Be Slightly Evil

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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.

Slightly Evil
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.

Boyd challenged each of his acolytes to make: in life you eventually have to decide whether to be somebody, or do something.

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.

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.”

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.

Realism is a way of viewing the world, pragmatism is the related way of acting within it.

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 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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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?”

The Idealist-Tragedian Paradox

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.

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).

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.

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.”

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.

Preparing to Play

Status 101

Felt status, played status and perceived status have almost nothing to do with each other at a fundamental level.

There are four status patterns: 
feeling low, playing low (LL) - Not accepting any status 
feeling low, playing high (LH) - Trying to "prove" status  
feeling high, playing low (HL) -  Being gracious/polite
feeling high, playing high (HH) - Act likes a King/Ruler

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.

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.

Observation

one of the easiest ways to figure someone out is to look at the information they choose to consume.

Derailing the Data Driven
The Cluelessly Data Driven fail in 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
Failing to understand sampling: CDDDs understand the technical ideas in sampling

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.

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Be Slightly Evil

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