curse, honk back harder, and give them the finger
(i.e. assume hypothesis 1)before you can figure out what the situation is,
you have a strong vindictive streak. If you instinctively shrink back and get
uncertain and start wondering “Oh, what did I do wrong?” you might be a
bit of a wuss (unless there are good reasons to default to the assumption that
you were wrong, like being a new driver).

If you suspend judgement and immediately start looking around to

actually figure out what happened, you are assuming nothing. This is the
apparently rational, data-driven way to proceed. In contexts where winning
matters (honking matches on the road aren’t among them), it is also a way
to lose.

The problem with the apparently rational response is that such situations
are often fast-moving and ambiguous, and it is hard to tell who was in the
wrong. Often there is shared blame as well as a role played by bad luck. If
you don’t act immediately, your rational analysis will not matter. Inaction is
loss.

So vindictiveness is a default tendency to blame others when you suffer

a loss, and reacting by trying to get even. Getting even is the key phrase
here. Vindictiveness is a status-leveling move. If somebody hurts you, it
doesn’t matter what the reasons and backstory are. If you don’t hurt them
back, you’ve lost status points.

So the intensity of an vindictive reaction is usually proportionate to the

perceived status loss, not to the actual material loss in the situation. This is
why for instance, even if they do the same damage, an open-handed slap
across the face, a back-handed slap and a punch are very different moves in
terms of status signals. The first is an attempt to lower the other’s status.
The second is an attempt to assert your own. The third is a neutral move
whose status significance depends on context.

Beyond proportionality, to the extent possible, the reaction should be of

the same kind. An eye for an eye. We’ll see the importance of this later.

This is a tough idea for win-win types to accept: vindictive pushback is

a very rational reaction. Though the highways and large anonymous cities
are mostly full of strangers, vindictiveness makes a lot of sense in the
context of older, more tribal cultures where everybody knew everybody. So
even if there are no witnesses to a honk-and-honk-back type skirmish, you
will likely interact with that person again, and he/she will likely report
his/her version of the events to the rest of the group. You will likely do the
same on your end.

If you don’t push back, your opponent has a story to tell where your
inaction can be read as acceptance of guilt, “Yeah, I yelled at him, and he
had nothing to say. The jerk knew he was in the wrong.”

Pushing back vindictively in a skirmish is the real-time equivalent of

pleading “not guilty” in a courtroom. You create a raw story that’s harder
for your opponent to spin in his favor. If you push back, the symmetry of
the skirmish creates a record of facts that can be spun either way. If it comes
to that, the he-said-she-said incident will be decided by a majority vote.
Social proof of character and power, rather than material proof concerning
the truth about the incident. This is where tribal dynamics around “honor”
come from. This is why it is crucially important in tribal cultures to develop
a reputation as someone who cannot be pushed around, someone not to be
messed with.

This also explains why (again, in tribal societies) it is rational to push

back harder than you were pushed. You prefer a decisive outcome to the
shoving/pushing/shouting contest for three reasons, especially if there are
witnesses. First, you should visibly exact a penalty for the opponent starting
an unjustified conflict. Second, the opponent knows personally not to mess
with you again, out of real fear of hurt. And third, if he does spread his own
version of the story, even if he convinces his friends that he was morally
right, you actually get PR for your not-to-be-messed-with reputation,
because you won the actual fight.

In fact, you could make a stronger statement, based on the analogy to

the “not guilty” plea:

Even if you know you were wrong, if you ALSO know the other person
cannot possibly know that, it pays to take offense and push back.

Why?

Because accepting blame without proof (i.e., needlessly admitting guilt)

legitimizes the other person’s authority to act as judge, jury and executioner
without proof. If the opponent were a noble and perfectly virtuous person,
this wouldn’t be a bad thing. You could trust them to bear the honor with
responsibility. But if the opponent is a flawed human with his/her own
agenda, legitimizing their actions is the equivalent of creating a corrupt
mini-court just to prosecute you. Everything you say can and will be used
against you (and your entire clan), with extreme prejudice.

The tribal world is full of such ambiguous, adversarial skirmishes.

Being very generous, always giving the other person the benefit of the
doubt, handing over information advantages regarding the material truth of
a matter without a fight, and turning the other cheek without regard to the
character of the opponent – all these civilized responses are recipes for
getting killed very quickly. There is a reason prison cultures have the rule
that you should beat up somebody on your first day.

Social Memory and Vendettas

When you cannot immediately respond to an attack (perhaps it was indirect,

like somebody spray-painting insults on your door, or beating up an ally
who couldn’t fight back), you have delayed responses. In tribal societies,
this leads to long-running vendettas for two reasons: first, the natural
tendency to push-back harder even in the real-time case, and second,
another tendency that exaggerates it: a sort of social compound interest. The
insult festers and grows in magnitude with every moment, and every telling
of the story.

This isn’t just a subjective sense of growing resentment. The status loss
results in an ongoing series of real transactional losses until you correct it,
since it will put you at a disadvantage in other transactions, with others who
have heard the story.

A vendetta is not a revenge. There isn’t a whole lot of deliberation,

planning or subterfuge. In fact those tend to make for ineffective vendettas,
because the point of every move and counter-move in a vendetta is to
demonstrate raw power and making a “not guilty” case in the court of
public opinion. The point is not to demonstrate intelligence. In fact, it pays
to make your vendetta move as visibly close to the original as possible. If
they killed one of your sons, you kill one (or two) of their sons.
Complicating the story with clever moves makes it much harder to read
socially, and third parties are left feeling uncertain about what is going on.
You want it to be completely obvious that you were responsible for the
counter-move, and what motivated it. The symmetry in the stories cancels
out everything except the raw status accounting.

Vendettas though, are inherently unstable, because of the ambiguity of

the compound interest process and the coarseness of real-world options. If
they killed one of your sons, and you suffered the compounded effects of
status loss for six months, you can only kill one of his sons or two of his
sons. If the mysterious calculus of tribal justice leads to the implicit public
consensus that you are owed 1.2 sons, there is no way to respond with a
move that cancels out the original move. You either underreact or overreact.
Worse, if the opponent does not have a son, and you do something like
burning down his house or kidnapping a daughter, you’ve now created more
ambiguity. The equation becomes more illegible over time, not less. The
status market has inefficiencies.

Vendettas therefore, naturally escalate, because in the short-term, it

makes more sense to overreact and let the other person deal with the market
inefficiency, than to underreact. (Technical note for the game theorists here,
which the rest of you can safely ignore. You may be familiar with the idea
in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma that the “Tit for Tat” is an evolutionary
equilibrium. It works because in a perfect information, zero-ambiguity
setting, it is actually possible to react in exact proportion to your opponent’s
move. The real world, sadly, is not so clean.)

There is only one way to resolve a vendetta, and that is to draw a

dividing line and create a detente with occasional skirmishes to make sure
everybody remembers the vendetta. Or one group moves away until old
memories are forgotten.

That brings us to revenge.

Revenge

The modern world is an uneasy mix of tribal and non-tribal dynamics. We

don’t live out our whole lives in small communities where everybody
knows everybody else. Group memories are weaker. Tribes form and
disband more easily. We have a lot of interactions with strangers. The idea
of “honor” evolves from being a life-or-death intrinsic measure of
reputation to something that lives in medals, degrees and expensive cars.
There are also many trusted externalized institutions, and many more
conflicts can be adjudicated by truly disinterested third parties who don’t
belong to either of the warring tribes (which in modern settings is no more
than the friends and immediate families of the litigants in a courtroom).

We call this evolved, non-tribal context “civilization.”

Vindictiveness though is not a carefully planned context-sensitive

behavior. It arises out of instinctive status computations under the
assumption of a tribal context. The push-back-when-pushed way of setting
goals, and the compound-interest calibration of required magnitude
continue to drive goal setting. If civilization gets in the way (your tribe
dissolves around you, the other person moves to another city and starts a
new life...), you bring all your rational powers to bear to engineer a payback
opportunity.
 The Count of Monte Cristo is of course, the best known of such revenge
sagas. Edmond Dantes goes about systematically taking the lives of his
opponents apart after he escapes from prison. Things have changed so much
though that they don’t even recognize him until he reveals himself.

This is of course, completely hollow, as Dantes himself realizes at the

end. If there is no shared tribe around you, and no interested third parties
comparing the two of you and making relative status calculations, the whole
affair is mostly pointless. At best you’ll balance out some irrational internal
status equation that even your opponent cannot parse (there is a hilarious
reductio ad absurdum of this kind of story in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker
series, where Arthur Dent unwittingly kills the same creature in multiple
reincarnations).

The other thing that can happen to vindictive instincts unleashed in a

non-tribal context is that you can develop a sense of injury and resentment
against large and faceless institutions rather than individuals. If you were
deeply screwed over by some bureaucratic process, but it is obvious even to
you that the hapless clerk you dealt with is not culpable, you end up
wanting to push back at the institution.

In the best case, this can lead to tough, assertive behavior when dealing
with customer service centers over the phone.

In the worst case, it can turn you into the Unabomber.

Just how messed-up is revenge against institutions? About as messed up

as revenge against wild animals. If your brother accidentally fall into the
lion’s cage at the zoo and it eats him, you wanting to kill the lion is just
plain silly. It was not playing status games with your brother. It was looking
for lunch. Revenge against institutions is often equally silly. When they hurt
you, it usually isn’t due to tribal status motives. Hence the wisdom in
Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained
by stupidity.

Of course, judges are real people too and the transition to

institutionalized civilization can be tricky. There is a wonderful Hindi short
story by Munshi Premchand, called God Lives in the Panch. The premise of
the story is that one of the two parties in a vendetta gets appointed to the
Panch, which is the tribal council of elders, just as the other party is about
to go on trial in an unrelated matter. He starts to fear that his enemy will
abuse his position to hurt him. As it happens, the newly-appointed
councillor feels a sense of respect for the role the moment come over him as
he assumes office, discovers a higher nature within himself, and delivers a
fair verdict.

So revenge is obviously a deeply messed-up expression of

vindictiveness. It is hard to even call it “evil.” It is just plain insanity. A
result of deeply messed-up thinking.

But you cannot make the leap from that obvious point to the conclusion
that vindictiveness (or even vendetta-seeking) are irrational. Our world is
not fully civilized. Everything does not get adjudicated in courts run by
judges who behave respectfully towards their offices. To the extent that an
extended conflict is playing out in the same tribal context (such as a
corporate department), where reputations matter, and to the extent that
individual players are legible (i.e. you are not railing against a system to
which you are imputing tribal motives), calibrated vindictive behavior is
valuable.

To put it in the context of the most familiar battleground for most of us,
if you do not push back when pushed in the office, you will have people
walking all over you. A nominal organizational peer attempting to assert
authority over you by “delegating” work to you over email requires
immediate pushback to establish the right status relationship. Possibly with
a cc to the joint manager. And yes, this does create a problem for the
manager to deal with. That’s his/her job: to civilize the essentially tribal
interaction for the greater good.

And yes, sometimes marketing and sales need to engage in a period of

vendetta so they can deal with each other with the right level of mutual
respect, instead of one organization walking all over the other. And yes, this
does create a problem. It is a tough kind of inter-tribal warfare problem, and
the CEO has to tread delicately so that an attempt at “civilizing” the
interactions does not end up killing the tribal passions that also get real
work done. It’s the sort of problem CEOs are paid to solve. And they are
certainly paid enough, so we need not feel sorry for them.

But to the extent that our world is not tribal, you do need a place to
direct your vindictive instincts. There are only two real options: learn to
forget, forgive and move on (probably to a different tribe), or go insane.
Action
On Petards
When I first started collecting notes on Slightly Evil tactics, I noticed that a
lot of very effective people had a favorite one: hoisting others up by their
own petards.

As I collected examples and pondered, I began to realize that this isn’t

just another Slightly Evil tactic. It is popular for a reason: it is the grand-
daddy of them all. Many other tactics can be derived from it.

First things first. Petard is a French term for a small bomb used to blow
up fortifications. Apparently, during medieval sieges, they were hoisted into
strategic positions before being blown up, and the engineer lighting the fuse
would sometimes get entangled in the ropes and get hoisted up along with
the bomb, and blown up. Hence the phrase.

In modern usage, the phrase is used to describe the tactic of using

somebody’s own arguments against them. Like using somebody’s own
momentum against them in martial arts, this is a very basic principle. Here’s
a typical example you might encounter in the workplace.

Alice: Let’s finalize this right now in this small group, before the all-
hands meeting.
Bob: I thought we believed in transparent, open processes. I cannot
support back-room machinations. We should take this to the all-hands
meeting.
Alice: Fine.
... (a week passes)
Bob: I need you to sign off on this purchase order.
Alice: I think we should refer this to the committee.
Bob: But we obviously need this widget for the project.
Alice: I thought you were all about open and transparent processes?

Why does it work? The answer is rather subtle.

 In the civilized parts of our world today, we normally don’t settle
disputes with fists or yelling anymore. We pretend that everybody is
reasonable, and therefore resort to reason, at least on the surface.

Now reasoning is a mechanical process only for simplistic computer

programs. For humans, it is a matter of pulling out favored patterns of
argumentation from a playbook in memory. Our plays may have been
actually thought through and appropriately deployed sometime in distant
memory, but mostly, when we deploy a “reasoning” play, we’re engaging in
a pure stimulus-response behavior. We vaguely recognize a situation, and
trot out a favorite argument that we’ve used to “win” before, with some
hasty adaptation. Often, our plays are learned via imitation, and have never
been examined at all.

The key here is the association with “winning.” In human social

interaction, winning is rarely about the facts or the truth. It is usually about
ending an interaction in a preferred status relationship (“I am better than
you” or “I am worse than you”). Whether the preferred outcome is
reinforcing the status quo or a establishing a new status pattern, winning or
losing is defined in terms of status.

But the interesting thing is that real arguments do nothing to status.

Status is a matter of social perception. Winning a chess game might raise
your status among geeks and lower it among jocks. So when you use an
argument to score a status win, there’s a very strong chance that it isn’t a
real argument at all, but a rationalization.

With complicated arguments, it can be hard to figure out the details of

exactly where reasoning stops and rationalization begins. But you don’t
need to figure it out. All you need to do is note whether status changes as
the result of a given argument. If it does, you can file it away, because used
in reverse, it will cause the reverse status change.

In the example above, Bob used the “open and transparent” argument
(inferring the consequences of assumed shared values in disingenuous ways
to score a cheap point and occupy the moral high ground). Alice filed away
the pattern and reversed it when it suited her. The tactic works not because
the reasoning pattern is strong but because it is weak. You could challenge
such a pattern the moment you spot it, and enter into a long argument. Or
you could just file it away to use as a petard later.

Many sitcom plots are entirely driven by status see-saws caused by

hoist-by-own-petard dynamics.

The nice thing is that even though the argument is weak, your opponent
will not want to attack it, since doing so would undermine their own
previous use of the tactic. This helps create cultures of consensus around
bullshit arguments that nobody wants to call out. But you can raise your
own game by only using such weak logic in such petard-hoist defenses, and
developing your own logical patterns much more carefully, avoiding any
arguments that could be used against you later. This requires honesty and
self-awareness. Not everybody can answer the key question: am I making
this argument to achieve a favorable status outcome for myself or to arrive
at a real truth? Note that I have nothing against status-movement goals.
They are in fact the bread and butter of Slightly Evil thinking. It’s just that
reason is a very dangerous, double-edged tool to use when playing status
games. Use other tools.

As a rule of thumb, useless arguments that move status without

discovering truths are most often found in the application of unexamined
“values.” Such values are rarely about profound moral positions. They are
more often a crutch for lazy thinkers.
Crisis Non-Response
The British Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister* television shows are
gold mines for Slightly Evil. I recently watched the entire series again, and
re-read the books, after nearly 20 years, and was astonished by how modern
the humor still seems. There is even a superb episode about a bank bailout.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the shows, they track the rising
fortunes of Jim Hacker, who goes from being “Minister for Adminstrative
Affairs” in the first show, to the Prime Minister’s office. The premise of the
show is the constant battle between Hacker and the bureaucratic civil
service. For those of you familiar with my Gervais Principle† series, the
picture painted is of an inverted MacLeod hierarchy: Members of
Parliament are the losers, ministers of the Crown are the clueless, and the
civil service contains the sociopaths. But unlike The Office, the main
characters are not pure examples of the archetypes. Hacker occasionally
wins via a streak of sociopathy, while the civil service occasionally loses
through cluelessness.

In the episode “A Victory for Democracy”, we find a description of how the

British Foreign Office deployed a well-thought out “creative inertia”
strategy to not respond to a crisis. The strategy involves four stages. You
can try using this the next time you want to avoid action. From the book:

“The standard Foreign Office response to any crisis is:

Stage One: We say nothing is going to happen

Stage Two: We say that something may be going to happen, but we
should do nothing about it
Stage Three: We say that maybe we should do something about it, but
there’s nothing we can do
Stage Four: We say that maybe there was something we could have
done but it’s too late now.”

Sound familiar?
 In the episode, this strategy is adopted by the civil service to resist
Hacker’s attempts to get Britain to intervene in an impending communist
coup on a Commonwealth island. (Hacker wants to intervene in order to
score points with the Americans, while the civil service wants to avoid
acting because of some Middle Eastern implications)

Hacker, in this case, outmaneuvers the civil service via a fait accompli,
sending an airborne battalion to the island on a goodwill mission via the
Defense Ministry, without letting the Foreign Office catch on. That’s
generally the best way to respond to such stalling: a fait accompli. If you try
to argue at any stage, you’ve already lost because the whole point of the
strategy is to waste time until it is too late. If you want to actually use this
stalling strategy, keep an eye on your flanks.

I’ll share more juicy bits from this rich source on this list occasionally,
but I strongly recommend you watch the shows and read the book versions,
which are not straight transcripts; the stories are presented slightly
differently via texts of memos and internal documents.
The Hierarchy of Deceptions
To function as a human being, you are forced to accept a minimum level of
deception in your life. The more complex and challenging your life, the
higher this minimum. If you live a quiet and conventional family life, you
may never be challenged beyond the problem of whether to tell your kid the
truth about Santa Claus. If you are President of the United States, your
moral intelligence is going to be tested a lot more severely. The journey on
the path of Slightly Evil deception begins with your attitude towards lying,
but ends up at Russian roulette.

The Principle of Conservation of Deception

Can the minimum level of deception in your life go to zero? Every time I
encounter somebody who swears by a philosophy of absolute honesty, I
invariably discover later that they’ve been deceiving themselves, and often
others as well, subconsciously. This observation inspired me to make up a
conjecture: the principle of conservation of deception: at any given level of
moral and intellectual development, there is an associated minimum level of
deception in your life. If you aren’t deceiving others, you are likely
deceiving yourself. Or you’re in denial.

You can only lower the level of deception in your life through further
intellectual and moral development. In other words you have to earn higher
levels of truth in your life. This actually takes intelligence, not just pious
intentions.

Perhaps there is an ideal of moral and cognitive genius where you can
function without deception at all. I haven’t met anyone at this level, but I
often come across people who recognize the principle of conservation of
deception, and seem to be consciously working to lower the amount of
deception in their lives.
The Anatomy of Deception

The question of deception arises when you are in a situation where you
have a skill or information advantage over another decision-maker. How
you use that advantage depends on four things: alignment of intentions,
your relationship to the other party, the relative value of a win to the two
parties, and the degree of moral certainty you have about your intentions.
Let’s get the first three out of the way, since they are easier to understand as
simple calculations.

On the one extreme, where there is a strong alignment of intentions, a

good relationship, and a desire to see the other party win, you have a parent
lying to make a problem simpler for a child and secretly helping him/her
succeed. On the other extreme, which is completely adversarial in both
intentions and relationship, and you stand to benefit much more, you pull
out all stops to win. Whatever the situation, you can use both your
information advantage and skill advantage towards the appropriate
outcome.

Deception is very nearly an amoral behavior. There are “good” lies:

little white lies, nurturing lies, and complicity in the larger polite fictions of
society. And there are “bad” lies that help you inflict as much destruction as
possible. But on the whole, deception is fundamentally friendlier to evil. So
any use of deception is at least slightly evil.

The Hierarchy of Deceptions

I find it very useful to think in terms of a hierarchy of deception skills, from

the least sophisticated to the most sophisticated. The less sophisticated ones
are harder to justify than the more sophisticated ones, which is reason
enough to increase your sophistication level.

The least sophisticated form of deception is outright lying and

fabrication of evidence.
 A slightly more sophisticated form of deception is misdirection. You
don’t lie, but you foreground a pattern of true information that is likely to
lead to false conclusions.

Next you get withholding of information. You don’t lie or misdirect, but
you don’t necessarily share any information that you don’t have to.

Next, you get equivocation, or sharing of information in ambiguous

ways. This allows you to maintain plausible deniability against charges of
lying, misdirection or withholding information, and relies on the
predisposition of the other party to draw certain conclusions over others.

At the final level of sophistication, you get not-correcting-others. You

don’t lie, misdirect, withhold or equivocate. But when others are drawing
false conclusions that you could correct if you chose to (or missing
inferences that are obvious to you due to your greater skill), you selectively
choose not to help them out. If they make no mistakes and miss nothing,
you’ve given your entire advantage away, though.

There is progressive minimalism and (social and moral) defensibility of

means in this hierarchy. I am not a lawyer, so I’d be curious to hear from
the lawyers among you, about the legal defensibility of different levels of
deception. Outright lying is obviously perjury, while not-correcting-others
would appear to be entirely defensible.

The more sophisticated techniques are harder to use. They take less
energy (both to use initially, and to cover up if discovered later), but more
skill. How you use all these techniques to compete in adversarial situations
should be obvious. It is harder to see how you would use any of the skills to
help another party. When you get good at not-correcting-others in helpful
ways, you become a good teacher.

Moral Certainty

Any sort of deception, to be justifiable within your personal morality, needs

to be driven by a certain amount of moral certainty regarding your own
intentions.

Fortunately, life is deliciously interesting: the question of deception

often comes up precisely when you are not entirely sure that you are
morally in the right. To make the analysis simple, let’s assume a
deterministic situation at the extremes: you have a certain decisive
advantage. If you used it, you’d win for sure. If you gave it away entirely,
you’d lose for sure. In between, your likelihood of winning depends on how
much of the advantage you cede. If you cede half the advantage, you are
leaving the outcome to fate.

How much of your advantage should you give away when you are
morally unsure about your position? I assert that you should give away the
advantage in direct proportion to the amount of doubt you feel. Not only
does this seem fair in some cosmic sense, but it is also a great way to
prevent moral doubt from paralyzing you to the point that you don’t act at
all.

I think this is the reason behind the appeal of the familiar trope of a
movie villain who sets up games of chance when he doesn’t have to. You
have a revolver, a decisive advantage, but you choose to play Russian
roulette with your opponent, rather than shooting him outright. Often, such
villains, whose actions reflect a fundamental grappling with moral doubt,
are more interesting than the heroes who live in a world of moral
righteousness.

Personally, I almost never lie outright these days. To the extent possible,
I try to turn moral ambiguity into Russian roulette.
The Art of Damage Control
Being Slightly Evil means you are looking to live the gambler’s life:
placing bets and taking risks. If you win, you get a lot more for your efforts
than drones who merely work hard. The downside is that you can and will
fail on occasion. And the possibility of failure leads to one of the worst
pieces of advice that gets passed around (out of either cluelessness or
malice aforethought):

“You must be willing to look foolish.”

Why is this bad advice? It is bad advice because it turns the manageable
problem of damage control into some kind of holy cross that you must
necessarily, and passively, bear. People who hand out this piece of advice
typically do so while striking a pious, quasi-religious pose. They make it
sound as though looking foolish were necessary atonement for your sins of
risk-taking.

Certainly, looking foolish is a potential consequence of failure (besides

of course, other consequences such as material losses, loss of trust,
credibility, friendships and so forth). “You must be willing to look foolish”
is part of a more general piece of advice, “you must accept the
consequences.”

No, you shouldn’t.

“You must accept the consequences” is the start of a dangerous line of

advice that also leads to “you should take one for the team,” hara kiri,
captains “going down with the ship,” and other (usually unnecessary) acts
of martyrdom. There are times and places when honor and such noble acts
of self-sacrifice might be appropriate (usually actual battlefields are
involved), but they are truly rare. Most of the time, nobody needs to die.

You should certainly accept that failure is imminent the moment the
signs are clear. When the writing’s on the wall, it is time to quit fighting for
success. But that doesn’t mean it is time to switch into noble passivity,
waiting for the blow to fall. You are not a defendant awaiting trial (unless
you’ve actually broken the law). It is time to rapidly shift into damage
control mode. There are no holy judges out there watching to see if karmic
justice is done, and waiting to applaud your noble actions. Only gleeful
onlookers enjoying their moment of schadenfreude, other evil and slightly
evil people furiously looking for an opportunity in your fall, and well-
intentioned compassionate souls eager to commiserate and tempt you into
passivity when you need to be active. If you are involved in a big enough
failure, there will also be an angry mob baying for your blood very soon.
And yes, there are potential innocent and hapless fallout victims who will
soon pose a moral quandary for you.

As a principal in a risky endeavor, unless you are prone to denial, you’ll

realize that failure is unavoidable long before others do. This means you
have the most time and control over consequences, which includes a degree
of control over how, where and when others find out what’s happening, and
how they react.

Damage control means predicting the unmanaged course of events,

designing interventions to minimize fallout, and optimally distributing the
residual impact among all exposed parties. This means trading off impact
on trust, credibility, and future opportunities. It means salvaging material
assets. And yes: it means deciding how foolish you can afford to look.
Looking foolish is serious business. Reputations take a long time to
establish and minutes to lose. Of all potential consequences, “looking
foolish” is the most damaging. You can rebuild assets, re-establish trust and
credibility and find life-lines and future opportunities in even the worst
chaos. But once people start thinking of you as “foolish,” you’ve put
yourself in a pigeonhole that is very hard to climb out of. Depending on the
situation, you may be able to buy back 10 units of lost trust with 1.5 units of
looking foolish. These calculations must be made. The do-nothing defaults
will be unfavorable, especially because others will shift into active damage
control mode, the moment they find out, even if you don’t.

Now, if you are really smart, the optimal hit will not be negative at all.
You’ll find a way to play a failure so you not only escape all adverse
consequences, but perhaps actually come out looking good.
 Why is this Slightly Evil? Because there’s a slippery slope to True Evil.
A basic truth about risk management is that old saw, “success has many
parents, while failure is an orphan.” If there’s a win, you fight for as much
of a share as you can (for yourself, or for a broader group whose interests
you represent). If there’s a failure, you rush to dissipate consequences as
widely and as far away from yourself as possible. The path to true evil lies
in your power to make innocents – scapegoats and fall guys – suffer the
worst of the consequences. For many, damage control is pretty much the
same as figuring out who can most safely be blamed. And the people who
are easiest to hurt (and also the last to find out) are typically the most
innocent (there is rarely anyone who is truly innocent; every stakeholder is
complicit in a failure to some extent).

You cannot be all noble and rise above the fray of the blame game.
When a true failure looms, you must play or be played. As always, you
decide where to draw your lines in the sand. And sometimes yes, you may
well decide to shoulder more than your share of the burden out of altruism.
But it better be calculated rather than clueless altruism.
Disrupting an Adversary
On Annoying Others
Wanting to be liked is a significant need that must be overcome on the
slightly evil path. It is not enough to learn to take criticism with a stiff-faced
smile. You must become comfortable with actively provoking and then
dealing with dislike. The first step is to learn how to be annoying without
any purpose in mind. That’s the

learning, practice and play stage. Then there’s a danger zone: you can get
addicted to button-pushing schadenfreude for the hell of it. Feeding your
self-esteem by baiting others is as limiting as feeding it by fishing for
compliments. There’s a reason both those idioms arise from the same
fishing metaphor. They are about behaviors at the same level. Those who

get addicted are the lifelong contrarians and trolls-without-a-cause.

At some point smart people simply start ignoring the bait, and the
contrarians are reduced to baiting idiots, which is neither entertaining nor
valuable.

But once you’ve learned how to be annoying for no reason, and avoided the
temptations of the danger zone, you can graduate to being selectively
annoying in calibrated ways when you have a good reason. Why would you
ever want to do that? Quite simply, because people who are in

an annoyed state behave more predictably than those who are in a

non-annoyed state, where they are actually thinking. If you ever need to
stop somebody from thinking too much about something, and more benign

methods like flattery, distraction or avoidance fail, you escalate by being

annoying.

It is far easier, and far more valuable, to annoy people using their
strengths, than by using their weaknesses. In fact, you cannot really annoy
people by attacking their weaknesses. You can only insult them and buy
anger and resentment that might come back to bite you in the form

of vindictiveness. When you annoy people using their strengths on

the other hand, they tend to get frustrated with themselves, rather than
angry at you. And while annoyance usually fades (unless you

reinforce it into a permanent state – the danger zone above), insults get

carved in stone. And best of all, causing annoyance is a tactic that can
neutralize people’s most effective behaviors, when they are not in your best
interests.

This phenomenon is part of a broader phenomenon I’ve talked about

before: all arrested development is caused by strengths, not weaknesses. If
you get too good at something, you get addicted to those rewards, and your
behavior around that strength gets predictable, even if highly effective.

To be truly effective, you must select strength vectors where you

personally are much weaker than your target (or can appear much weaker
because you’ve managed to make them underestimate you). In fact

that’s the source of this whole bag of tricks: all annoyance tactics are
derived from the natural behaviors of stupid, illogical, uncreative and
unintuitive people, and rely on the mechanics of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
* he only difference is that in their natural form, these are typically poorly-
timed lash out/bite back behaviors that arise from threats to self-esteem. In
their deliberate form, the tactics are used when you want to achieve specific
effects.
Derailing the Data-Driven
In the Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister TV

shows of the 80s, the Whitehall bureaucrats Humphrey Appleby and

Bernard Wooley kept the hapless minister (and later, Prime Minister) Jim
Hacker trapped between a rock and a hard place: they would either flood
him with so much information that he couldn’t find what he needed to
know, or withhold so much, it wasn’t there for him to find. By effectively
combining filtration tactics with distraction tactics based on irrelevant
information, the bureaucrats managed to keep the reins in their own hands.
In information wars, filters are power and useless data are weapons.

This general approach to manipulation relies on the fundamental

relationship between data and decisions. New tactics are becoming
available in our digital age.

When two parties have divergent agendas, the party that controls data
flows is usually the one that wins. To control how a decision is framed and
made, you have to control the data flows that feed into that decision. This
requires two levels of work. First, you have to frame the decision. This step
determines which data are deemed important and relevant. Second, you
have to hide some data and exaggerate the importance of other data.
Framing is a more powerful lever, since by perversely misframing a
decision, you can send someone down a completely irrelevant bunny trail
and give them the illusion of choice. For example, if you know that for a
given question, the opinions of parents matter more than those of teachers,
encouraging your opponent to design a survey to target teachers to distract
him/her (preferably a detailed survey to be administered at a teacher
conference in 6 months rather than a quick one conducted online next
week), will win you an advantage.

But if you cannot completely distract somebody from the important data
flows, you need to learn the basics of data judo, so they end up doing the
wrong things with the right data.
 In Hacker’s day (the show is set in the 80s), this general approach to
manipulation relied on the paper version of information overload/scarcity.

Overload meant Hacker would have to process multiple boxes of papers

every night. The bureaucrats would hide the important papers deep inside
the last box (a tactic also favored by defendants in class-action lawsuits,
where the discovery phase results in huge piles of mostly useless data).
He’d be so tired by the time he got to them late at night, he’d sign without
looking (later in the show, Hacker wises up to this tactic).

Hacker’s mistake lay in delegating the determination of “important”

to his nominal underlings. If he felt overwhelmed with data, he’d complain

of information overload and tell his staff to only give him the most
important papers to read. If he felt important things were being kept from
him, he’d demand that he be kept in the loop about everything.

In data flows, there is no real protection against manipulation by people

with more privileged and direct access to data, (it’s like being the lower
riparian state along the course of a river) but you can do better than Hacker.
You can set explicit relevance criteria for example: “send me everything
about issue X, but leave me out of the loop on issue Y.”

That at least escalates the game, since hiding information from a relevance
filter is tougher than hiding it from a generic “importance”

filter.

But enough about 80s style information-based manipulation. We are in

the 2010s now, with several generations of information technology between
us and the Jim Hacker age.

The equivalent of Jim Hacker in the 2010s is the self-styled “data-

driven”

decision-maker. I first started encountering the term around 2006, when

“analytics” was starting to catch on as a buzzword. The typical clueless
data-driven decision-maker (call him/her a CDDD) has the following
characteristics:

Often has a background in a process discipline such as six sigma.

Loves anything with a statistical cachet to it, like “A/B testing” or

“ARIMA model.”

Often has some very rudimentary training in statistics and

probability theory.

Conflates more sophisticated analysis with more useful results.

Confuses precision with accuracy (this usually shows up as worry

about data quality while forgetting about data relevance).

Is often a formula geek rather than somebody who actually looks at

specific numbers.

Is vastly more confident and secure in his/her clueless state compared

to his paper-driven predecessors.

The last two elements are particularly important. By “formula geek,” I

mean someone who has only a very hazy conceptual understanding of
mathematical ideas like regression and technological tools like SQL, but is
able to actually use the tools very well, and relies on them to provide
answers and insight. They can run regressions, fit curves, talk about R-
squared and even run simpler SQL queries and routine database reports.
This leads to the greater sense of confidence and competence: CDDDs
mistake basic understanding of more powerful tools for greater personal
competence (like somebody with a car feeling more confident about their
sense of direction than somebody on foot)

What they completely lack is any sense of taste about when and how to
use the tools, any sense of what data is missing, and how to improvise.
They believe “drilling down” means generating more detailed reports or
knowing the tricks involved in slicing data increasingly refined ways.

The truth of course, is that to “drill down” is to act like a detective

following an instinctive trail of questioning in a mystery novel, based on
clues that seem significant. Intuition in data-driven thinking doesn’t vanish,
it merely moves from the answers to the questions. There are extremely
sophisticated thinkers who simply “get” data-driven decision-making
without knowing any statistics or technical details: they understand that
being intelligently data-driven is simply about asking the right questions at
the right time, which is something that takes hard thinking and a sense of
timing rather than technical skills.It can be scary to watch these smart
people in action. I once watched a CDDD team do a 30 minute presentation

to a smart executive, presenting tons of data and answering tons of obvious

and irrelevant questions. All eye-glazing stuff. In the Q&A session, most of
the tired audience simply asked dull follow-up questions that the CDDD
team could easily answer. The smart executive? He cut right to the chase
and asked the ONE important question that reframed the issue and made it
obvious that all the data and analysis was irrelevant.

CDDDs fail in the following predictable ways:

Failing to understand the relationship between time and data: more

data is only useful if it is being generated and intelligently analyzed
faster than options are expiring due to a ticking clock.

Falling prey to the drunkard-and-keys effect: looking in the glare of

wherever data is available, rather than where the data is actually
needed, to lower risk.

Going beyond “roughly right”: If you can eyeball a graph and notice
that it is basically trending up in a rough straight line, and that’s good
enough for the decision you need to make, there is no real point in
doing complicated math to figure out exactly how straight it is (the key
phrase is “good enough”). This is an extremely common failure mode.
 A simple way to test for this is to ask “can ANY possible conclusion
from this mathematical refinement exercise actually swing the decision
the other way?” If the answer is no, the work is not worth doing.

Failing to understand sampling: CDDDs understand the technical ideas

in sampling (randomness, i.i.d, true randomness versus chain samples
versus convenience samples, methodological problems with different
data collection methods). But they don’t understand the far simpler
framing issues in sampling. A technically perfect A/B test is
completely useless if you are asking the wrong question to begin with.

All these failure modes arise from the same place: failing to actually
think about the problem at a pre-technical level: asking the right questions
and pondering the underlying assumptions and hypotheses. All these
activities

are outside of the technical work of data-driven decision making. There are
no formulas or processes at this framing stage.

Which brings us to the slightly evil part. If you are dealing with a
CDDD

who is getting in your way, what can you do? You could of course, do the
digital equivalent of too much/too little data dumping as with Jim Hacker
(too much is usually far easier these days: give them a massive Excel sheet,
or access to a database query interface that can do far too much, and is
designed to drill down and generate reports in the wrong directions).

But the digital world offers more room for creative misdirection,
overload and information hiding. They key is to recognize that CDDDs do
everything they do out of risk aversion, but are hazy about what data reduce
what risks and uncertainties. Their risk aversion also tends to be absolute
rather than relative. CDDDs usually want the same levels of certainty
around every decision, whether or not there is enough information to lower
the risk to their comfort levels. This means they are in a hurry to get to the
technical parts because it feels like they are accomplishing something.
 So you need to encourage them in their quest for a false sense of
security, and hurry them along to the technical exercises. Here are four
techniques to take advantage of each of the four predictable failure modes
above.

If you know that a decision will tend towards a default option you like,
if left unmade, you can suggest delaying or deferring a decision until
more data is in. If the analysis supports what you wanted anyway, you
look smart. If not, you can always say, “it’s too late now, we’re already
committed. Second-guessing now will be very costly.”

If you know that the actual data required to move a decision out of
your gut is simply unavailable or too expensive, look for the most
convenient red-herring data source. Suggest that the CDDD study that
data source. If possible, suggest that they chair a committee to study
that data source.

Using this failure mode requires some technical knowledge. If you

don’t care whether an upward-trending graph is a straight line,

exponential or an S-curve (all you care about is “up”), then suggest the
most complex technique you can. Everybody can do linear regressions.
Suggest something like “we really need to do a logistic regression
here; there may be some implications if it turns out we are on an S-
curve.” If your CDDD doesn’t know how to do logistic regressions,
he/she will waste time studying up the subject (and enjoying it) or
hunting for an expert who knows how to use the technique. More
generally, sending people off on useless learning missions and digital
wild-goose chases is one of the best ways to distract them from
substantive issues.

A real thinker will not move on to technical questions about sampling

(“is this i.i.d?”) before thinking through the qualitative and narrative
questions (“are women really the target market here?”). If you want to
distract a CDDD from the important questions about a sample, scare
them with methodological questions: “Are we really sure this time
 series is i.i.d? We don’t want a Black-Scholes-Mertens type Black
Swan meltdown here).

Perhaps for the digital age, we need a phrase to replace “wild goose chase.”
How about “black swan chase”?

Keep in mind that in some ways, being forced to use these techniques
wastes useful talent. If at all possible, try and point a CDDD in a direction
where they can do good. Unfortunately, this is often impossible, because of
their false sense of confidence. Because they are often more competent
around data tools than their peers, they mistakenly believe they are also
more insightful around data in general.
Rebooting Conversations
Sometimes conversations just start off wrong. So wrong that you need to hit
the reboot button. I saw a virtuoso display of conversation rebooting once.
A customer at a store had run into a major mess while trying to get a return
processed, and the floor staff could not help her. The manager had not yet
returned from lunch. She stood there getting angrier by the minute. When
the manager finally walked through the door (nursing a chilly frappuccino;
very apt given what he did next), she could hold herself back no longer.

She strode up to him immediately and launched into an angry outburst:

“This is just not acceptable; I’ve been waiting here fifteen minutes! I was
promised...”

The manager waited for a pause in the outburst before firmly taking
charge: “No, no, NO. That is not the way. Let’s start again. Hi! My name is
___, and you are?”

That took the wind out of the woman’s sails. She was forced to restart
with introductions, properly embarrassed that she’d railed at a stranger
without figuring out if he deserved the anger.

This was a particularly extreme example, the equivalent of sidestepping

and calming down a raging bull. I don’t think my nerves would have held
that steady.

But less extreme “soft reboot” situations are both more common and
easier to handle. The trigger is always someone (call him/her the “bull”)
coming up to you unexpectedly, in an emotionally charged state (anger, fear
and sullenness are the common ones). I am only talking about casual, work
and professional situations of course, not spouses, kids or parents. Cases
where you have no particular obligation to be nurturing and caring (can
“nurturing and caring” be an effective management style? That’s a topic for
another day. Short answer, “Not if it is a simple port of parental instincts”).
 Common reactions like “Whoa, whoa, calm down” or “time out, time
out!” can be dangerous because you implicitly accept responsibility for
being the calm and adult one, and give the bull permission to continue the
tantrum. That’s a common (and often deliberate) exploit employed by the
emotionally violent against those whose desire for peace and harmony is a
known weakness. What you need is a reaction that gives you reboot control,
but doesn’t leave you responsible for maintaining overall calm. Just your
own calm. You leave the bull responsible for his/her own emotions, and you
don’t take responsibility for the situation until YOU decide you want to.
This also means being willing to let the situation spiral out of control with
“nobody in charge” for a while, if the bull doesn’t restrain himself/herself.

The basic trick is simple: you repeat all or part of their opening line,
but with zero emotional content. Deadpan.

This works about 80% of the time. Sometimes you may have to change
an assertion into a question, either just with interrogative modulation, or by
a minimalist word substitution. Here’s are a few examples:

Bull: HAVE YOU HEARD? THIS IS BULLCRAP!

You: This is bullcrap?

Bull: I AM NOT PUTTING UP WITH THIS! THEY’VE MOVED

MY DESK TO THE BASEMENT!
You: They’ve moved your desk to the basement?

Bull (crying or close to it): Whha–wwhat am I going to do now? I am

screwed.
You: You’re screwed?

This works because of the basic dynamics of emotions. When faced

with an emotionally charged stimulus, your own emotional reaction will
race ahead and censor the options generated by your cognitive reaction.
Emotional reactions to such charged stimuli can be empathetic (you are an
ally, and you mirror the emotion), sympathetic (you react with a
calming/moderating emotion before determining if you want responsibility
for the blow-up) or complementary (for example, defensive cringing in the
face of rage).
 Reacting with a repetition (or a slightly modified repetition) is a
cognitively lightweight operation, so it is quick enough to prevent an
emotional hijacking. Depending on the situation, it can take some nerves to
do the repetition drained of emotional content, but it is still a
straightforward behavior to practice and learn.

What happens next? Usually, the bull will see your response as a request
for elaboration. Elaboration takes coherent thinking, so he/she will be
forced to slow down before saying anything more. At the same time, you’ve
substituted your emotionally neutral repetition for the charged opening, as
the stimulus to respond to. The train of thought that starts in your head will
be less constrained. Most importantly, you don’t end up with responsibility
for the developing situation before you decide if you want it.

When this does not work, it is usually because the bull will displace the
strong emotion towards you (“don’t f$@%$@ just repeat what I say, I am
MAD” or “How can you just sit there?”), but by then, you’ve bought
yourself a favorable reaction-start point even if the bull continues the
charge.
Case Studies
The Game of Hallway Chicken
You’ve probably played the game of Hallway Chicken. That uncomfortable
little dance you do when you need to maneuver around somebody going the
other way in a hallway or lobby. Unlike the game of chicken on roads or in
conflict, where you win by not being the first to give way, in Hallway
Chicken, you win by being the first to give way, but doing so in a status-
enhancing way so you appear gracious. Be honest – such encounters aren’t
just practical problems. You feel either a small social win or loss each time.

The key to giving way graciously, as it happens, is to slow your

movements down to below the walking tempo of the oncomer. This is a
status win because slow movements are associated with higher status.
Happily, it is also a good way to actually solve the collision-avoidance
problem efficiently.

It’s a mathematical thing, and it’s easiest to explain via an analogy to

dropped phone calls in the days before call waiting. When a call is dropped,
if both parties try to call back immediately, they’ll both get busy signals
(the equivalent of moving in the same direction in Hallway Chicken). One
known method for resolving such conflicts is to simply wait a random
period before trying again. If you get a busy signal, you wait a longer
random period. This protocol solves the problem quickly and efficiently (it
may even be optimal in some sense, I forget my long-ago technical
introduction to this problem). Electrical engineers actually design such
slow-down protocols to re-establish dropped connections in communication
networks.

Explaining why this works takes some tedious probability theory, but
the point is, slowing down leads to a resolution of the collision avoidance
problem. If one party slows down while the other continues to dance side-
to-side rapidly, the dancer will more likely be the one to get the right of
way, generally the lower-status outcome.
 It takes some practice to adopt this behavior, because in a given physical
environment, people generally go with the flow and walk at a given pace or
faster. Not slower. So Hallway Chicken situations typically start with
roughly matched tempos. Besides consciously training yourself to instantly
slow down in hallway encounters, you can also just try walking with
slower, longer strides.

For homework, consider another everyday walking-around situation that

can turn into a status thing: the problem of if, how, and how long to hold a
door open when people are coming through behind you. We’ll see in the
next chapter a discussion of some solutions to this problem.
Door-Holding and Illegible Queues
Let’s analyze the status dynamics of the game of Holding Doors Open. I
challenged a few friends to come up with their own analyses. I am sharing
four in edited form here, with the full names withheld (I don’t want to
accidentally out someone as a practitioner of the Slightly Evil arts). You
will find my own view (and I make no claims to my own solution being the
best) at the end.

The 3-Second Rule

First up, EB has a very systematic answer that starts with his notion of a 3-
second rule:

I’ve always reduced the door-holding problem to the “3 second rule”. If

the person behind you is more than 3 seconds away from the door, you dont
have to hold it. Now I realize it’s more complicated than that. For example:

You lose status if you fail to hold the door within the 3 seconds, or
extend the hold too long
When a person holds a door for you, you are expected to walk faster
even if carrying a lot of stuff
People who do not speed up for a held door lose status
If you are male, and the person behind you is male, the 3 second rule
becomes fairly rigid
If you are male, and the person behind you is female, the 3 second rule
becomes relaxed and extends to about 5 seconds
Rules are greatly relaxed when the next person is carrying so many
things that opening the door would be problematic.
Heres an interesting one...given a stream of people, if you hold the
door for one person, the next male behind you is obligated to take over
the door holding until he is relieved by another male or the stream ends
A male who fails in his obligation in rule 7 (streaming) loses status
 I don’t entirely agree with the conclusions (in cases 3 and 8, I am not
sure the offender loses status for example), but nevertheless, it is a very
interesting breakdown.

Swing Direction, Air Locks and Other Subtleties

BE’s answer is more of a narrative analysis that raises more questions

than it answers, than a set of rules. Some of BE’s answers conflict with
EB’s (how’s that for symmetry)?

The Swing Direction Matters

Gaining status in 1:1 situations sometimes depends on the direction the

door opens and depending on relative status before the encounter, may
require being the one to open or having the door opened for you. When the
number of people and doors involved increases, everything changes. The
trickiest situation is the air-lock vestibule, where you enter a building
through a set of doors, take a few steps and then have to go through a
second set of doors.

What Women Don’t Know

Custom in the US dictates that gallant gentlemen should open doors for
ladies. Have you noticed how few women know that once they step into the
vestibule they are supposed to take a step to the side in order for the guy to
enter and open the next door? Time and again I watch these awkward
moments at restaurants where one or the other doesn’t know how to solve
for this situation. On a date, status can be lost by failing to perform this
dance properly, but I’m not sure status can (or should) be gained or leveled.
The same is not true in the business environment.

Air-lock Slam Dunk

 I walk fast and tend to be the pace-setter when walking with co-
workers. When walking with just one other person, as we near the type of
[air lock] entrance I just described, I slow down enough to let the person
pass me, and then I step aside so they can open the second door for me as
well. A completely unambiguous status statement. When walking with a
larger group, I slow down to the third position, so I can be the first one
completely through without holding any doors for anyone.

And if you find yourself in the situation that I described where the
person is waiting for you to open the second set of doors for them, you can
somewhat re-level status by going through the second door and continuing
on without making any effort to actually hold it for the other person.

Making the Favor Explicit

G approaches the problem from the point of view of negative and positive
payoff scenarios. I wont quote his full answer, but he makes one very
interesting point about the value of making the favor explicit:

Hold the door briefly, but transfer the effort to someone (preferably
male) in the other party as they come through. Offer a genuine smile, say
“Got it?” and, if time allows and the other group is appealing in some way, I
engage the group after they enter behind me (+++ if this turns into a social
win for my group and theirs). Why does this work?

It makes the favor explicit; they can’t help but follow your direction and
there is at least a small status loss any time a man does what a stranger tells
him to.You get to the be one offering politeness, the first one to speak and
have the option to reopen the interaction after you are all inside. This is the
prerogative of someone with higher status.
Culture Matters

RB points out that the local culture is very important in determining the
status dynamics.

In regard to opening doors...I’m a southern boy. I was raised to always

hold doors for anyone who comes along as Im going in a door. But I have to
admit that I usually use an approximate of 20ish yards to determine if I
should hold the door for people far behind me. Women present an
interesting situation these days. On a few occasions I’ve been asked if I was
holding the door for a woman just because she is a woman. To that I
respond, “No, Ma’am. I’m holding the door for you because I’m a
gentleman.” A little snarky, I admit, but I think it’s rude, anyway, to
question the motive for generosity with something as simple as opening a
door.

The Natural Time Constant Rule

In contrast to EB’s 3-second rule, KB has a sort of natural time constant

rule, which I think is more sophisticated.

If the other person is going in the same direction as I am I will hold the
door only if I believe they will get to the door before it would fall closed
naturally. My feeling is that one gains status by taking a moment to be
gracious. However, one could lose status by appearing too eager to appear
gracious. On the flip side, not holding the door gives leaves a poor
impression.

The other, and I find more awkward, way one can have this situation
come up is when the parties are travelling opposite directions (one entering,
one exiting). In these cases I always defer to the other party. Both parties
are present so one can always appear gracious by being willing to delay
themselves momentarily. This situation can become awkward when both
parties are trying the same strategy. I’m not sure what the right move is
here, but what I personally opt to do is allow them to be gracious both to
avoid an impasse and I do get a minor feeling of status gain because while I
have offered to be gracious, I do actually have somewhere to be.

My Solution

My solution is driven more by sheer laziness than any desire to have fun
with status games. I’d distill my unconscious policy down to five heuristics.

If the door pulls open towards me and there are people coming the
other way, I simply step aside and hold the door open.
If the door pulls open on the other side and there are people coming
the other way, I wait for them to pass through. If one of them holds the
door open, I pass through, but this is sort of rare. People seem to
manage one-way situations in batches.
If there are people behind me (whichever way the door opens), I do the
“relay handoff” if the person is right behind me (holding the door
propped open while passing through, rather than from the side). If
there are more than a few paces behind me, I just give the door an
extra hard shove as I pass through, so that the swing-shut is delayed.
The latter is a bit callous, since the follower has to hurry to catch the
door before it swings shut, but I don’t have to wait for the person. I get
points for trying, but don’t really have to slow down.
If I am with a group I know, and am out in front, I just hold the door
open for everybody. If somebody else is doing that, I pass through with
a nod, but never offer to take over.
If it is an old, physically disabled or over-burdened-with-stuff person, I
hold the door open always. This one is really a practical reciprocity
norm rather than a status ritual. Anyone who doesn’t do this comes off
looking both socially inept and inconsiderate in a childish way.

I hadn’t really thought about the two-door/vestibule situation. I think

there’s no really elegant solution there. It is just a physically awkward
situation.
An Exercise for the Reader: Illegible Queues

One morning, I was third in line for coffee at Starbucks. It was one of
those lines where the person ahead of me was standing a little too far back,
and as the third person, I had to set the line direction, but couldn’t do so
with complete clarity.

A somewhat self-important looking guy came up behind me, but stood

in the middle of the “ambiguous zone” where, if the person at the register
hasn't been paying attention, it will not be clear who is next.

I’ve observed this move many times. It is something just short of cutting
in line (which is very rare in America today at least). It is ambiguous
challenge/attempt to fork the queue, but there is room for plausible
deniability (“Oh, I didn’t realize you were in line”). The situation is
exacerbated in cases where multiple lines converge into a single line at a
service location, and creating and manipulating “queue illegibility” can get
you a couple of jumps ahead.

There is also a cultural angle in this case. Crowded countries tend to

have very close-together queueing norms, and what might seem like cutting
in line in a high-personal-space country can be a genuine misunderstanding
in a low-personal-space country.

Whats your take on the dynamics here? Whats the difference in

risk/reward structure between this kind of move and outright cutting in line?
What are the available defenses if you are faced with this situation?
Napping in the Trenches
I occasionally give advice to people, if their case seems compelling enough.
Kai had one such case–a subtle existential question masquerading as a banal
lifestyle design question:

I’m 26 with a background in economics and marketing. Until recently, I

was the director of marketing with a large construction company. I’m a
recently self-employed guy. I have really reasonable expenses (between
rent, small student loans, and a small car payment, I’m about $2,000/mo).
Between consulting work (website development, marketing strategy, and
business development) and a few side projects (iPhone recycling via eBay)
my expenses are covered. But I keep freaking out that I’m not doing
enough. I’m covering my bases with 15hrs/wk of work which is exactly
what I’ve wanted for the last few year, butmy days are filled with a bit of
dread that I should be working harder, doing more, and trying to earn
at a higher level. ...I haven’t had to dip into my savings. I’m meeting my
needs. I landed a nice consulting contract with a startup. Things are going
really well, but...Part of my head keeps saying I should be freaked out.

In Kai’s email, the bits in bold are what jumped out at me. That’s the
heart of the matter. The rest is just situational detail.

Let’s see if we can help Kai relax a bit.

This dread is certainly something I’ve experienced (and continue to

experience) personally, and heard other people describe. If you haven’t
experienced it, you’re either lying or clueless.

To set up a model for Kai’s problem, imagine a 2x2 with scripted and
unscripted on the X-axis, and failure and success on the Y-axis. In the
paycheck world, you have scripts for both success and failure that tell you
how to behave and react. Success comes with specific rewards that you’ve
already been conditioned to process, and there is a lot of social support to
help you deal with it. You sort of know how to behave when you get
married, get promoted to VP, have a first kid, or get a big bonus. It’s like
going to one of those arcades where you earn tickets from games and can
trade them at the counter for items from a fixed menu of prizes. Or playing
a video game. Failure is similar. There are standardized consolation prizes,
safety nets, coping scripts and strategies. In both cases, you can tell when
you aren’t being given your due (unlucky), or when you are being over-
rewarded (lucky). You have a narrative frame of reference to make sense of
events in your life and calibrate your responses to them. Sure, each new
event is new for you, but you can rely on the experiences of others who’ve
been through the same thing.

But in the unscripted part of the world of work that free agents inhabit,
there are far fewer behaviors to imitate, no well-tested scripts, and few
social cues helping you calibrate success/failure and suggesting appropriate
behaviors. If you’re actually failing (failing to make rent for example), the
problem is quite simple. At some point you’ll run out of money no matter
how low your burn rate, and end up having to head back to the scripted
world or spiral down into a homeless shelter.

The problem is with success. You have enough to continue indefinitely,

with a little discretionary surplus that allows you to think beyond the next
rent check. And that’s where the trouble starts.

You’re not quite sure how to calibrate your response to your evolving
situation. You don’t know quite what to do with your surplus. You could try
and imitate the scripts of the paycheck world, but you’ve probably already
discredited them in your own mind (and may not qualify anyway: try
getting a mortgage on a volatile equivalent of a steady paycheck that would
easily get you a mortgage).

To take a very simple example, when you are living off volatile cash
flows and managing “personal” and “business” investments dynamically in
a mixed way, all those retirement planning calculators are useless. You have
to be constantly be deciding whether a cash surplus goes into your
retirement account, or whether you’d be better off investing it in growing
your business in some way. What’s a better bet? An insight you have about
Netflix stock, or an idea for an app you can work on? In the paycheck
world, you never have to choose between those sorts of options. They are
generally sealed off from each other.
 This concern isn’t limited to bootstrapped lives that seem to eternally
endure, a slim margin away from collapse. Even radical success doesn’t
make this lack of narrative structure go away. When things are absolutely
booming, you have to face the terror of the thought that it may be a
transient success that could vanish as quickly as it appeared. The question
then becomes, this is too good to last; am I making enough hay while the
sun is shining? Or, where can I safely put this cash I am spinning right
now?

So what do you do? The key to the answer is one word: insurance.
Insurance is the idea that drives script building and behaviors for those who
lack a script to deal with the rewards of success.

I encountered this idea recently, from a couple of different sources, that

the law of diminishing marginal utility does not apply to money because
there is a category of uses for money (buying insurance) that don’t diminish
in value no matter how much you have. When you are poor, with no
surplus, you get your free tetanus shot at the community clinic and try to
avoid getting sick. Then you get health insurance. Then you get life
insurance. Then you start college savings accounts for your kids. On the
business front, you start new projects, you fret about existing projects
hitting end-of-life, you wonder if you should diversify. All of it is
insurance-thinking. You wonder if dollar devaluation will make your $5
million stash worthless in the next financial crisis. You fret about the most
secure place to stash what you have.

The insurance-dominated script building can sometimes show up in a

disguised form as experience maximization: you become afraid, not of bad
things happening, but missing out on good things. But as the idea of the
bucket list demonstrates, fear of “missing out” is simply another
manifestation of insurance-driven thinking. If you had all the time in the
world, missing out wouldn’t be a worry.

So why isn’t the insurance bought with dollarn+1 worth less than the
insurance bought with dollarn? Because in an open world, you cannot
actually estimate probabilities of various scenarios and rationally arrange to
buy insurance in the order of decreasing likelihood of various scenarios.
Because there are unknown unknowns that aren’t even on your list, let
alone modeled and rank-ordered by likelihood estimates. Heck, even for
known risks, you can only raise or lower risks in relative ways, not absolute
ways. If you avoid flying, you can still get killed in a plane crash if the
plane crashes into your house. Underground bunker? Maybe the crashed
plane will release a deadly toxin that seeps in.

There’s a fable in Indian mythology that gets at this. A rich and

powerful king wants to be immortal, and gets the gods to grant him a boon.
But they don’t offer him immortality, just an insurance policy with explicit
clauses. So he asks for and is granted, the following policy: he cannot be
killed by day or night, by human or beast, neither indoors nor outdoors, and
so forth. Clever, huh? And of course, he gets killed by a half-man-half-lion
at dusk, on a doorstep. Talk about black swans.

This process never ends. You can keep imagining things that could go
wrong and destroy the quality of life you’ve achieved (or limit the things
you could “miss out” on), and keep spending to secure it better against an
infinite universe of uncertainty. That’s why rich people (in my experience)
are usually more careful with their money than poor people. Sure, they may
splurge on luxuries (that’s their idea of rewarding themselves with a
specific lifestyle), but that spending is just the spending on the lifestyle.
They save the bulk of their wealth for increasingly complex forms of
insurance to preserve those achieved lifestyles. The richer you get, the
more lifestyle design becomes lifestyle insurance.

Hedge funds, cabins in the Wyoming mountains, offshore bank

accounts, a private jet on standby to fly you to a safe haven on a secret
private island in case the world ends and zombies run amok, cryogenic self-
freezing, and the ultimate holy grail of insurance: immortality-seeking. That
isn’t just Mr. Burns of The Simpsons. That’s more real rich people than you
might think, starting with John D. Rockefeller (who strove mightily to live
past a hundred, but failed at 98) to Ray Kurzweil today, who reportedly
takes 150 health supplements a day in the hope of living long enough to see
the Singularity arrive, so he can upload his brain into cyberspace where it
can survive for eternity and beat entropy (he still has to hope multiple
simultaneous earthquakes don’t take out all the datacenters where iKurzweil
is stored).

If you ever wondered why your rich friend blows money on a $1000
bottle of wine at dinner, but goes all Scrooge on you if you ask for $1000 to
help you build your app, it’s not entirely resentment at being considered a
soft touch, or fear of being taken advantage of. It’s also because the $1000
bottle of wine is merely an element of the designed lifestyle he/she is trying
to preserve against scenarios via insurance. What’s better than a $1000
bottle of wine? Why, the ability to keep drinking that $1000 bottle of wine
even in the event of a zombie apocalypse or the Skynet Hunter-Killers
chasing you. That $1000 isn’t in the diminishing marginal utility zone. It
actually represents millions in expected costs,against a space of scenarios
being insured against. Buying a lifetime supply of your favorite wine is
merely the first step. Then you have to put some cases in your bunker on
your private island in Greece. Then you have to buy anti-aircraft guns for
your island. And a nuclear reactor. And a fall-out shelter in case the nuclear
reactor suffers a meltdown. And install a private computer network that
Skynet cannot get into.

I fully sympathize, by the way. We all think the same way, just not on
such a grand scale.

To put this on our 2x2 matrix, when you have no “reasonable” story
(reasonable in the sense of “everybody else is following that script” whether
or not it is actually sensible), your anxieties are limited only by your
imagination. The paycheck-scripted, by the way, aren’t immune to such
anxieties. They just find security and comfort in numbers. Collective scripts
are more naturally self-limiting. They don’t spiral out of control to zombie
insurance as easily. If everybody around you accepts a pattern of insurance,
no matter how irrational, you feel safe accepting it yourself and relaxing.

But to bring it down to the world of people like Kai, you and me,
making ends meet and wondering if we’re doing enough, both the
millionaire’s situation and our own reflect age-old anxieties about mortality.

A simple and stark motif for this is a soldier in the trenches of World
War I.
 Imagine being this soldier. You are stuck in a boring, tedious, physically
uncomfortable situation – cold, wet, eating terrible food, battling disease
around you — all while dealing with ever-present death.

Ask a simple question about this soldier: can this soldier engage in the
most basic human relaxation behavior, taking a nap?

Surprisingly, the answer is yes. Even under such extreme circumstances,

you eventually hit a cognitive and physical limit and cannot devote any
more intellectual resources to increasing your chances of winning and
surviving. You hit a point where you let go, and take a nap.

The human condition for everybody, rich or poor, in a wartime trench or

doing Internet marketing and hoping to move to Hawaii, like Kai, is the
same. Whether the immediate situation is pleasant or unpleasant, the
overarching reality is that all your future planning and thinking involves
scripts that all end in exactly the same way: with your death.

So the answer to Kai’s question: am I doing enough? is always no.

There is always more you can do, all the way to the best available idea for
immortality that happens to be around during your lifetime.

Whenever you are lucid, awake and thinking, you cannot escape the
thought that the inevitability of death frames your current situation. It will
frame your behaviors whether you realize it or not. The WWI soldier in the
trench is always subconsciously alive to the fact that death is a careless
stretch away. Whether he is smoking a cigarette, eating cold soup, or staring
at a faded black and white picture of his kid, that thought is never far away.

And so is the millionaire, drinking his $1000 bottle of wine at a fancy

restaurant. Mortality may be a more distant thought, buried under more
pleasant layers of distraction, but it is there. And it is the same for the
desperate experience-maximizer, doing a frantic “if it’s Tuesday, it must be
Brussels” tour of Europe.

But just because there is always more you can do – and you should, it is
the definition of being alive in a way – does not mean you cannot take a
nap.
 So take that nap. Mortality will always be staring you in the face when
you wake up, and you can always fret about the next bit of insurance you
can buy with your next dollar when you wake up in 45 minutes. Some days,
mortality will stare you in the face close up. Other days it will be a subtle
and quiet note at a fun party where you’re immersed in the pleasures of the
moment. But it’ll always be around.

I hope, Kai, that this was not an entirely useless answer. Relax, take a
nap. You can get back to freaking out when you wake up.

Now I need a nap.

Pistols, at Dawn
Here is a case study on handling a work situation, from a Be Slightly Evil
perspective.

K, a middle-aged single mom, who worked hard to put herself through

graduate school while working a day job as an admin assistant, found a new
job as sales analyst in a Fortune 500 company where big, bear-hunting
teams go after multi-million-dollar corporate sales. Within the first couple
of hunts, she realized that a particular senior sales guy–call him J–was
treating her like a secretary. Innocuous “requests” like, “could you add this
note to slide 12” and “could you clean that up before you print off copies
for the client meeting” started coming her way. K did not report to J, but
both reported to a sales manager T, who had a laissez-faire style. The entire
sales team (which included several others, including an actual
admin/editorial assistant) worked in a fluid, “collaborative” way, with group
emails flying around (with the usual tactical cc’ing and backchannel
sidebars). A typical modern workplace in short. J’s “requests” were never
direct commands, but she found herself complying anyway, and getting
stuck with tasks she used to do in her old career. And shut out of higher-
value tasks that she could do and wanted to do (and had paid big education-
dollars to learn to do).

K emailed me right after a particularly egregious email (part of a long

straggling exchange of multiple emails) from J. She wanted to know how to
respond to that email to “fix” the whole situation, and be treated with the
“respect” she “deserves.”

Here are my analysis and recommendations, minus some irrelevant

situational details:

There are several good ways to deal with such toxic email exchanges. K
had thought of a couple of bad ones, and I could immediately see a half-
dozen better ones. Unfortunately, none of them would have been
particularly effective. Even worse, I could suggest a one-off response to K,
but she clearly lacked the email-fu skills to sustain the elevated level of
sparring without continued babysitting. Consciously studying and
improving email-fu skills in the heat of battle was not an option either. I
would have done K a disservice by just suggesting a one-time tactical email
band-aid. It would have merely prolonged her misery.

The problem here with K is that she forgot the first rule of dueling: as
the challenged party, you need to exercise your prerogative to choose the
time, place and manner of combat. That is the great advantage in being the
reactor rather than the instigator. Don’t choose a drunken fist-fight in a bar
simply because that’s where the challenge was thrown down. If pistols at
dawn work better for you, choose those.

In K’s case, the problem wasn’t really created by J, the tactically-

superior email-fu warrior. It was created by K failing to recognize the
consequences of working, at her interpersonal-skills level, with the lazy,
conflict-avoiding manager T, hiding poor team management skills under a
facade of laissez-faire management. K’s problem was to deal with default
unfavorable perceptions (female in a male-driven workplace, with a known
“secretary” history, and ingrained, easily-triggered behaviors, in compliant
“administrative assistant” mode). Fighting one J at a time, one email
exchange at a time would be impossibly hard. Email is a medium ideally
suited to small, real-time perception corrections, achievable with a couple
of sentences mixed judiciously into routine communication. It is a terrible
medium for making large perception corrections or setting favorable
defaults.

One ideal-case what-if is instructive to consider. K would have had a

backchannel chat with T early in the engagement, at the very first sign of
“secretary perception” issues, factored in T’s laissez-faire style, and
suggested that T clarify roles, responsibilities and expectations at the next
planning meeting. A more thoughtful manager than T would have done
something like that without being prompted.

This is still a difficult task, but at least it is merely one “crucial

conversation” instead of a hundred email-fu fights between a green belt and
a black belt. Handling such “perception setting” crucial conversations is an
essay-length topic in itself, but I’ll provide (as I provided to K) a brief hint
on how to manage those. The wrong way is to honestly explain the
particular situation bothering you (“J is treating me like a secretary”). It
puts you in “complaining to Mommy” mode, which all managers, laissez-
faire ones in particular, hate. Most managers are terrible in Mommy mode,
even if they sincerely want to help. It also risks poking at specific and
dangerous interpersonal histories which you may not know about (J-T in
this case). One right way, for someone like K with her level of situational
information and skill, is to flatter the “management style” conceits of the
particular manager and make an abstract suggestion. In this case, something
like this might work: “Really like your style, and how you don’t
micromanage us; I expect you’re going to do a basic roles/expectations
thing at the next planning meeting, and then put us on autopilot?”

This will not work in all cases, but seemed like an appropriate stab
given what I’d been told about T. A different T may be too lazy or scared
for even this much managerial work, or need more direction and hints on
K’s expectations of such a meeting. Or T may be smart enough to detect,
and thin-skinned enough to take offense at, the back-seat driving and the
somewhat transparent flattery implied in the “you’ve probably already
thought of this” idea attribution. The point is, you can devote enough time
to prepare for this conversation, pick the right attack and make it count.
And you won’t have to juggle real-time operational details at the same time.
If you are truly forced to “solve” a difficult interpersonal meta-problem in a
reply to a specific email, while dealing with the actual work-content part of
the reply, that’s a tough situation to be in. Don’t put yourself there if you
can help it.

In the ideal case, if the crucial conversation had succeeded, the

favorable initial conditions would have created many more opportunities for
K to start building up a true “sales analyst” perception, provided her with a
more controlled email-fu learning environment (while handicapping people
like J, for whom laissez-faire is an advantage), and laid the groundwork for
any subsequent intervention needed from T.

For K, it was obviously too late to do this in the specific situation. It

was late enough in the engagement that she’d already been labeled,
‘secretary type’ and through her actions, signalled assent to the label. All
the email options (we’ll examine such tactical options sometime) would
have had a high cost and/or a poor chance of success. The good news: such
situational damage is not irreversible. If, in the next engagement, with the
next team, K reads the team members accurately and initiates the “early
context-setting” strategy successfully, she will start building a solid and
advantageous perception. A temporary email band-aid in response to J was
still required of course, but less would be riding on it (I suggested a couple
to K, after making sure she understood it WAS a band-aid and not a
solution).

Moral of the story: you can’t always pick your battles, but you can
choose when, where, how and with whom to fight. Isolated tactical
problems are very rare, and if you are seeing any situation as “how do I
respond to this email” or “what do I say in this meeting,” chances are, you
are misframing a broader problem and heading towards your personal
Vietnam. There are no formulas. Eyes-wide-open analysis of complete
situations and contexts, followed by a deliberate choice of when, where and
who to “work” to get where you need to be, is the only way. And this
analysis must be informed by self-awareness and understanding of your
own limits and others’ personalities in the equation. The analysis must be
turned into action through a mix of immediate band-aids and well-timed
strategic interventions. And after all that, you will still fail often, since there
are always uncertainties you cannot model. So you course-correct at
multiple levels with feedback.

The good news is that this comprehensive approach leads to

“investment” rather than “spending.” Rather than every interaction starting
from square one, you gradually accumulate a favorable
perception/reputation and a repertoire of adequately-practiced skills. It’s
like gaining new weapons faster than you lose lives in a video game.
How to Interrupt
I unconsciously learned how to interrupt effectively, by watching and
starting to imitate a senior executive who was really good at it. But I didn’t
realize I was doing it, or understand why it worked, until I read Impro by
Keith Johnstone.

The ineffective method is to wait till the interruptee has finished making the
point you disagree with, form a response in your head, and then interrupt
with something like, “excuse me, but...” or “sorry for interrupting, but...”

Here’s the effective method: you need to interrupt as soon as you’ve

roughly understood that there is an objectionable point being made (which
can be before the speaker has finished making it), and before you’ve
decided what to say. You do so by thinking out aloud, going
“Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” or “Ehhhhummmmmm!” clearly, and stretching out
your interrupt phrase over several seconds, until the interruptee shuts up
and looks towards you. And most importantly, it should be patently clear
that you haven’t yet decided what to say, and are thinking about it. This
means looking up, down, or away in the distance as you normally would
when you are absorbed in thought, not directly at the interruptee. Don’t try
to stage this. An artificial use of this tactic will be transparent to smart
people. You should actually start the interrupt at the real right time (based
on the content of what’s being said, rather than the formation of your
intention of “I need to stop this”), immediately tune out the room, and start
shaping the response in your head. The quality of your timing will tell the
other smart people in the room whether you know what you are doing, or
faking it.

Why does this work? As Johnstone explains, it is primarily a status

thing. Important people feel confident enough about their situational status
to effectively say, “I disagree, but I am important enough that you should all
shut up and wait while I figure out why, even if it means wasting 10
seconds of everybody’s time.” In terms of rhetoric, the timing matters,
because if you wait till you’ve formed your response before interrupting, it
is already too late. The interruptee has likely used that point, introduced
other points, and moved on with the construction of his/her argument. It
may be too late to arrest the momentum. There are other subtleties here,
about why and how this works, but rather than work out all the
implications, I’ll do one example and leave you to work out others. The
example: you don’t have to look or sound super-confident, but it should be
clear from your body language that any uncertainty you display is
associated with the real-time thinking you are doing, not the social
appropriateness of the interrupt. A great example of doing uncertainty right
is Vincent D’Onofrio’s Robert Goren character in Law and Order: Criminal
Intent. When he interrupts (usually with this method), he always looks
uncertain and fumbling, but still communicates mastery and control of the
situation.

How evil is this tactic?

It is good if you are shooting down a truly flawed and stupid point. You
are saving everybody time and helping an idiot avoid embarrassment.

It is slightly evil if you are using the tactic to stop a shaky argument in
its tracks, but the argument you want to build up in its stead is equally
shaky (i.e., you are ensuring that your smarter tactics win the day, because
you aren’t sure that substance will).

It is plain evil when it is evil by whatever standards you maintain that

allow you to sleep at night. I am not your priest. Draw your own lines in the
sand.

There’s a lot more of course, there are good and bad times/places/status
situations to interrupt this way, and it can backfire if you use the tactic at
the wrong time. A fairly safe time/place to use it is when you control the
meeting both substantively and procedurally (for example, you are the chair
and also have dictatorial authority over the decisions being made).
On Dodging Decisions
Question evasion is a highly-recognizable behavior, even when done well.
Politicians provide us with a lot of examples and practice, so most of us are
pretty good at detecting evasion (dealing with it is a different matter). But
you probably haven’t thought much about a close cousin: dodging
decisions. We are often put in the position of having to make decisions that
are framed in such a way that all the options are bad. The best way to dodge
such a decision is to replace it with another one that allows you to do what
you want with far less blowback.

I’ve never watched the TV thriller 24 regularly, but the other day, I caught a
glimpse of a first-season episode with a scene that showcased decision-
dodging very well. I call this tactic “emotional charging.”

In this episode, super-agent Jack Bauer is at a hospital with his wife,

along with the father of a critically-injured teenage girl. Bauer’s daughter is
missing and the injured girl is the last person who saw her.

The doctor steps out into the lobby and informs the group that the girl is
conscious. Bauer immediately requests permission to ask the girl a few
questions. The doctor passes the question to the girl’s father. The father, for
reasons we learn later, does not want the girl questioned. His response is the
perfect dodge: “Let me go in and check if she is up to it first.”

Compare this to the straight refusal, “no,” which would invite argument
and debate. By changing the “can I question her?” decision to a “let me
judge if she’s up to it” decision, the father created a safe way to say no later.
“Up to it” is a judgment call that provides wide latitude. More importantly,
it is a subjective judgement masquerading as a data-driven one, where even
medical professionals would have a tough time over-riding a parent, let
alone a third party. Unlike a straight refusal, the “up to it” decision also
buys an indeterminate amount of time.

As you might expect, Bauer and his wife accept the idea. You can’t
really argue with such a reasonable-sounding dodge that doesn’t
comprehensively say “no,” but moves the “maybe yes” to a place from
where it can slide effectively into a “no.”

It turns out later that the “father” is not really the girl’s father (who has
been murdered), but one of the bad guys. He heads in and quietly murders
the girl, since she does know important things, and comes back out and
feeds Bauer’s wife a lie that allows him to kidnap her (Bauer has been
called away in the interim).

But even without such a high-stakes reason to dodge, the impersonator’s

decision-dodging tactic is well worth learning. The key is to make the
original decision dependent on another decision which requires your
subjective interpretation of some emotion-laden missing information.
Imagine if the father had been the real father, and the superficial situation
had actually played out:

Father: I am sorry, but she seems really on the brink, I can’t risk letting
you question her.
Bauer: I understand how you feel, but my daughter could be in real
danger, it’ll only be a minute, and I am sure she can handle it.
Father (angrily): That’s easy for you to say; it’s not your daughter in
there fighting for her life. If it were your daughter in there, you
wouldn’t allow it either.

The displacement to a more subjective and emotional decision cannot

be challenged easily, especially because the emotion sneaks in later (the
original dodge, remember, looks like a quest for missing objective
information). If the judgment is questioned, there is a legitimate excuse to
get angry. This is why I call the move “emotional charging.” Every
significant “people” decision is like a battery which can be charged up with
useful emotion if you think hard enough. By injecting enough subjective
and emotion-laden information into a decision indirectly, you can make it
impossible for others to question your right to make the call unilaterally.
Every emotional-charging decision dodge is a case of seeking refuge in the
fortress of “don’t tell me how to feel.”

Emotional charging, when available for use, is vastly preferable to more

common decision-dodging moves such as referral to a committee (this
cedes too much autonomy to a body that could potentially run amok and not
fulfill its appointed “death by consultation” role). The nice thing about the
emotional charging tactic is that you still get to decide, and you still get to
choose the option you wanted in the original decision. Emotional charging
can also help you reel in and speed up a decision that’s outside your locus
of control, unlike many one-way dodging tactics that can only delay a
decision. An example in Star Wars, is Senator Palpatine using the excuse of
violence in Naboo to grab power, while making it seem like a subjective
emotional burden. It is one of the rare interesting pieces of action in the
otherwise psychologically tame Star Wars saga.

The technique is particularly effective against those who pride

themselves on being “data-driven” decision-makers. Subjectivity is their
Achilles heel.
Inside the Tempo
We’ve come a long way and covered a lot of ground. So in this chapter, I
am going to try and put the whole Be Slightly Evil philosophy in
perspective and introduce a capstone idea that will hopefully pull together
the material we’ve explored in previous chapters.

This is the murky idea of being inside the tempo of an opponent,

arguably one of the most difficult ideas to understand in adversarial
decision-making. The idea is often referred to as being inside the decision-
cycle, where the reference is to the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act)
model developed by John Boyd, but I prefer inside the tempo because it
gets away from the specific structural idea of a “cycle.” The word tempo
goes beyond just the rhythms of an adversarial decision process to its
emotions and energy flows.

The idea has been best articulated in the world of Boydian strategic
thinking, but versions exist in most sophisticated decision-making domains.
In business for instance, “inside the tempo,” properly understood,
corresponds to the idea of disruption in Clayton Christensen’s sense. In
games like chess and martial arts, “inside the tempo” is about playing your
opponent rather than the game (as Boyd said, “fight the enemy, not the
terrain”).

The idea actually applies to cooperative decision-making as well (an

attentive parent or teacher can be “inside the tempo” of a child’s behavior
for instance), but adversarial contexts tend to bring out the richness of the
model better.

Being inside an adversary’s tempo is all about wrangling luck to exploit

habits.

Wrangling Luck
To a first approximation, the difference between artificial games and life is
that in life, luck is a variable you can influence much more powerfully. This
is because you get to change rules in open-ended ways instead of just
operating within a closed set of rules and a pair of dice. So the open game
of life, to a large extent, is about wrangling luck by playing with rules.

Real life is uncertain and messy for everybody, and an adversary is

anyone who is trying to create better-than-random conditions for
themselves by creating worse-than-random conditions for you, via the
meta-game of rule-making and rule-breaking. To compete, you must do the
same where necessary.

To get inside the tempo of an adversary is to recognize and exploit the

ways in which he or she (or it, in the case of organizations) is a creature of
habit. And we all are creatures of habit to some extent because we possess
limited attention. Winning in competitive settings is about exploiting your
adversary’s habits before he/she/it can exploit yours.

There are many ways to exploit others’ habits, but wrangling luck is
perhaps the most powerful way. Wrangling luck effectively creates a sort of
“competitive climate” comprising patterns of serendipity and its opposite,
zemblanity.

Competitive Climates
You’re in a world where luck is the scarce resource, because there are more
ways for things to go wrong than right. If you can direct more luck towards
yourself and more misfortune towards your adversary, you’ve amplified the
effectiveness of just about everything else you do.

In open competitive environments, luck is not just about die-rolls or

card shuffles. It is a control variable. The control variable. In the overall
game of life, your big goal is to drive serendipity towards yourself and its
opposite, zemblanity (there, you learned a new word) towards your
adversaries.
 When luck is being consciously wrangled in a real-life game, winning
feels like things miraculously going your way, things falling into place for
you just right, unreasonably out of proportion to your actions. This is
serendipity.

By contrast, losing feels like an overpowering sense of doom and

snowballing misfortunes out of proportion to your sins and stupidity. This is
zemblanity.

Creating patterns of serendipity and zemblanity that favor you and

disadvantage your adversaries is perhaps the most general goal in
competitive behavior.

The first order of business, once you’ve decided to start wrangling luck
in a domain, is to create a real-world game.

There are two distinct setup moves, people moves and process moves.
A fundamental tenet of luck wrangling is that you do people before process.
This means creating a configuration of alliances and oppositions to create a
pattern of conflict (for the Boydians among you, I mean something slightly
different from what you might assume).

Creating Patterns of Conflict

The more real the game, the less trivial the problem of setting up patterns of
conflict. In a chess game, two people simply sit down across from each
other. In a pickup soccer game, captains might take turns picking players
and get the game going within minutes.

In real-life adversarial environments, the decision of when to cooperate

or compete becomes non-trivial and highly situation-dependent. It can be a
harder problem than the actual procedural game-play. In fact, if you create
the right configuration of alliances and oppositions, the game might be over
before it begins, once the configuration is signaled to all parties. Weaker
alliances often simply give up in the face of invincible opposition, offering
walkovers.

So before you even make an opening move, you have to calibrate the
default level of competitiveness or cooperativeness with which you
approach a situation and create the right configuration.

Being combative when it’s time to cooperate, or trying to broker peace

when there is clearly some competitive energy needed, can actually
backfire. As the counterintuitive old saying goes (overloaded a bit), if you
want peace, prepare for war, if you want war, prepare for peace.

But it is possible to get too clever in the people-setup stage. Let’s do a

side-bar on loyalty.

Slightly Evil Loyalty

How do you do manage your loyalties so you are being neither child-like,
nor all Game of Thrones about it? I’ll offer you three laws, but not justify
them in detail. That would be a separate 5000-word essay.

For the first law, in place of win-win or no-deal, I offer you: adult-adult
or no deal.

Broken promises are inevitable under conditions of volatility,

uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). It is important to avoid
demanding, or promising, absolute loyalty. Dealing with people who trade
in childlike absolute loyalties is not worth it unless they are actually
children.

When you deal with adults, loyalty is not a value you have to apply but
a budget you have to manage. In everyday life, you may never have to
choose between a girlfriend and an idealistic politician as Batman was
forced to, by the Joker, but you’re probably going to be disappointing
people throughout your life. Managing how you spread the disappointment
around is how you manage your loyalty budget.

The second law is about drawing a good line in the sand between
slightly evil and true evil: any loyalty you offer or accept has to be
contingent but sincere.

It is possible to use loyalty itself as a game variable. You can win

confidence in order to betray it. You can act adversarial to gain attention in
order to win an alliance.

But most of us are not living a spy-versus-spy life game. In everyday

life, people will forgive broken promises with just a sincere apology, but not
bad-faith promises. Faking good faith consistently is more trouble than it is
worth.

The third law of slightly evil loyalty: never be your own #1.

Consider your actions under situations of severe, but not absurd stress.
Not thought experiments involving torture by evil dictators, but realistic
stresses such as losing half your savings and being forced to choose which
of two children to send to college. Think about making a list of assorted
people in your life, in decreasing order of the severity of situations that
might lead you to betray them. So a child might top the list, and a random,
but nice-seeming waiter might be at the bottom.

Now put yourself on that list, in the right position: what sort of stress
would make you break promises to yourself? You will likely find that you
won’t be putting yourself at the top of the list. Most of us will have at least
one person we would put ahead of ourselves. That’s the paradox of being
slightly evil: it is far easier to Be Slightly Evil on behalf of someone else. If
this seems like a particularly complex point, that’s because it is. Don’t
worry if you don’t get it immediately.

To summarize:

1. Adult-adult or no deal: don’t ask for, or offer, absolute loyalties

2. Contingent but sincere: don’t play loyalty games
 3. Don’t be your own #1: it is easier to Be Slightly Evil on behalf of
others

Once you’ve created a pattern of conflict that respects the three laws,
it’s time to frame rules of engagement: unilateral agreements with yourself
that limit how you act. This is the process setup stage.

Rules of Engagement
Rules of engagement are about much more than modeling the ethics of how
you enter the fray in a domain. Those are an important but relatively minor
part of the work involved.

A more important function of rules of engagement is to manage risk.

Limiting the damage when things go wrong.

But the primary purpose is directing luck towards yourself. The most
important work involved in creating rules of engagement is figuring out
how to stack the odds in your favor before you begin playing, by deploying
your existing advantages.

Few artificial competitions have this feature (an example is the

America’s Cup sailing competition, where winning teams get to define the
rules for the next competition).

In artificial games, rules of engagement are mostly about picking the

right game to play. So a poker player might survey a room and pick a table.

But real life is about creating games, which means drawing your own
boundaries, picking which rules to bend or break, and which rules to try and
enforce. By creating a pattern of conflict through
cooperation/competition/loyalty decisions, you’ve already drawn a
boundary, and drawn people into the fray whether they want to play or not.
 If you’ve been smart, you’ve chosen to draw a boundary in a way that
offers some potential for rule-making and rule-breaking, which generally
means you’ve circumscribed a region that is not entirely and
unambiguously governed by any single existing game. If you’re lucky, you
might even have a some no-rules virgin territory to work with. If not, you’ll
have a domain of overlapping games, none of which dictates all the action.

The biggest characteristic of such an environment is that it is

somewhere between complex and chaotic, so you have to be constantly
modeling and remodeling it just to maintain situation awareness, even if
you’re doing nothing more than observing.

Any set of rules of engagement that actually gets you and others moving
from a state of situation-aware immobility in the face of such “chaoplexity”
is a real-world game. Unlike formal games, real-world games can be
understood as collisions between competing sets of rules of engagement,
independently selected by the players. Sets of rules that can be arbitrarily
and unilaterally changed as play progresses.

Why focus on rules you make for yourself? What about rules agreed to
by consensus among all players? Rules inherited from society?

To focus on convention and social rules is to put the cart before the
horse. Ultimately, the only rules that actually matter in competition are the
ones individuals and organizations impose on themselves and voluntarily
follow. Other rules in the environment are not rules at all, but risks to be
modeled and managed. If you decide not to pay your taxes because the
government has lost legitimacy in your view, you have to deal with the risk
of getting caught and punished by forces more powerful than you.

The environment is a playing field where your self-imposed rules

collide with the self-imposed rules of others, creating conflict. Unlike chess
boards and football fields, the playing field for real-world games is some
arbitrarily (and fuzzily) delineated area of volatility, uncertainty, complexity
and ambiguity, with an open and leaky boundary.
VUCA Fields
VUCA is the overall environmental condition out of which games
precipitate. Wrangling luck by influencing how serendipity and zemblanity
slosh around is the same as wrangling VUCA.

While a lot of VUCA emerges in the physical environment, in

competitive settings, much of it originates in people, in the social layer of
gameplay itself. So in the context of interpersonal interactions, VUCA
means the following:

Volatility: there are no pure friends or enemies; most players you

interact with are likely to be allies today, adversaries tomorrow and
neutrals the day after.
Uncertainty: it is hard to tell potential allies and adversaries apart at a
fundamental level, because situations and optimal patterns of loyalty
are fundamentally murky..
Complexity: Ever tried to diagram the set of who-hates-whom/who-
likes-whom in the organization chart of a corporation? Intractable
beyond about a dozen.
Ambiguity: The environment is what it is. Ambiguity is a feature of
your mental model of it, characterized by ifs, buts and maybes in your
thinking about a situation.

So social-origin VUCA leads to more possibilities than actualities. More

flirting than commitments. More tentative probing than decisive action. A
social environment with a lot of ambiguity in the collective mindspace is
one where nobody wants to be the first to act because of the high risks, but
where there is a huge individual and collective cost to not acting.

Risk is a function of VUCA. The higher the VUCA, the higher the
perceived risk of any path.

The ifs, buts and maybes created by VUCA lead to indecision and
paralysis. So unlike artificial games, where a starter’s pistol marks the
beginning by convention, in real-world games, action has to be deliberately
precipitated out of VUCA by an act of sheer will.
Precipitating Action
Creating a game is about precipitating action out of VUCA, by creating a
zone of artificial clarity. Something as simple as declaring to yourself, ”I
want a million dollars” is enough to create such a zone. But not all games
are created equal. Some unleash a lot more energy than others.

A high-potential game has few rules, and unleashes a lot of collective

energy. Technology revolutions are an example. A low-potential game has
many rules and unleashes much less energy. Political wrangling in
Washington, DC is an example.

Action precipitates out of VUCA because it is an unstable state. This

instability manifests as a paradox.

On the one hand, not acting is often as risky, or riskier, than acting. This
means, any decisive action might be better than the status quo.

On the other hand, acting first creates vulnerability. When you act
decisively in a VUCA environment, you create a signal in a noisy
environment that is likely to be immediately spotted, interpreted and
intelligently responded to by competitors.

When everybody is waiting around or cautiously probing, it is hard to

mask decisive movement. Because decisive movement creates an energy
signature. Even if you pretend nothing is happening and act nonchalant, it is
hard to hide serious, focused energy flows. Walk into the cafeteria of a
major company at lunch time. You can immediately tell which project
teams are just excited to be seeing some real action and which ones are
trapped in a fog of indecision.

So playing VUCA chess means being good at opening with both white
and black pieces. You have to know how to be the decisive first-mover, and
you have to know how to be a decisive fast-follower. Both are ways of
creating the game.
The Three Phases of a Game
Once somebody has precipitated action in a VUCA environment, you have
to navigate an opening phase, where players jockey for position to define
the rules.

Next you have to learn to play the mid-game, after the system has lost
its memory of the opening phase.

And finally, you have to learn to script end-games, which, unlike in

board games, are not a function of game-play rules, but conscious time to
cash out/cut losses exit decisions.

These three phases exist in artificial games as well. But unlike artificial
games, where everybody notices when the game starts, real-world games
can begin stealthily and asymmetrically. Some players may start before
others.

They can also close stealthily: early, big winners might stealthily cash
out and move on and as part of the setup for the next game, to try to keep
potential competitors playing the last game as though it still mattered.

Let’s examine the three phases in more detail.

The Opening
VUCA is a condition of noise waiting to be turned into information.

When you choose to play white – be the first to act under VUCA – the
key is to turn noise into signal, attract cooperation and delay or misdirect
competition.
 This is what it means to bank a first-mover advantage. This last bit
means masking your actions so that any potential adversaries either ignore
you for longer than they should (i.e. you engineer a delayed reaction), or
even better, start heading in the wrong direction.

Stealth and misdirection in short.

Imagine how different chess would be if you were allowed to start the
game and make a bunch of moves before the opponent gets to the table, and
continue making more moves on your own while he temporarily plays at
the wrong board.

So you have to discover a raw signal on one end (privileged market

intelligence in a business context for example) that represents a prize worth
fighting over, and send a refined version towards your allies (otherwise
what value are you adding?) and a noisier version towards adversaries
(amplified VUCA). Think of this as the process of striking gold. You want
to let your friends know to come join you, but you want to avoid triggering
a general gold rush before you’ve had a chance to take all you want.

It is not easy to script this kind of white opening. Most people fumble
either by ignoring the competition too much, ignoring allies too much or
ignoring signal-generation too much. But when you get it right, you can
develop runaway momentum and a solid trust-bank, while sending your
competitors off a cliff. Amazon has mastered this type of opening, but
lately, they’ve been burning up trust in favor of greater competitive
maneuverability at a potentially unsustainable rate. Their future will be
interesting to watch. Jeff Bezos’ philosophy of “being willing to be
misunderstood” is highly effective for competitive maneuvering, but it
comes with a price.

What about opening with black; fast-following? Your challenge is to

first detect that moves are being made, read the opening moves of the first
mover correctly, neutralize any feinting designed to send you off towards
the wrong game, and pursue in the right direction, faster than they are
moving, because you have to catch up and overtake.
 But unlike in war or purely adversarial situations, in slightly adversarial
ones, you can be too clever for your own good, especially when playing
white. Your stealth and misdirection of potential adversaries might alienate
potential allies and destroy trust when you are “found out.”

There is also a direct cost. One of the ways you attract allies is by
giving them opportunities to imitate your successful moves. If you mask
them too much, imitation and the cooperative scaling which results from it
will fail. In some cases, making your moves completely transparent may be
the right white opening. This is the well-known modern openness strategy
practiced in the technology industry.

So opening-game maneuvering needs to protect allies (shielding), or

anticipate and accommodate allied losses on each maneuver (controlled
losses).

Far too many people who get interested in Slightly Evil philosophies
imagine that they’re playing in a truly vicious Game of Thrones world of
near-constant backstabbing and unstable loyalties. There is perverse
satisfaction to be found in such dark romantic fantasies, but they are no
more realistic than the win-win-or-no-deal approach of unqualified
cooperationists. Outside of perhaps parts of the finance industry, a Game of
Thrones mental model is simply not accurate, and operating like it is can
backfire badly.

The Mid-Game
In the mid-game, the fog of indecision gets replaced by the fog of war.
Instead of I don’t know what to do, you get I don’t know what the hell is
going on.

The key to the mid-game is to treat it as a fractal regime of sub-games

and sub-sub-games. What prevents such dynamic mid-games from turning
into stalemates is that the non-human part of the environment tends to keep
changing, constantly undermining the assumptions underlying previous
successes, and creating potential openings for changes in the leaderboard.

The key to the mid-game is exploiting the complacency of power. Once

all players declared their nominal claims to various bits of territory, and
have secured actual control over some subset of it, all players have
something to lose. Which means there is a defensive agenda to preserve
what has been secured, in addition to an offensive agenda to secure more.

Agendas of defense generally receive much less attention and resources

than agendas of offense. This is necessary. Winning would be worthless if
holding on to winnings took as much ongoing effort as gaining them. The
lowered level of effort manifests as habits.

A habit is an efficient pattern of action dissociated from the logic that

created it, and built around a fundamental desire or aversion.

The efficiency arises from automation and the suspension of active

thought. The ongoing motivation comes from the presence of a core desire
or aversion. Habits and automation are at the heart of the vulnerability that
makes inside-the-tempo attacks possible. So it deserves a second special
sidebar.

Habits as Vulnerability
Automation is about steady and predictable rhythms, emotions and energy
patterns. A fixed tempo. At the heart of such a stable tempo is a stable
decision-cycle.

To use OODA terminology, a habit is an OODA cycle where the second

O, orient has been unplugged, leaving behind a non-adaptive O-DA cycle.
Note that unconscious habits of adaptation simply represent more complex
habits, not habits monitored by a conscious process of ongoing orientation
and creative adaptation.
 As a challenger who has temporarily acknowledged defeat on some
front, what you need to do is create an opening to restart the competition.
That means watching the environment more closely than the complacent
adversary, spotting environmental changes earlier, figuring out what
assumptions they undermine, and starting a subgame to take advantage.

Sometimes, all you need is the complacency of steady profitability. At

other times, the incumbent adversary remains on high alert, sacrificing
some profitability in order to remain responsive to threats. In these cases,
creating an opening means creating distractions on one front so you can
open up another in peace.

An alert adversary in a mid-game is a bundle of learned habits, both

simple and complex, primed to respond faster and more instinctively to
some threats than others. These are their strengths. They are also their
push-button vulnerabilities.

So if you can create a false signal that suggests a watched assumption is

being undermined, you can exploit the absorption of limited attention on
one front to open up another. You want a special kind of distraction to
create instinctive fumbling driven by zemblanity rather than decisive
responses: fear-uncertainty-doubt. FUD.

FUD is artificial VUCA created to drive up zemblanity for an adversary.

When you have a game in progress and an active adversary who has a
strong position in the current game, creating VUCA on one front where
they feel strong, in order to drain attention without triggering action, is what
allows you to break a stalemate.

There is an interesting psychological effect here known as inattentional

blindness – the effect that allows somebody in a gorilla suit to run
unnoticed across a basketball court with a game in progress. Because there
is confusing but relatively legible action going on in one corner, you miss
incomprehensible action elsewhere. Your attention locks onto things that it
can process more easily into active situation awareness.

But these tactics only have predictable consequences if they target

ingrained strong habits in an adversary. An adversary directing attention
and energy via habits is an adversary who is thinking (O-DA) but not
thinking about thinking (O-rienting) in open-ended and creative ways.

The extent to which an adversary has energy left to devote to thinking-

about-thinking is the extent to which he/she still has an active orientation
component to their decision-making. Opening up one front may not enough
to exhaust orientation potential. You may need to open up front after front
in order to move all attention from withheld potential to active executive
attention.

Once you manage to create an opening and gain a foothold, you’ve

created a sub-game the adversary cannot shut down immediately. Sub-
games are similar to top-level games, but are more constrained by existing
rules of engagement, and involve smaller wins. This is because there is
already a game in progress around the sub-game.

As the action develops, energy increasingly shifts to kinetic form, and

each new sub-game wrinkle that develops has less potential energy –
orientation potential – to draw on. VUCA turns into what is known as
dynamic VUCA, or VUCA(D). We really ought to call it kinetic VUCA to
emphasize the potential energy/kinetic energy analogy.

When all available potential energy has been drawn into action, and it
becomes impossible to start new sub-games without stopping old-
subgames, a cascade of ceded games and exchange sacrifices commences,
setting up the end-game.

End Games

When everybody has all their energy fully committed to a set of

ongoing games at multiple interconnected levels, you’re beyond both the
fog of indecision and the fog of war. You’re entering the fog of exhaustion.
Often, players who have already banked big wins secure and liquidate their
assets and exit the field of play entirely if they can.

Much of the intelligence has been squeezed out of the system through
the creation of layers and layers of gameplay, whose rules have captured all
available intelligence and capacity for continuous reorientation.
 In military thinking, this phase is often referred to as a melee, where
there’s only energy left for instinctive action. You’ve learned all you’re
going to learn. You’ve used up all the tricks you have. What’s left is energy
and muscle memory. What follows is relatively dumb action, a last-player-
standing situation, where unforced errors, attention exhaustion and resource
exhaustion drive the action.

When resources are exhausted, players simply drop out. When resources
remain, but attention is fully absorbed on multiple active fronts, fatal
vulnerabilities open up for others to exploit, even without FUD-creation.
These are unforced errors. So ceding some contests in order to create a
reserve of attention, before a fatal number of unforced errors accumulate, is
a necessary strategy.

In many ways, Microsoft’s loss of market leadership to Apple in the

consumer market was a case of end-game exhaustion rather than clever
maneuvering by Apple. Microsoft had so much going on, on so many
fronts, especially in enterprise markets, that even without artificially created
FUD, it did not have the attention or energy left to respond meaningfully to
Apple’s moves. Now as the games created by Apple – smartphones and
tablets – enter a late mid-game phase, we are seeing Apple being drawn into
similar unforced errors.

Of course, you can drive competitors to this state by forcing

accumulating losses on them, primarily by opening up an exhausting
number of fronts for them to respond to. This is because creating games is
cheaper for those with less to lose. But as endgames get underway,
zemblanity also has a natural tendency to take over the action, without
artificial help.

So endgames are naturally messy.

They may not be very dynamic, but when an active war is shutting
down, there is still a lot of cleaning up to do. It may sound grim, but that’s
what it looks like. There are broken things everywhere, wounds and
corpses, general messiness. Things collapsing due to zemblanity forces that
have been set in motion but are too large to control.
 The VUCA is changing flavor once again: from VUCA(D) to
VUCA(E), E for entropy.

Why “Inside the Tempo”?

So what does the phrase “inside the tempo” actually mean? I’ve described it
as a process of a group of adversarial players collectively trying to
outmaneuver each other by creating games and games-within-games, and
continuously maneuvering until players start to exit or die.

It’s the memetic equivalent of a genetic arms race in biology.

I’ve also described it, in parallel, as VUCA turning into VUCA(D) and
into VUCA(E). Potential energy (capacity for open-ended creative
reorientation) turning into kinetic energy (layers of habits that account for
most of the energy flow) and eventually into a state of entropic collapse.

And finally, I’ve also described it as a process of declining intelligence.

From an opening phase of great cleverness, daring and imagination, where
heroes are born, to a mid-game phase with increasing amounts of energy
trapped in habits, to an end-game that’s mostly dumb energy, with very little
intelligence and often no residual value: sound and fury signifying nothing.

But the nice thing about living in a nice little neighborhood of the
universe, with the sun shining down on us, delivering a continuous stream
of low-entropy energy, is that this game can create wealth. Wealth that can
create a period of prosperity and peace before we have to do it all over
again.

The phrase “inside the tempo” is appropriate because on the whole,

partially adversarial situations drive up intelligence through open,
Darwinian competition among competitors continuously getting inside each
other’s heads by exploiting habits of thought. Mental models grow and
strengthen all around, turning the latent truths of VUCA into the codified
rules of a hierarchical complex of game play: a landscape of institutions.
 Landscapes of institutions extract wealth from the environment for a
period of time before collapsing under their own weight, contributing to the
primordial chaos from which new games can begin: the process of creative
destruction.

Without adversarial competition, we’d collectively spiral down into

stupidity as a species. By racing against each other, we manage to
collectively outrun the forces of entropy for a while.

This is why, despite being a vegetarian who abhors unnecessary cruelty

and pain, especially towards those who cannot protect themselves, I
fundamentally don’t like the mind-atrophying idea of a permanent peace
under conditions of permanent, unqualified abundance. Competition is
ultimately the essence of life itself. To be slightly evil is to embrace life.
Acknowledgements
A big thank-you to several people who helped put this ebook together. Jane
Huang sequenced and converted the original html email newsletters to
LaTeX, PDF and ePub formats and also helped copyedit the material.
Patrick Vlaskovits and Bill Seitz proofread the final manuscript and helped
elevate it above blog/newsletter level copy quality.

Over the last three years, conversations with a few people have been
especially helpful in developing this material. Hosh Hsiao, Daniel Pritchett
and Patrick Vlaskovits in particular, shared many insightful ideas on the
nature of conflict and competition. The excellent community that has grown
around the annual Boyd and Beyond conference at Quantico has also
proved to be a rich source of insights and ideas for me. Chet Richards’
Certain to Win in particular, proved very helpful in shaping my own
thinking.

And lastly, a big thank you to the 2200-plus loyal readers of the Be
Slightly Evil email newsletter, who made the journey very worthwhile.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop
†http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/01/06/the-gollum-effect/
 ‡http://online.wsj.com/article/

SB10001424052748704407804575425561952689390.html
 §http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2008/05/11/what-got-you-here-wont-get-you-there-by-marshall-

goldsmith
¶http://hbr.org/2010/07/column-powerlessness-corrupts/ar/1
∥http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/09/17/your-evil-twins-and-how-to-find-them/
 **http://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/index.php/Kellogg/

article/sizing_up_the_nightlife
††http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
 ‡‡http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-or-the-office-according-to-the-

office/
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
*The complete book and DVD collections for both series can be purchased on Amazon.
 *http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_

effect