-Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

Let me begin this post with a quick preface:

I know and understand that nobody is perfect. I seek perfection and demand perfection from no one because a) perfection doesn’t exists and b) I am not perfect myself—so how can I or anyone expect others to conform to an ideal that they themselves cannot meet because it is unattainable? That’s just nuts!!!!!  Anyway, now on to the juicy part…

I had a huge fight with the roomie recently…. I don’t expect him to be perfect, but I do expect a little bit of common sense and courtesy. “What— you say I’m disrespectful, I’m treating you like a child????  Well, then get your act together and I won’t bother you.  NO, I’m not your mom, and NO, I don’t want to look after you and tell you what to do because I’m NOT your mom and you’re NOT a child, dammit!!!!!!”

Since demanding/seeking perfection is as useless as a bikini in Antarctica, throughout my life I have tried my best to be a good friend, sister, daughter, co-worker, roommate, etc. by doing the most sensible thing: following the Golden Rule, but as I have learned so far from my two most recent experiences living with roommates, even that has proven to be too much for some people.

Yep, contrary to popular belief, even that simple, time-tested notion of treating others with the same respect you would like to be shown does NOT ensure you will get it!!!  Nope.  Treating people with the respect you want for yourself doesn’t work because people define the word “respect” differently.  It may seem obvious, particularly for those of us who are receptive, but as Voltaire once wrote, “common sense is rare”.  If common sense was really that common and obvious, would people perpetually engage in behavior that upsets us and brings us to the point of considering criminal activity against them? Are we– the “normal” ones surrounded by a bunch of sociopaths or are we doing something terribly wrong and not being treated with respect because we don’t command any?

The problem, as I have come to see it, does NOT stem from what others are “doing” to us, but rather from how WE approach the situation and what WE are actively doing to address it.  We are accountable only for our OWN actions, we have no control over what others do, how they think, or how they treat us.  Because nobody is perfect and because everybody has a different definition of respect, we cannot rely on others to treat us “the way we want to be treated” even if we treat them well, I’m convinced it’s simply too much to ask of mankind…. But instead of sulking and waiting around for the other party (or parties) to change their wayward ways, we have to be PROACTIVE and to do whatever is in our hands to correct the situation before it escalates and reaches a critical point, WE must be accountable for  our OWN actions, and that includes actively doing whatever is in our means to command the respect we are due when others either knowingly or unknowingly fail to provide it.  In the case of roommates, my advice is setting boundaries– preferably right away*.

In order to set boundaries, I have decided that ANYONE spending more than ONE DAY living with me needs to observe the following House Rules! to a “T”. For a very brief but precise chat on defining “limits” see the asterix below.

HOUSE RULES!

1. Pick up/clean up AFTER YOURSELF promptly– preferably within the next 24 hours. (Remember: there are no maids or magical house elves here).

2. Procure whatever you need for yourself YOURSELF.  Ask before just taking & be sure to promptly replace or return whatever you take.  (Communal items such as dish soap, toilet paper, etc. will be purchased by roommates in an alternating basis). 

3.  Absolutely positively NO DRUGS (including pot) or ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES!!!! (Discuss exceptions with roommate beforehand).

4. Absolutely positively NO UNAUTHORIZED OVERNIGHT GUESTS!!!! (Discuss exceptions with roommate beforehand).

5.  Communal areas including kitchen, living room and bathroom will be cleaned on a __________ alternating basis or as needed, see rule #1.

6. Try to exercise common sense and courtesy.  Be prepared to follow rules #1-5. 

7. Try to exercise common sense and courtesy.  Be prepared to follow rules #1-5, please. 

8. Try to exercise common sense and courtesy.  Be prepared to follow rules #1-5, pretty please.

9. Try to exercise common sense and courtesy.  Be prepared to follow rules #1-5 or else be prepared to be unceremoniously kicked out.

10. Rent is promptly due by __________ . Bills are due on _____________.  (see rules 6-9)

These are my rules, feel free to use them as above or alter them as you see fit. Good luck to anyone experiencing issues with a hostile roommate, just know that any interpersonal relationship is a two-way street.  There are no “victims”, stand up for yourself and command the respect your are due. Good luck!

A short after thought on “limits”:

*What I mean by “limit” is how many instances of unapproved behavior you are willing to tolerate before verbally addressing your roommate regarding this behavior.  My personal “limit” is set by the quote at the beginning of this entry, everyone has a different limit and should decide what that limit is based on experience. The reason I have chosen my limit to be of 2 is because in the past I have been too lenient, which has sent roommates the impression that their behavior doesn’t bother me or is even encouraged! Some people have suggested saying something as soon as you “experience” the first symptoms of annoyance, to me that seems like you’re jumping the gun, especially because nobody is perfect and we should give people the benefit of the doubt before we start treating them like children and telling them what to do. But as the quote says, if it happens more than once, then count on it happening all the time….

He shrugged, a young boy of 16 years, handsome tall and strong stood before her. He had his eyes, she couldn’t look at them anymore.

“You look like him…,” she mumbled absentmindedly as she began pacing the floor of her loft. Her steps were light, stealthy and calculated.

“I just wanted to meet you I guess,” he finally said.

She paused to look at him “You are all over the news!” She spit at him

“They named me Gavin,” he chewed on his bottom lip “I don’t like the name,” he contemplated for a minute ….

A crease appeared between her eyebrows, that’s a stupid name

“What did you name me ?” He whispered

“I named you Arlo,” she said stopping and staring him in the eye. She looked away slowly.

“Arlo,” he repeated lightly

“Your work is messy,” she chewed on her bottom lip,she began to pace again…

“Was it after my father?”

She stopped abruptly “What?! No, he’s dead…” Her brow furrowed “What do you want?! She snapped.

“I wanted to meet you…I told you that,” His shoulders became tense “How’d my dad die?”

She took a deep breath walked over to the counter and poured a glass of wine. She pushed the loose strands of hair out of her face “People haven’t heard from him in 17 years, most assume he’s dead,”

“So he might still be alive then?”

She took a sip of her wine and eyed him carefully “No,” she said plainly after a beat.

“You don’t know that,” he said defensively

She nodded and smiled lightly “I do,” she blinked.

“How?” he narrowed his eyes

She sighed in frustration “You’re so young…and sloppy, I’ve seen the news,” she sipped her wine eyeing him “I’m not that sloppy… That’s how,”

“You’re like me.” He stated, and it all made sense.

She chuckled and took another sip of wine “No baby boy …you’re like me,”

She shrugged “I’m pregnant”

The doctor looked up at her from her notepad nodded slightly and continued writing on her pad. ”Why would that warrant an unscheduled visit to my office?”

“C’mon doc, you know why,”

“No,I don’t,” she stopped writing and looked up “which is why I’ve asked,” she slung her head to one side then peered expectantly at her.

“Do people like me …have children?” She asked earnestly, eyes wide.

“Great question…” the doctor began

“Can I love it?” She interrupted

The doctor seemed pleased, she pondered her response carefully ”The fact that you’re apprehensive about this baby, and concerned for its well being is sign enough to me that we’ve made considerable progress,”

She was proud of herself

“Hmmm ok,” Nina seemed skeptical

“You don’t think so?” The doctor pressed

“Not really,” she twisted her mouth and peered at the ground in deep thought; her brows furrowed.

“And why is that? I think you’re doing well,” the doctor retorted with confidence.

“I killed its father,”

I do too.

But that’s not my worst problem. My worst problem is a struggle with a sense that none of us are worth anything. We are all equally wretched and useless. The world is a terrible place and I don’t want to be here. Thanks, anyway. Thanks, but no thanks. I’ll just be on my on my way…

That’s what happens when you are raised by a psychopathic whose main aim in life is to prove that the rest of humanity is as depraved as he is, that we all lack courage, we are all manipulative liars and self-absorbed takers. Whatever we say about ourselves, we can be used. We will use others for the right incentive. None of us are what we say we are, and none of us are any better than he is.

It’s a mindset I’d like to take off my head and smash into a million pieces.

So to all of those of you who give up your seats when you see an elderly person board the bus or enter the room, for all of you who hug your kids when they cry, for all of you who tell your employees well done when have indeed done well, for all of you who fight wars without intentionally killing civilians, for peace officers who arrest offenders without beating them, for all of you who rescue homeless dogs and cats and children, and for those who try to help in any way: Thanks. You make the world a place worth living in.

Without you, I couldn’t do it.

This will be long and repeat a lot of previous material. There are two reasons for that. First, I intend this essay to be a summarization of some highlights from where we’ve been. Second, I want it to stand alone as a “survey course” of the previous 20 essays, so that people can understand the highlights (and, thus, understand what I propose in the conclusion) even if they haven’t read all the prior material.

If I were to restart this series of posts (for which I did not intend it, originally, to reach 22 essays and 92+ kilowords) I would rename it Why Does Work Suck? In fact, if I turn this stuff into a book, that’s probably what I’ll name it. I never allowed myself to answer, “because it’s work, duh.” We’re biologically programmed to enjoy working. In fact, most of the things people do in their free time (growing produce, unpaid writing, open-source programming) involve more actual work than their paid jobs. Work is a human need.

How Does Work Suck?

There are a few problems with Work that make it almost unbearable, driving it into such a negative state that people only do it for the lack of other options.

• Work Sucks because it is inefficient. This is what makes investors and bosses angry. Getting returns on capital either requires managing it, which is time-consuming, or hiring a manager, which means one has to put a lot of trust in this person. Work is also inefficient for average employees (MacLeod Losers) which is why wages age so low.
• Work Sucks because bad people end up in charge. Whether most of them are legitimately morally bad is open to debate, but they’re certainly a ruthless and improperly balanced set of people (MacLeod Sociopath) who can be trusted to enforce corporate statism. Over time, this produces a leadership caste that is great at maintaining power internally but incapable of driving the company to external success.
• Work Sucks because of a lack of trust. That’s true on all sides. People are spending 8+ hours per day on high-stakes social gambling while surrounded by people they distrust, and who distrust them back.
• Work Sucks because so much of what’s to be done in unrewarding and pointless. People are glad to do work that’s interesting to them or advances their knowledge, or work that’s essential to the business because of career benefits, but there’s a lot of Fourth Quadrant work for which neither applies. This nonsensical junk work is generated by strategically blind (MacLeod Clueless) middle managers and executed by rationally disengaged peons (MacLeod Losers) who find it easier to subordinate than to question the obviously bad planning and direction.

All of these, in truth, are the same problem. The lack of trust creates the inefficiencies that require moral flexibility (convex deception) for a person to overcome. In a trust-sparse environment, the people who gain people are the least deserving of trust: the most successful liars. It’s also the lack of trust that generates the unrewarding work. Employees are subjected, in most companies, to a years-long dues-paying period which is mostly evaluative– to see how each handles unpleasant make-work and pick out the “team players”. The “job” exists to give the employer an out-of-the-money call option on legitimately important work, should it need some done. It’s a devastatingly bad system, so why does it hold up? Because, for two hundred years, it actually worked quite well. Explaining that requires delving into mathematics, so here we go.

Love the Logistic

The most important concept here is the S-shaped logistic function, which looks like this (courtesy of Wolfram Alpha):

The general form of such a function L(x; A, B, C) is:

where A represents the upper asymptote (“maximum potential”), B represents the rapidity of the change, and C is a horizontal offset (“difficulty”) representing the x-coordinate of the inflection point. The graph above is for L(x; 1, 1, 0).

Logistic functions are how economists generally model input-output relationships, such as the relationship between wages and productivity. They’re surprisingly useful because they can capture a wide variety of mathematical phenomena, such as:

• Linear relationships; as B -> 0, the relationship becomes locally linear around the inflection point, (C, A/2).
  
• Discrete 0/1 relationships: as B -> infinity, the function approaches a “step function” whose value is A for x > C and 0 for x < C.
• Exponential (accelerating) growth: If B > 0, L(x; A, B, C) is very close to being exponential at the far left (x << C). (Convexity.)
• Saturation: If B > 0, L(x; A, B, C) is approaching A with exponential decay at the far right (x >> C). (Concavity.)

Let’s keep inputs abstract but assume that we’re interested in some combination of skill, talent, effort, morale and knowledge called x with mean 0 and “typical values” between -1.0 and 1.0, meaning that we’re not especially interested in x = 10 because we don’t know how to get there. If C is large (e.g. C = 6) then we have an exponential function for all the values we care about: convexity over the entire window. Likewise, leftward C values (e.g. C = -6) give us concavity over the whole window.

Industrial work, over the past 200 years, has tended toward commoditization, meaning that (a) a yes/no quality standard exists, increasing B, and (b) it’s relatively easy for most properly set-up producers to meet it most of the time (with occasional error). The result is a curve that looks like this one, L(x; 10, 4.5, -0.7), which I’ll call a(x):

Variation, here, is mainly in incompetence. Another way to look at it is in terms of error rate. The excellent workers make almost no errors, the average ones achieve 95.8% of what is possible (or a 4.2% error rate) with the mediocre (x = -0.5) making almost 5 times as many mistakes (28.9% error rate), and the abysmal unemployable with an error rate well over 50%. This is what employment has looked like for the past two hundred years. Why? Because an industrial process is better modeled as a complex network of these functions, with outputs from one being inputs to another. The relationship of individual wage into morale, morale into performance, performance into productivity, and individual productivity into firm productivity, and firm productivity into profitability, can all be modeled as S-shaped curves. With this convoluted network of “hidden nodes” that exists in a context of a sophisticated industrial operation, it’s generally held to be better to have a consistently high-performing (B high, C negative) node than higher-performing but variable node.

One way to understand the B in the above equation is that it represents how reliably the same result is achieved, noting the convergence to a step function as B goes to infinity. In this light, we can understand mechanization. Middle grades of work rarely exist with machines. In the ideal, they either execute perfectly, or fail perfectly (and visibly, so one can repair them). Further refinements to this process are seen in the changeover from purely mechanical systems to electronic ones. It’s not always this way, even with software. There are nondeterministic computer behaviors that can produce intermittent bugs, but they’re rare and far from the ideal.

As I’ve discussed, if we can define perfect performance (i.e. we know what A, the error-free yield, looks like) then we can program a machine to achieve it. Concave work is being handed over to machines, with the convex tasks remaining available. With convexity, it’s rare that one knows what A and B are. On explored values, the graph just looks like this one, for L(x; 200, 2.0, 1.5), which I’ll call b(x):

It shows no signs of leveling off and, for all intents and purposes, it’s exponential. This is usually observed for creative work where a few major players (the “stars”) get outsized rewards in comparison to the average people.

Convexity Isn’t Fair

Let’s say that you have two employees, one of whom (Alice) is slightly above average (x = 0.1) and the other of whom (Bob) is just average (x = 0.0). You have the resources to provide 1.0 full point of training, and you can split it anyway you choose (e.g. 0.35 points for Alice, and 0.65 points for Bob). Now, let’s say that you’re managing concave work modeled by the function L(x; 100, 2.0, -0.3), which is concave.

Let the x-axis represent the amount of training (0.0 to 1.0) given to Alice, with the remainder given to Bob. Here’s a graph of their individual productivity levels, with Alice in blue, Bob in purple, and their sum productivity in the green curve

If we zoom in to look at the sum curve, we see a maximum at x = 0.45, an interior solution where both get some training.

At x = 0.0 (full investment in Bob) Alice is producing 69.0 points and Bob’s producing 93.1, for a total of 162.1.

At x = 0.5 (even split of training) Alice in producing 85.8 points and Bob’s producing 83.2, for a total of 169.0.

At x = 1.0 (full investment in Alice) Alice is producing 94.3 points and Bob’s producing 64.6, for a total of 158.9.

The maximal point is x = 0.45, which means that Alice gets slightly less training because Bob is further behind and needs it more. Both end up producing 84.55 points, for a total of 169.1. After the training is disbursed, they’re at the same level of competence (0.55). This is a “share the wealth“ interior optimum that justifies sharing the training.

Let’s change to a convex world, with the function L(x; 320, 2.0, 1.1). Then, for the same problem, we get this graph (blue representing Alice’s productivity, purple representing Bob’s, and the green curve representing the sum):

Zooming in on the graph sum productivity, we find that the “fair” solution (x = 0.45) is the worst!

At x = 0.0 (full investment in Bob) Alice is producing 38.1 points and Bob’s producing 144.1, for a total of 182.2.

At x = 0.5 (even split of training) Alice in producing 86.1 points and Bob’s producing 74.1, for a total of 160.2.

At x = 1.0 (full investment in Alice) Alice is producing 160.0 points and Bob’s producing 31.9, for a total of 191.9.

The maxima are at the edges. The best strategy is to give Alice all of the training, but giving all to Bob is better than splitting it evenly, which is about the worst of the options. This is a “starve the poor” optimum. It favors picking a winner and putting all the investment into one party. This is how celebrity economies work. Slight differences in ability lead to massive differences in investment and, ultimately, create a permanent class of winners. Here, choosing a winner is often more important than getting “the right one” with the most potential.

Convexity pertains to decisions that don’t admit interior maxima, or for which such solutions don’t exist or make sense. For example, choosing a business model for a new company is convex, because putting resources into multiple models would result in mediocre performance in all of them, thus failure. The rarity of “co-CEOs” seems to indicate that choosing a leader is also a convex matter.

Convexity is hard to manage

In optimization, convex problems tend to be the easier ones, so the nomenclature here might be strange. In fact, this variety of convexity is the exact opposite of convexity in labor. Optimization problems are usually framed in terms of minimization of some undesirable quantity like cost, financial risk, statistical error, or defect rate. Zero is the (usually unattainable) perfect state. In business, that would correspond to the assumption that an industrial apparatus has an idealized business model and process, with the management’s goal to drive execution error to zero.

What makes convex minimization methods easier is that, even in a high-dimensional landscape, one can converge to the optimal point (global minimum) by starting from anywhere and iteratively stepping in the direction recommended by local features (usually, first and second derivative). It’s like finding the bottom point in a bowl. Non-convex optimizations are a lot harder because (a) there can be multiple local optima, which means that starting points matter, and (b) the local optima might be at the edges, which has its own undesirable properties (including, with people, unfairness). The amount of work required to find the best solutions is exponential in the number of dimensions. That’s why, for example, computers can’t algorithmically find the best business model for a “startup generator”. Even if it were a well-formed problem, the dimensionality would be high and the search problem intractable (probably).

Convex labor is analogous to non-convex optimization problems while management of concave labor is analogous to convex optimization. Sorry if this is confusing. There’s an important semantic difference to highlight here, though. With concave labor, there is some definition of perfect completion so that error (departure from that) can be defined and minimized with a known lower bound: 0. With convex labor, no one knows what the maximum value is, because the territory is unexplored and the “leveling off” of the logistic curve hasn’t been found yet. It’s natural, then, to frame that as a maximization problem without a known bound. With convex labor, you don’t know what the “zero-or-max” point is because no one knows how well one can perform.

Concave labor is the easy, nice case from a managerial perspective. While management doesn’t literally implement gradient descent, it tends to be able to self-correct when individual labor is concave (i.e. the optimization problem is convex). If Alice starts to pull ahead while Bob struggles, management will offer more training to Bob.

However, in the convex world, initial conditions matter. Consider the Alice-Bob problem above with the convex productivity curve, and the fact that splitting the training equitably is the worst possible solution. Management would ideally recognize Alice’s slight superiority and give her all the training, thus finding the optimal “edge case”. But what if Bob managed (convex dishonesty) to convince management that he was slightly superior to Alice and at, say, x = 0.2? Then Bob would get all the training, and Alice would get none, and management would converge on a sub-optimal local maximum. That is the essence of corporate backstabbing, is it not? Management’s increasing awareness of convexity in intellectual work means that it will tend to double down its investment in winners and toss away (fire) the losers. Thus, subordinates put considerable effort into creating the appearance of high potential for the sake of driving management to a local maximum that, if not necessarily ideal for the company, benefits them. That’s what “multiple local optima” means, in practical terms.

The traditional three-tiered corporation has a firm distinction between executives and managers (the third tier being “workers”, who are treated as a landscape feature) and its pertains to this. Because business problems are never entirely concave and orderly, the local “hill climbing” is left to managers, while the convex problems (which, like choosing initial conditions, require non-local insight) such as selecting leaders and business models are left to executives.

Yet with everything concave being performed, or soon to be performed, by machines, we’re seeing convexity pop up everywhere. The question of which programming languages to learn is a convex decision that non-managerial software engineers have to make in their careers. Picking a specialty is likewise; convexity is why it’s of value to specialize. The most talented people today are becoming self-executive, which means that they take responsibility for non-local matters that would otherwise be left to executives, including the direction of their own career. This, however, leads to conflicts with authority.

Older managers often complain about Millennial self-executivity and call it an attitude of entitlement. Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s disentitlement. When you’re entitled, you assume social contracts with other people and become angry when (from your perception) they don’t hold up their end. Millennials leave jobs, and furtively use slow periods to invest in their careers (e.g. in MOOCs) rather than asking for more work. That’s not an act of aggression or disillusion; it’s because they don’t believe the social contract ever existed. It’s not that they’re going to whine about a boss who doesn’t invest in their career– that would be entitlement– because that would do no good. They just leave. They weren’t owed anything, and they don’t owe anything. That’s disentitlement.

Convexity is bad for your job security

Here’s some scary news. When it comes to convex labor, most people shouldn’t be employed. First, let me show a concave input-output graph for worker productivity, assuming even distribution in worker ability from -1.0 to 1.0. Our model also assumes this ability statistic to be inflexible; there’s no training effect.

The blue line, at 82.44, represents the mean worker in the population. Why’s this important? It represents the expected productivity of a new hire off the street. If you’re at the median (x = 0.0) or even a bit below it, you are “above average”. It’s better to retain you than to bring someone in off the street. Let’s say that John is 40th percentile (x = -0.2) hire, which means that his productivity is 90. A random person hired off the street will be better than John, 60% of the time. However, the upside is limited (10 points at most) and the downside (possibly 70 points) is immense so, on average, it’s a terrible trade. It’s better to keep John (a known mediocre worker) on board than to replace him.

With a convex example, we find the opposite to be true:

Here, we have an arrangement in which most people are below the mean, so we’d expect high turnover. Management, one expects, would be inclined to hire people on a “try out” basis with the intention of throwing most of them back on the street. An average or even good (x = 0.5) hire should be thrown out in order to “roll the dice” with a new hire who might be the next star. Is that how managers actually behave? No, because there are frictional and morale reasons not to fire 80% of your people, and because this model’s assumption that people are inflexibly set at a competence level is not entirely true for most jobs, and those where it is true (e.g. fashion modeling) make it easy for management to evaluate someone before a hire is made. In-house experience matters. That is, however, how venture capital, publishing and record labels work. Once you turn out a couple failures, with those being the norm, it might still be that you’re a high performer who’s been unlucky, but you’re judged inferior to a random new entrant (with more upside potential) and flushed out of the system.

In the real world, it’s not so severe. We don’t see 80% of people being fired, and the reason is that, for most jobs, learning matters. The above applies to work at which there’s no learning process, but each worker is inflexibly put at a certain perfectly measurable productivity level. That’s not how the world really works. In-born talent is one relevant input, but there are others like skill, in-house experience, and education that have defensive properties and keep a person’s job security. People can often get themselves above the mean with hard work.

Secondly, the model above assumes workers are paid equally, which is not the case for most convex work. In the convex model above, the star (x = 1.0) might command several times the salary of the average performer (x = 0.0) and he should. That compensation inequality actually creates job security for the rest of them. If the best people didn’t charge more for their work, then employers would be inclined to fire middling performers in the search of a bargain.

This may be one of the reasons why there is such high turnover in the software industry. You can’t a get seasoned options trader for under $250,000 per year, but you can get excellent programmers (who are worth 5-10 times that amount, if given the right kind of work) for less than half of that. This is often individually justified (by the engineer) with an attitude of, “well, I don’t need to be paid millions; I care more about interesting work”. As an individual behavior, that’s fine, but it might be why so many software employers are so quick to toss engineers aside for dubious reasons. Once the manager concludes that the individual doesn’t have “star” potential, it’s worth it to throw out even a good engineer and try again for a shot at a bargain, considering the number of great engineers at mediocre salary levels.

One thing I’ve noticed in software (which is highly convex) is that there’s a cavalier attitude toward firing, and it’s almost certainly related to that “star economy” effect. What’s different is that software convexity has a lot inputs other that personal ability– project/person fit, tool familiarity, team cohesion, and a lot factors that are so hard to detect that they feel like pure luck– in the mix, so the “toss aside all but the best” strategy is severely defective, at least for a larger organization that should be enabling people to find better fitting projects, which makes a lot of sense amid convexity. That’s one of the reasons why I am so dogmatic about open allocation, at least in big companies.

Convexity is risky

Job insecurity amid convexity is an obvious problem, but not damning. If there’s a fixed demand for widgets, a competitor who can produce 10 times more of them is terrifying, because it will crash prices and put everyone else out of business (and, then, become a monopolist and raise them). Call that “red ocean convexity”, where the winners put the losers out of business because a “10X” performer takes 9X from someone else. However, if demand is limitless, then the presence of superior players isn’t always a bad thing. A movie star making $3 million isn’t ruined by one making $40 million. The arts are an example of “blue ocean convexity”, insofar as successful artists don’t make the others poorer, but increase the aggregate demand of art. It’s not “winner-take-all” insofar as one doesn’t have to be the top player to add something people value.

Computational problem solving (not “programming”) is a field where there’s very high demand, so the fact that top performers will produce an order of magnitude more value (the “10X effect”) doesn’t put the rest out of business. That’s a very good thing, because most of those top performers were among “the rest” when they started their career. Not only is there little direct competition, but as software engineers, we tend to admire those “10X” people and take every opportunity we can get to learn from them. If there were more of them, it wouldn’t make us poorer. It would make the world richer.

Is demand for anything limitless, though? For industrial products, no. Demand for televisions, for example, is limited by peoples’ need for them and space to put them. For making peoples’ lives better, yes. For improving processes, sure. Generation of true wealth (as Paul Graham defines it: “stuff people want”) is something for which there’s infinite demand, at least as far as we can see. So what’s the limiting factor? Why can’t everyone work on blue-ocean convex work that makes peoples’ lives better? It comes down to risk. So, let’s look at that. The model I’m going to use is as follows:

• We only care about the immediate neighborhood of a specific (“typical”) competence level. We’ll call it x = 0.
• Tasks have a difficulty t between -1.0 and 2.0, which represents the C in the logistic form. B is going to be a constant 4.5; just ignore that. 
• The harder a task is, the higher the potential payoff. Thus, I’ll set A = 100 * (1 + e^(5*t)). This means that work gets more valuable slightly faster (11% faster) than it gets harder (“risk premium”). The constant term in A is based on the understanding that even very easy (difficulty of -1.0) work has value insofar as it’s time-consuming and therefore people must be paid to do it.
• We measure risk for a given difficulty t by taking the first derivative of L(x; …), with respect to x, at x = 0. Why? L’(x; …) tells us how sensitive the output (payoff) is to marginal changes in input. We’re modeling unknown input variables and plain luck factors as a random, zero-mean “noise” variable d and assuming that for known competence x the true performance will be L(x + d; …). So this first derivative tells us, at x = 0, how sensitive we are to that unknown noise factor.
  

What we want to do is assess the yield (expected value) and risk (first derivative of yield) for difficulty levels from -1 to 2 when known x = 0. Here’s a graph of expected yield:

It’s hard to notice on that graph, but there’s actually a slight “dip” or “uncanny valley” as one goes from the extreme of easiness (t = -1.0) to slightly harder (-1.0 < t < 0.0) work:

Does it actually work that way in the real world? I have no idea. What causes this in the model is that, as we go from the ridiculously easy (t = 1.0) to the merely moderately easy (t = 0.5) the rate of potential failure grows faster than the maximum potential A does, as a function of t. That’s an artifact of how I modeled this and I don’t know for sure that a real-world market would have this trait. Actually, I doubt it would. It’s a small dip so I’m not going to worry about it. What we do see is that our yield is approximately constant as a function of difficulty for t from -1.0 to 0.0, where the work is concave for that level of skill; and then it grows exponentially as a function of t from 0.0 to 2.0, where the work is convex. That is what we tend to see on markets. The maximal market value of work (1 + e^(5 * t) in this model) grows slightly faster than difficulty in completing it (1 + e^(4.5*t), here).

However, what we’re interested in is risk, so let me show that as well by graphing the first derivative of L with respect to x (not t!) for each t.

What this shows us, pretty clearly, is monotonic risk increase as the tasks become more difficult. That’s probably not too surprising, but it’s nice to see what it looks like on paper. Notice that the easy work has almost no risk involved. Let’s plot these together. I’ve taken the liberty of normalizing the risk formula (in purple) to plot them together, which is reasonable because our units are abstract:

Let’s look at one other statistic, which will be the ratio between yield and risk. In finance, this is called the Sharpe Ratio. Because the units are abstract (i.e. there’s no real meaning to “1 unit” of competence or difficulty) there is no intrinsic meaning to its scale, and therefore I’ve again taken the liberty of normalizing this as well. That ratio, as a function of task difficulty, looks like this…

…which looks exactly like affine exponential decay. In fact, that’s what it is. The Sharpe Ratio is exponentially favorable for easy work (t < 0.0) and approaches a constant value (1.0 here, because of the normalization) for large t.

What’s the meaning of all this? Well, traditionally, the industrial problem was to maximize yield on capital within a finite “risk budget”. If that’s the case– you’re constrained by some finite amount of risk– then you want to select work according to the Sharpe Ratio. Concave tasks might have less yield, but they’re so low in risk that you can do more of them. For each quantum of risk in your budget, you want to get the most yield (expected value) out of it that you can. This favors the extreme concave labor. This is why industrial labor, for the past 200 years, has been almost all concave. Boring. Reliable. In many ways, the world still is concave and that’s a desirable thing. Good enough is good enough. However, it just so happens that when we, as humans, master a concave task when tend to look for the convex challenge of making it run itself. In pre-technological times, this was done by giving instructions to other people, and making machines as easy as possible for humans to use. In the technological era, it’s done with computers and code. Even the grunt work of coding is given to programs (we call them compilers) so we can focus on the interesting stuff. We’re programming all of that concave work out of human hands. Yes, concave work is still the backbone of the industrial world and always will be. It’s just not going to require humans doing it.

What if, instead, the risk budget weren’t an issue? Let’s say that we have a team of 5 programmers given a year to do whatever they want, and the worst they can do is waste their time, and you’re okay with that maximal-risk outcome (5 annual salaries for a learning experience). They might build something amazing that sells for $100 million, or they might work for a year and have the project still fail on the market. Maybe they do great work, but no one wants it; that’s a risk of creation. In this case, we’re not constrained by risk allocation but by talent. We’ve already accepted the worst possible outcome as acceptable. We want them to be doing convex work, which has the highest yield. Those top-notch people are the limiting resource, not risk allocation.

Convexity requires teamwork

Above, I established that if individual productivity is a convex function of investment in that person, and group performance is a sum of individual productivity, then the optimal solution is to ply one person with resources and starve (and likely fire) the rest. Is that how things actually work? No, not usually. There’s a glaring false assumption, which is the additive model where group performance is a simple sum of individual performances. Real team efforts shouldn’t work that way.

When a team is properly configured, most of their efforts don’t merely add to some pile of assets, but they multiply each others’ productivity. Each works to make the others more successful. I wrote about this advancement of technical maturity (from multiplier to adder) as it pertains to software but I think it’s more general. Warning: incompetent attempts at multiplier efforts are every bit as toxic as incompetent management and will have a divider effect.

Team convexity is a bit unique in the sense that both sides of the logistic “S-curve” are observed. You have synergy (convexity) as the team scales up to a certain size, but congestion (concavity) beyond a certain point. It’s very hard to get team size and configuration right, and typical “Theory Z” management (which attempts to coerce a heterogeneous set of people who didn’t choose each other, and probably didn’t choose the project, into being a team) generally fails at this. It can’t be managed competently from a top-down perspective, despite what many executives say (they are wrong). It has to be grass-roots self-organization. Top-down, closed-allocation management can work well in the Alice/Bob models above where productivity is the sum of individual performances (i.e. team synergies aren’t important) but it fails catastrophically on projects that require interactive, multiplicative effects in order to be successful.

Convexity has different rules

The technological economy is going to be very different, because of the way business problems are formulated. In the industrial economy, capital was held in some fixed amount by a business, whose goal was to gain as much yield (profit or interest) from it while keeping risk within certain bounds deemed acceptable. That made concavity desirable. It still is; stable income with low variation is always a good thing. It’s just that such work no longer requires humans. Concave work has been so commoditized that it’s hard to get a passive profit from it.

Ultimately, I think a basic income is the only way society will be able to handle widespread convexity of individual labor. What does it say about the future? People will either be very highly compensated, or effectively unemployed. There will be an increasing need for unpaid learning while people push themselves from the low, flat region of a convex curve to the high, steep part. Right now, we have a society where people with the means to indulge in that can put themselves on a strong career track, but the majority who have a lifelong need for monthly income end up getting shafted: they become a permanent class of unskilled labor and, by keeping wages low, they actually hold back technological advancement.

Industrial management was risk-reductive. A manager took ownership of some process and his job was to look for ways it could fail, then tried to reduce the sources of error in that process. The rare convex task (choosing a business strategy) was for a higher order of being, an executive. Technological management has to embrace risk, because all the concave work’s being taken by machines. In the future, it will only be economical for a human to do something when perfect completion is unknown or undefinable, and that’s the convex work.

A couple more graphs deserve attention, because both pertain to managerial goals. There are two ways that a manager can create a profit. One is to improve output. The other is to reduce costs. Which is favorable? It depends. Below is a graph that shows productivity ($/hour) as a function of wages for some task where performance is assumed to be convex in wages. The relationship is assumed here to be inflexible and go both ways: better people will expect more in wages, low wages will cause peoples’ out-of-work distractions to degrade their performance. Plotted in purple is the y = x or “break-even” line.

As one can see, it doesn’t even make sense to hire people for this kind of work at less than $68/hour: they’ll produce less than they cost. That “dip” is an inherent problem for convex work. Who’s going to pay people in the $50/hour range so they can become good and eventually move to the $100/hour range (where they’re producing $200/hour work)? This naturally tends toward a “winners and losers” scenario. The people who can quickly get themselves to the $70/hour productivity level (through the unpaid acquisition of skill) are employable, and will continue to grow; the rest will not be able to justify wages that sustain them. The short version: it’s hard to get into convex work.

Here’s a similar graph for concave work:

… and here’s a graph of the difference between productivity and wage, or per-hour profit, on each worker:

So the optimal profit is achieved at $24.45 per hour, where the worker provides $56.33 worth of work in that time. It doesn’t seem fair, but improvements to wages beyond that, while they improve productivity, do not improve it by enough to justify the additional cost. That’s not to say that companies will necessarily set wages to that level. (They might raise them higher to attract more workers, increasing total profit.) Also, here is a case where labor unions can be powerful (they aren’t especially helpful with convex work): in the above, the company would still earn a respectable profit on each worker with wages as high as $55 per hour, and wouldn’t be put out of business (despite managements’ claim that “you’ll break us” at, say, $40) until almost $80.

The tendency of corporate management toward cost-cutting, “always say no”, and Theory-X practices is an artifact of the above result of concavity. So while I can argue that “convexity is unfair” insofar as it encourages inequality of investment and resources, enabling small differences in initial conditions to produce a winner-take-all outcome; concavity produces its own variety of unfairness, since it often encourages wages to go to a very low level, where employers take a massive surplus.

The most important problem…?

Above is a lot about convexity, but I feel like the changeover to convexity in individual labor is the most important economic issue of the 21st century. So if we want to understand why the contemporary, MacLeod-hierarchical, organization won’t survive it, we need a deep understanding of what convexity is and how it works. I think we have that, now.

What does this have to do with Work Sucking? Well, there are a few things we get out of it. First, for the concave work that most of the labor force is still doing…

• Concave (“commodity”) labor leads to grossly unfair wages. This creates a natural adversity between workers and management on the issue of wage levels. 
• Management has a natural desire to reduce risk and cut costs, on an assumption of concavity. It’s what they’ve been doing for over 200 years. When you manage concave work, that’s the most profitable thing to do.
• Management will often take a convex endeavor (e.g. computer programming) and try to treat it as concave. That’s what we, in software, call the “commodity developer” culture that clueless software managers try to shove down hapless engineers’ throats.
• Stable, concave work is disappearing. Machines are taking it over. This isn’t a bad thing (on the contrary, it’s quite good) but it is eroding the semi-skilled labor base that gave the developed world a large middle class.

Now, for the convex:

• Convex work favors low employment and volatile compensation. It’s not true that there “isn’t a lot of convex work” to go around. In fact, there’s a limitless amount of demand for it. However, one has to be unusually good for a company to justify paying for it at a level one could live on, because of the risk. Without a basic income in place, convexity will generate an economy where income volatility is at a level beyond what people are able to accept. As a firm believer in the need for market economies, this must be addressed.
• Convex payoffs produce multiple optima on personnel matters (e.g. training, leadership). This sounds harmless until one realizes that “multiple optima” is a euphemism for “office politics”. It means there isn’t a clear meritocracy, as performance is highly context-sensitive.
• Convex work often creates a tension between individual competition and teamwork. Managers attempting to grade individuals in isolation will create a competitive focus on individual productivity, because convexity rewards acceleration of small individual differences. This managerial style works for simple additive convexity, but fails in an organization that needs people to have multiplicative or synergistic effects (team convexity) and that’s most of them.

Red and blue ocean convexity

One of the surprising traits of convexity, tied-in with the matter of teamwork, is that it’s hard to predict whether it will be structurally cooperative or competitive. This leads me to believe that there are fundamental differences between “red ocean” and “blue ocean” varieties of convexity. For those unfamiliar with the terms, red ocean refers to well-established territory in which competition is fierce. There’s a known high quantity of resources (“blood in the water”) available but there’s a frenzy of people (some with considerable competitive advantages) working to get at it. It’s fierce and if you aren’t strong, the better predators will crowd you out. Blue ocean refers to unexplored territory where the yields are unknown but the competition’s less fierce (for now).

I don’t know this industry well, but I would think that modeling is an example of red-ocean convexity. Small differences in input (physical attractiveness, and skill at self-marketing) result in massive discrepancies of output, but there’s a small and limited amount of demand for the work. If there’s a new “10X model” on the scene, all the other models are worse off, because the supermodel takes up all of the work. For example, I know that some ridiculous percentage of the world’s hand-modeling is performed by one woman (who cannot live a normal life, due to her need to protect her hands).

What about professional sports, the distilled essence of competition? Blue ocean. Yep. That might seem surprising, given that these people often seem to want to kill each other, but the economic goal of a sports team is not to win games, but to play great games that people will pay money to watch. A “10X” player might revitalize the reputation of the sport, as Tiger Woods did for golf, and expand the audience. Top players actually make a lot of money for the opponents they defeat; the stars get a larger share of the pool, meaning their opponents get a smaller percentage, but they also expand that pool so much that everyone gets richer.

How about the VC-funded startup ecosystem? That’s less clear. Business formation is blue ocean convexity, insofar as there are plenty of untapped opportunities to add immense value, and they exist all over the world. However, fund-raising (at least, in the current investor climate) and press-whoring are red ocean convexity: a few already-established (and complacent) players get the lion’s share of the attention and resources, giving them an enormous head start. Indeed, this is the point of venture capital in the consumer-web space: use the “rocket fuel” (capital infusion) to take a first-entrant advantage before anyone else has a shot.

Red and blue ocean convexity are dramatically different in how they encourage people to think. With red-ocean convexity, it’s truly a ruthless, winner-take-all, space because the superior, 10X, player will force the others out of business. You must either beat him or join him. I recommend “join”. With blue-ocean convexity (which is the force that drives economic growth) outsized success doesn’t come at the expense of other people. In fact, the relationship may be symbiotic and cooperative. For example, great programmers build tools that are used all over the world and make everyone better at their jobs. So while there is a lot of inequality in payoffs– Linus Torvalds makes millions per year, I use his tools– because that’s how convexity works, it’s not necessarily a bad thing because everyone can win.

Convexity and progress

Convexity’s most important property is progressive time. Real-world convexity curves are often steeper than the ones graphed above and, if there isn’t a role for learning, then the vast majority of people will be unable to achieve at a level supporting an income, and thus unemployed. For example, while practice is key in (highly convex) professional sports, there aren’t many people who have the natural talent to earn a living at it. Convexity shuts out those without natural talent. Luckily for us and the world, most convex work isn’t so heavily influenced by natural limitations, but by skills, specialization and education. There’s still an elite at the rightward side of the payoff distribution curve that takes the bulk of the reward, but it’s possible for a diligent and motivated person to enter that elite by gaining the requisite skills. In other words, most of the inputs into that convex payoff function are within the individual actor’s control. This is another case of “good inequality”. In blue-ocean convexity, we want the top players to reap very large rewards, because it motivates more people to do the work that gets them there. 

Consider software engineering, which is perhaps the platonic ideal of blue-ocean convexity. What retards us the most as an industry is the lack of highly-skilled people. As an industry, we contend with managerial environments tailored to mediocrity, and suffer from code-quality problems that can reduce a technical asset’s real value to 80, 20, or even minus-300 cents on the dollar compared to its book value. Good software engineers are rare, and that hurts everyone. In fact, perhaps the easiest way to add $1 trillion in value to the economy would be to increase software engineer autonomy. Because most software engineers never get the environment of autonomy that would enable them to get any good, the whole economy suffers. What’s the antidote? A lot of training and effort– the so-called “10000 hours” of deliberate practice– that’s generally unpaid in this era of short-term, disposable jobs.

Convexity’s fundamental problem is that it requires highly-skilled labor, but no employer is willing to pay for people to develop the relevant skills, out of a fear that employees who drive up their market value will leave. In the short term, it’s an effective business strategy to hire mediocre “commodity developers” and staff them on gigantic teams for uninspiring projects, and give them work that requires minimal intellectual ability aside from following orders. In the long term, those developers never improve and produce garbage software that no one knows how to maintain, producing creeping morale decay and, sometimes, “time bombs” that cause huge business losses at unknown times in the future.

That’s why convexity is such a major threat to the full-employment society to which even liberal Americans still cling. Firms almost never invest in their people– empirically, we see that– in favor of the short-term “solution”, which is to ignore convexity and try to beat the labor context into concavity, that is terrible in the long term. Thus, even in convex work, the bulk of people linger at the low-yield leftward end of the curve. Their employers don’t invest in them, and often they lack the time and resources to invest in themselves. What we have, instead of blue-ocean convexity, is an economy where the privileged (who can afford unpaid time for learning) become superior because they have the capital to invest in themselves, and the rest are ignored and fall into low-yield commodity work. This was socially stable when there was a lot of concave, commodity work for humans to do, but that’s increasingly not the case.

Someone is going to have to invest in the long term, and to pay for progress and training. Right now, privileged individuals do it for themselves and their progeny, but that’s not scalable and will not avert the social instability threatened by systemic, long-term unemployment.

Trust and convexity

As I’ve said, convexity isn’t only a property of the relationship between individual inputs (talent, motivation, effort, skill) and productivity, but also occurs in team endeavors. Teams can be synergistic, with peoples’ efforts interacting multiplicatively instead of additively. That’s a very good thing, when it happens.

So it’s no surprise that large accomplishments often require multiple people. We already knew that! That is less true in 2013 than it was 1985– now, a single person can build a website serving millions– but it’s still the case. Arguably, it’s more the case now; it’s only that many markets have become so efficient that interpersonal dependencies “just work” and give more leverage to single actors. (The web entrepreneur is using technologies and infrastructure built by millions of other people.) At any rate, it’s only a small space of important projects that will be accomplished well by a single party, acting alone. For most, there’s a need to bring multiple people together, but to retain focus and that requires interior political inequalities (leadership) to the group.

We’re hard-wired to understand this. As humans, we fundamentally get the need for team endeavors with strong leadership. That’s why we enjoy team sports so much.

Historically, there have been three “sources of power” that have enabled people to undertake and lead large projects (team convexity):

• coercion, which exists when negative consequences are used to motivate someone to do work that she wouldn’t otherwise do. This was the cornerstone of pre-industrial economies (slavery) but is also used, in a softer form, by ineffective managers: do this or lose your income/reputation. Anyway, coercion is how the Egyptian pyramids were built: coercive slave labor.
• divination, in which leaders are elected based on an abstract principle, which may be the whim of a god, legal precedent, or pure random luck. For example, it has been argued that gambling (a case of “pure random luck”) served a socially positive purpose on the American frontier. Although it moved funds “randomly”, it allowed pools of capital to form, financing infrastructural ventures. Something like divination is how the cathedrals were built: voluntary labor, motivated by religious belief, directed by architects who often were connected with the Church. Self-divination, which tends to occur in a pure power vacuum, is called arrogation.
  
• aggregation, where an attempt to compute, fairly, the group preference or the true market value of an asset is made. Political elections and financial markets are aggregations. Aggregation is how the Internet was built: self-directed labor driven by market forces.

When possible, fair aggregations are the most desirable, but it’s non-trivial to define what fair is. Should corporate management be driven by the one-dollar, one-vote system that exists today? Personally, I don’t think so. I think it sucks. I think employees deserve a vote simply because they have an obvious stake in the company. As much as the current, right-wing, state of the American electorate infuriates me, I really like the fact that citizens have the power to fire bad politicians. (They don’t use it enough; incumbent victory rates are so high that a bad politician has more job security than a good programmer.) Working people should have the same power over their management. By accepting a wage that is lower than the value of what they produce, they are paying their bosses. They have a right to dictate how they are managed, and to insist on the mentorship and training that convexity is making essential.

Because it’s so hard to determine a fair aggregation in the general case, there’s always some room for divination and arrogation, or even coercion in extreme cases. For example, our Constitution is a case of (secular, well-informed) divination on the matter of how to build a principled, stable and rational government, but it sets up an aggregation that we use elect political leaders. Additionally, if a political leader were voted out of office but did not hand over power, he’d be pushed out of it by force (coercion). Trust is what enables self-organizing (or, at least, stable) divination. People will grant power to leaders based on abstract principles if they trust those ideas, and they’ll allow representatives to act on their behalf if they trust those people.

Needless to say, convex payoffs to group efforts generate an important role for trust. That’s what the “stone soup” parable is about; because there’s no trust in the community, people hoard their own produce instead of sharing, and no one has had a decent meal for months. When outside travelers offer a nonexistent delicacy– the stone is a social catalyst with no nutritional value– and convince the other villagers to donate their spare produce, they enable them all to work together. So they get a nutritious bowl of soup and, one hopes, they can start to trust each other and build at least a barter or gift economy. They all benefit from the “stone soup”, but they were deceived.

Convex dishonesty isn’t always bad. It is the act of “borrowing” trust by lying to people, with the intent to pay them back out of the synergistic profits. Sometimes convex dishonesty is exactly what a person needs to do in order to get something accomplished. Nor is it always good. Failed convex frauds are damaging to morale, and therefore they often exacerbate the lack-of-trust problem. Moreover, there are many endeavors (e.g. pyramid schemes) that have the flavor of convex fraud but are, in reality, just fraud.

This, in fact, is why modern finance exists. It’s to replace the self-divinations that pre-financial societies required to get convex projects done with a fairer aggregation system that properly measures, and allows the transfer of, risks.

Credibility

For macroscopic considerations like the fair prices of oil or business equity, financial aggregations seem to work. What about the micro-level concern of what each worker should do on a daily basis? That usually exists in the context of a corporation (closed system) with specific authority structures and needs. Companies often attempt to create internal markets (tough culture) for resources and support, with each team’s footprint measured in internal “funny money” given the name of dollars. I’ve seen how those work, and they often become corrupt. The matter of how people direct the use of their time is based on an internal social currency (including job titles, visibility, etc.) that I’ve taken to calling credibility. It’s supposed to create a meritocracy, insofar as the only way one is supposed to be able to get credibility is through hard work and genuine achievement, but it often has some severely anti-meritocratic effects. 

So why does your job (probably) Suck? Your job will generally suck if you lack credibility, because it means that you don’t control your own time, have little choice over what you do and how you do it, and that your job security is poor. Your efforts will be allocated, controlled, and evaluated by an external party (a manager) whose superiority in credibility grants him the right of self-divination. He gets to throw your time into his convex project, but not vice versa. You don’t have a say in it. Remember: he’s got credibility, and you lack it. 

Credibility always generates a black market. There is no failing in this principle. Performance reviews are gamed, with various trades being made wherein managers offer review points in exchange for non-performance-related favors (such as vocal support for an unrelated project, positive “360-degree reviews”, and various considerations that are just inappropriate and won’t be discussed here) and loyalty. Temporary strongmen/thugs use transient credibility (usually, from managerial favoritism) to intimidate and extort other people into sharing credit for work accomplished, thus enabling the thug to appear like a high performer and get promoted to a real managerial role (permanent credibility). You win on a credibility market by buying and selling it for a profit, creating various perverted social arbitrages. No organization that has allowed credibility to become a major force has avoided this.

Now I can discuss the hierarchy as immortalized by this cartoon from Hugh MacLeod:

Losers are not undesirable, unpopular, or useless people. In fact, they’re often the opposite. What makes them “losers” is that, in an economic sense, they’re losing insofar as they contribute more to the organization than they get out of it. Why do they do this? They like the monthly income and social stability. Sociopaths (who are not bad people; they’re just gamblers) take the other side of that risk trade. They bear a disproportionate share of the organization’s risk and work the hardest, but they get the most reward. They have the most to lose. A Loser who gets fired will get another job at the same wage; a Sociopath CEO will have to apply for subordinate positions if the company fails. Clueless are a level that forms later on when this risk transfer becomes degenerate– the Sociopaths are no longer putting in more effort or taking more risk than anyone else, but have become an entitled, complacent rent-seeking class– and they need a middle-management layer of over-eager “useful idiots” to create the image (Effort Thermocline) that the top jobs are still demanding.

What’s missing in this analysis? Well, there’s nothing morally wrong, at all, with a financial risk transfer. If I had a resource that had a 50% chance of yielding $10 million, and 50% chance of being worthless, I’d probably sell it to a rich person (whose tolerance of risk is much greater) for $4.9 million to “lock in” that amount. A +5-million-dollar swing in personal wealth is huge to me and minuscule to him. It’d be a good trade for both of us. I’d be paying a (comparably small) $100,000 risk premium to have that volatility out of my financial life. I’m not a Loser in this deal, and he’s not a Sociopath. It’s by-the-book finance, how it’s supposed to work.

What generates the evil, then? Well, it’s the credibility market. I don’t hold the individual firm responsible for prevailing financial scarcity and, thus, the overwhelmingly large number of people willing to make low-expectancy plays. As long as that firms pays its people reasonably, it has clean hands. So the financial Loser trade is not a sign of malfeasance. The credibility market’s different, because the organization has control over it. It creates the damn thing. Thus, I think the character of the risk transfer has several phases, each deserving its own moral stance:

1. Financial risk transfer. Entrepreneurs put capital and their reputations at risk to amass the resources necessary to start a project whose returns are (macroscopically, at least) convex. This pool of resources is used to pay bills and wages, therefore allowing workers to get a reliable, recurring monthly wage that is somewhat less than the expected value of their contribution. Again, there’s nothing morally wrong here. Workers are getting a risk-free income (so long as the business continues to exist) while participating in the profits of industrial macro-convexity. 
2. De-risking, entrenchment, and convex fraud. As the business becomes more established, its people stop viewing it as a risk transfer between entrepreneurs and workers, and start seeing it (after the company’s success is obvious) as a pool of “free” resources to gain control over. Such resources are often economic (“this place has millions of dollars to fund my ideas”) but reputation (“imagine what I could do as a representative of X”) is also a factor. People begin making self-divination (convex fraud) gambits to establish themselves as top performers and vault into the increasingly complacent, rent-seeking, executive tier. This is a red-ocean feeding frenzy for the pile of surplus value that the organization’s success has created.
3. Credibility emerges, and becomes the internal currency. Successful convex fraudsters are almost always people who weren’t part of the original founding team. They didn’t get their equity when it was cheap, so now they’re in an unstable positions. They’re high-ranking managers, but haven’t yet entwined themselves with the business or won a significant share of the rewards/equity. Knowing that their success is a direct output of self-divination (that is, arrogation) they use their purloined social standing to create official credibility in the forms of titles (public statements of credibility), closed allocation (credibility as a project-maker and priority-setter), and performance reviews (periodic credibility recalibrations). This turns the unofficial credibility they’ve stolen into an official, secure kind.
4. Panic trading, and credibility risk transfer. Newly formed businesses, given their recent memory of existential risk, generally have a cavalier attitude toward firing and a tough culture, which I’ll explain below. This means that a person can be terminated not because of doing anything wrong or being incompetent, but just because of an unlucky break in credibility fluctuations (e.g. a sponsor who changes jobs, a performance-review “vitality curve”). In role-playing games, this is the “killed by the dice” question: should the GM (game coordinator who functions as a neutral party, creating and directing the game world) allow characters, played well, to die– really die, in the “create a new character” sense, not in the “miraculously resurrected by a level-18 healer” sense– because of bad rolls of the dice? In role-playing games, it’s a matter of taste. Some people hate games where they can lose a character by random chance; others like the tension that it creates. At work, though, “killed by the dice” is always bad. Tough-culture credibility markets allow good employees to be killed by the dice. In fact, when stack-ranking and “low performer” witch hunts set in, they encourage it. This creates a lot of panic trading and there’s a new risk transfer in town. It’s not the morally acceptable and socially-positive transfer of financial risk we saw in Stage 1. Rather, it’s the degenerate black-market credibility trading that enables the worst sorts of people (true psychopaths) to rise.
   
5. Collapse into feudalistic rank culture. No one wants a job where she can be fired “for performance” because of bad luck, so tough cultures don’t last very wrong; they turn into rank cultures. People (Losers) panic-trade their credibility, and would rather subordinate to get some credibility (“protection”) from a feudal lord (Sociopath) than risk having none and being flushed out. The people who control the review process become very powerful and, eventually, can manufacture enough of an image of high performance to become official managers. You’re no longer going to be killed by the dice in a rank culture, but you can be killed by a manager because he can unilaterally reduce your credibility to zero.
6. Macroscopic underperformance and decline. Full-on rank culture is terribly inefficient, because it generates so much fourth-quadrant work that serves the need of local extortionists (usually, middle managers and their favorites) but does not help the business. Eventually, this leads to underperformance of the business as a whole. Rank culture fosters so much incompetence that trust breaks down within the organization, and it’s often permanent. Firing bad apples is no longer possible, because the process of flushing them away would require firing a substantial fraction of the organization, and that would become so politicized and disruptive as to break the company outright. Such companies regularly lapse into brief episodes of “tough culture”, when new executives (usually, people who buy it as its market value tanks) decide that it’s time to flush out the low performers, but they usually do it in a heavy-handed, McKinsey-esque way that creates a new and equally toxic credibility market. But… like clockwork, those who control said black markets become the new holders of rank and, soon enough, the official bosses. These mid-level rank-holders start out as the mean-spirited witch-hunters (proto-Sociopaths) who implement the “low performer initiative” but they eventually rise and leave a residue of strategically-unaware, soft, complacent and generally harmless mid-ranking “useful idiots” (new Clueless). Clueless are the middle managers who get some power when the company lurches into a new rank culture, but don’t know how to use it and don’t know the main rule of the game of thrones: you win or you die.
7. Obsolescence and death. Self-explanatory. Some combination of rank-culture complacency and tough-culture moral decay turn the company into a shell of what it once was. The bad guys have taken out their millions and are driving up house prices in the area and their wives with too much plastic surgery are on zoning committees keeping those prices high; everyone else who worked at the firm is properly fucked. Sell off the pieces that still have value, close the shop.

That cycle, in the industrial era, used to play out over decades. If you joined a company in Stage 1 in 1945, you might start to see the Stage 4 midlife when you retired in 1975. Now, it happens much more quickly: it goes down over years, and sometimes months for fast-changing startups. It’s much more of an immediate threat to personal job security than it has ever been before. Cultural decay used to be a long-term existential risk to companies not taken seriously because calamity was decades away; now, it’s often ongoing and rapid thanks to the “build to flip” mentality.

To tell the truth about it, the MacLeod rank culture wasn’t such a bad fit for the industrial era. Industrial enterprises had a minimal amount of convex work (choosing the business model, setting strategies) that could be delegated to a small, elite, executive nerve-center. Clueless middle managers and rationally-disengaged (Loser) wage earners could implement ideas delivered from the top without too much introspection or insight, and that was fine because individual work was concave. Additionally, that small set of executives could be kept close to the owners of the company (if they weren’t the same set of people).

In the technological era, individual labor is convex and we can no longer afford Cluelessness, or Loserism. The most important work– and within a century or so, all work where there’s demand for humans to do it– requires self-executivity. The hierarchical corporation is a brachiosaur sunning itself on the Yucatan, but that bright point of light isn’t the sun.

Your job is a call option

If companies seem to tolerate, at least passively, the inefficiency of full-blown rank culture, doesn’t that mean that there isn’t a lot of real work for them to do? Well, yes, that’s true. I’ve already discussed the existence of low-yield, boring, Fourth Quadrant busywork that serves little purpose to the business. It’s not without any value, but it doesn’t do much for a person’s career. Why does it exist? First, let’s answer this: where does it come from?

Companies have a jealously-guarded core of real work: essential to the business, great for the careers of those who do it. The winners of the credibility market get the First Quadrant (1Q) of interesting and essential work. They put themselves on the “fun stuff” that is also the core of the business– it’s enjoyable, and it makes a lot of money for the firm and therefore leads to high bonuses. There isn’t a lot of work like this, and it’s coveted, so few people can be in this set. Those are akin to feudal lords, and correspond with MacLeod Sociopaths. Those who wish to join their set, but haven’t amassed enough credibility yet, take on the less enjoyable, but still important Second Quadrant (2Q) of work: unpleasant but essential. Those are the vassals attempting to become lords in the future. That’s often a Clueless strategy because it rarely works, but sometimes it does. Then there is a third monastic category of people who have enough credibility (got into the business early, usually) to sustain themselves but have no wish to rise in the organizational hierarchy. They work on fun, R&D projects that aren’t in the direct line of business (but might be, in the future). They do what’s interesting to them, because they have enough credibility to get away with that and not be fired. They work on the Third Quadrant (3Q): interesting but discretionary. How they fit into the MacLeod pyramid is unclear. I’d say they’re a fortunate sub-caste of Losers in the sense that they rationally disengage from the power politics of the essential work; but they’re Clueless if they’re wrong about their job security and get fired. Finally, who gets the Fourth Quadrant (4Q) of unpleasant and discretionary work? The peasants. The Losers without the job security of permanent credibility are the ones who do that stuff, because they have no other choice.

Where does the Fourth Quadrant work come from? Clueless middle-managers who take undesirable (2Q) or unimportant (3Q) projects, but manage to take all the career upside (turning 2Q into 4Q for their reports) and fun work (turning 3Q into 4Q) for themselves, leaving their reports utterly hosed. This might seem to violate their Cluelessness; it’s more Sociopathic, right? Well, MacLeod “Clueless” doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to fend for themselves. It means they’re non-strategic, or that they rarely know what’s good for the business or what will succeed in the long-term. They suck at “the big picture” but they’re perfectly capable of local operations. Additionally, some Clueless are decent people; others are very clearly not. It is perfectly possible to be MacLeod Clueless and also a sociopath.

Why do the Sociopaths in charge allow the blind Clueless to generate so much garbage make-work? The answer is that such work is evaluative. The point of the years-long “dues paying” period is to figure out who the “team players” are so that, when leadership opportunities or chances for legitimate, important work open up, the Sociopaths know which of the Clueless and Losers to pick. In other words, hiring a Loser subordinate and putting him on unimportant work is a call option on a key hire, later.

Workplace cultures

I mentioned rank and tough cultures above, so let me get into more detail of what those are. In general, an organization is going to evaluate its individuals based on three core traits:

• subordinacy: does this person put the goals of the organization (or, at least, his immediate team and supervisor) above her own?
  
• dedication: will she do unpleasant work, or large amounts of work, in order to succeed?
• strategy: does she know what is worth working on, and direct her efforts toward important things?

People who lack two or all three of these core traits are generally so dysfunctional that all but the most nonselective employers just flush them out. Those types– such as the strategic, not-dedicated, and insubordinate Passive-Aggressive and the dedicated, insubordinate, and not-strategic Loose Cannon– occasionally pop up for comic relief, but they’re so incompetent that they don’t last long in a company and are never in contention for important roles. I call them, as a group, the Lumpenlosers.

MacLeod Losers tend to be strategic and subordinate, but not dedicated. They know what’s worth working on, but they tend to follow orders because they’re optimizing for comfort, social approval, and job security. They don’t see any value in 90-hour weeks (which would compromise their social polish) or radical pursuit of improvement (which would upset authority). They just want to be liked and adjust well to the cozy, boring, middle-bottom. If you make a MacLeod Loser work Saturdays, though, she’ll quit. She knows that she can get a similar or better job elsewhere.

MacLeod Clueless are subordinate and dedicated but not strategic. They have no clue what’s worth working on. They blindly follow orders, but will also put in above-board effort because of an unconditional work ethic. They frequently end up cleaning up messes made by Sociopaths above and Losers below them. They tend to be where the corporate buck actually stops, because Sociopaths can count on them to be loyal fall guys.

MacLeod Sociopaths are dedicated and strategic but insubordinate. They figure out how the system works and what is worth putting effort into, and they optimize for personal yield. They’re risk-takers who don’t mind taking the chance of getting fired if there’s also a decent likelihood of a promotion. They tend to have “up-or-out” career trajectories, and job hopping isn’t uncommon.

Since there are good Sociopaths out there, I’ve taken to calling the socially positive ones the Technocrats, who tend to be insubordinate with respect to immediate organizational authority, but have higher moral principles rooted in convexity: process improvements, teamwork and cooperation, technical and infrastructural excellence. They’re the “positive-sum” radicals.  I’ll get back to them.

Is there a “unicorn” employee who combines all three desired traits– subordinacy, dedication, and strategy? Yes, but it’s strictly conditional upon a particular set of circumstances. In general, it’s not strategic to be subordinate and dedicated. If you’re strategic, you’ll usually either optimize for comfort and be subordinate, but not dedicated, because that’s uncomfortable. If you follow orders, it’s pretty easy to coast in most companies. That’s the Loser strategy. Or, you might optimize for personal yield and work a bit harder, becoming dedicated, but you won’t do it for a manager’s benefit: it’s either your own, or some kind of higher purpose. That’s the Sociopath strategy. The exception is a mentor/protege relationship. Strategic and dedicated people will subordinate if they think that the person in authority knows more than they do, and is looking out for their career interests. They’re subordinating to a mentor conditionally, based on the understanding that they will be in authority, or at least able to do more interesting and important work, in the future.

From this understanding, we can derive four common workplace cultures:

• rank cultures value subordinacy above all. You can coast if you’re in good graces with your manager, and the company ultimately becomes lazy. Rank cultures have the most pronounced MacLeod pyramid: lazy but affable Losers, blind but eager Clueless, and Sociopaths at the top looking for ways to gain from the whole mess. 
• tough cultures value dedication, and flush out the less dedicated using informal social pressure and formal performance reviews. It’s no longer acceptable to work a standard workweek; 60 hours is the new 40. Tough culture exists to purge the Loser tier, splitting it between the neo-Clueless sector and the still-Loser rejects, which it will fire if they don’t quit first. So the MacLeod pyramid of a tough culture is more fluid, but every bit as pathological.
• self-executive cultures value strategy. Employees are individually responsible for directing their own efforts into pursuits that are of the most value. This is the open allocation for which Valve and Github are known. Instead of employees having to compete for projects (tough culture) or managerial support (rank culture) it is the opposite. Projects compete for talent on an open market, and managers (if they exist) must operate in the interests of those being managed. There is no MacLeod hierarchy in a self-executive culture.
• guild culture values a balance of the three. Junior employees aren’t treated as terminal subordinates but as proteges who will eventually rise into leadership/mentoring positions. There isn’t a MacLeod pyramid here; to the extent that there may be undesirable structure, it has more to do with inaccurate seniority metrics (e.g. years of experience) than with bad-faith credibility trading. 

Rank and guild cultures are both command cultures, insofar as they rely on central planning and global (within the institution) rule-setting. Top management must keep continual awareness of how many people are at each level, and plan out the future accordingly. Tough and self-executive cultures are market cultures, because they require direct engagement with an organic, internal market.

The healthy, “Theory Y” cultures are the guild and self-executive cultures. These confer a basic credibility on all employees, which shuts off the panic trading that generates the MacLeod process. In a guild culture, each employee has credibility for being a student who will grow in the future. In self-executive culture, each employee has power inherent in the right to direct her efforts to the project she considers most worthy. Bosses and projects competing for workers is a Good Thing. 

The pathological, “Theory X” cultures are the rank and tough cultures. It goes without saying that most rank cultures try to present themselves as guild cultures– but management has so much power that it need not take any mentorship commitments seriously. Likewise, most tough cultures present themselves as self-executive ones. How do you tell if your company has a genuinely healthy (Theory Y) culture? Basic credibility. If it’s there, it’s the good kind. If it’s not, it’s the bad kind of culture.

Basic credibility

In a healthy company, employees won’t be “killed by the dice”. Sure, random fluctuations in credibility and performance might delay a promotion for a year or two, but the panicked credibility trading of the Theory-X culture isn’t there. People don’t fear their bosses in a Theory-Y culture; they’re self-motivated and fear not doing enough by their own standards– because they actually care. Basic credibility means that every employee is extended enough credibility to direct his own work and career.

That does not mean people are never fired. If someone punches a colleague in the face or steals from the company, you fire him, but it has nothing to do with credibility. You get rid of him because, well, he did something illegal and harmful. What it does mean is that people aren’t terminated for “performance reasons” that really mean either (a) they were just unlucky and couldn’t get enough support to save them in tough-culture “stack ranking”, or (b) their manager disliked them for some reason (no-fault lack-of-fit, or manager-fault lack-of-fit). It does mean that people are permitted to move around in the company, and that the firm might tolerate a real underperformer for a couple of years. Guess what? In a convex world, underperformance almost doesn’t matter.

With convexity, the difference between excellence and mediocrity matters much more than that between mediocrity and underperformance. In a concave world, yes, you must fire underperformers because the margin you get on good employees is so low that one slacker can cancel out 4 or 5 good people. In a convex world, the danger isn’t that you have a few underperformers. You will have, at the least, good-faith low-performers, just because the nature of convexity is to create risk and inequality of return and some peoples’ projects won’t pan out. Thjat’s fine. Instead, the danger is that you don’t have any excellent (“10x”) employees.

There’s a managerial myth that cracking down on “low performers” is useful because they demotivate the “10x-ers”. Yes and no. Incompetent management and having to work around bad code are devastating and will chase out your top performers. If 10xer’s have to work with incompetents and have no opportunity to improve them, they get frustrated and quit. There are toxic incompetents (dividers) who make others unproductive and damage morale, and then there are low-impact employees who just need more time (subtracters). Subtracters cost more in salary than they deliver, but they aren’t hurting anyone and they will usually improve. Fire dividers immediately. Give subtracters a few years (yes, I said years) to find a fit. Sometimes, you’ll hire someone good and still have that person end up as a subtracter at first. That common in the face of convexity– and remember that convexity is the defining problem of the 21st-century business world. The right thing to do is to let her keep looking for a fit until she finds one. Almost never will it take years if your company runs properly.

“Low performer initiatives” rarely smoke out the truly toxic dividers, as it turns out. Why? Because people who have defective personalities and hurt other peoples’ morale and productivity are used to having their jobs in jeopardy, and have learned to play politics. They will usually survive. It’ll be unlucky subtracters you end up firing. You might save chump change on the balance sheet, but you’re not going to fix the real organizational problems.

Theories X, Y, and Z

I grouped the negative workplace cultures (rank and tough) together and called them Theory X; the positive ones (self-executive and guild) I called Theory Y. This isn’t my terminology; it’s about 50 years old, coming from Douglas MacGregor. The 1960s was the height of Theory Y management, so that was the “good” managerial style. Let’s compare them and see what they say.

Recall what I said about the “sources of power”: coercion, divination, and aggregation. Coercion was, by far, the predominant force in aggregate labor before 1800. Slavery, prisons, and militaries (with, in that time, lots of conscription) were the inspirations for the original corporations, and the new class of industrialists was very cruel: criminal by modern standards. Theory X was the norm. Under Theory X, workers are just resources. They have no rights, no important desires, and should be well-treated only if there’s an immediate performance benefit. Today, we recognize that as brutal and psychotic, but for a humanity coming off over 100,000 years of male positional violence and coerced labor, the original-sin model of work shouldn’t seem far off. Theory X held that employees are intrinsically lazy and selfish and will only work hard if threatened.

Around 1920, industrialists began to realize that, even though labor in that time mostly was concave, it was good business to be decent to one’s workers. Henry Ford, a rabid anti-Semite, was hardly a decent human being, much less “a nice guy”, but even he was able to see this. He raised wages, creating a healthy consumer base for his products. He reduced the workday to ten hours, then eight. The long days just weren’t productive. Over the next forty years, employers learned that if workers were treated well, they’d repay the favor by behaving better and working harder. This lead to the Theory Y school of management, which held that people were intrinsically altruistic and earnest, and that management’s role was to nurture them. This gave birth to the paternalistic corporation and the bilateral social contracts that created the American middle class.

Theory Y failed. Why? It grew up in the 1940s to ’60s, when there was a prosperous middle class, but in a time of very low economic inequality. One thing that would amaze most Millennials is that, when our parents grew up, the idea that a person would work for money was socially unacceptable. You just couldn’t say that you wanted to get rich, in 1970, and not be despised for it. And it was very rare for a person to make 10 times more than the average citizen! However, the growth of economic inequality that began in the 1970s, and accelerated since then, raised the stakes. Then the Reagan Era hit.

Most of the buyout/private equity activity that happened in the 1980s had a source immortalized by the movie Wall Street: industrial espionage, mostly driven by younger people eager to sell out their employers’ secrets to get jobs from private equity firms. There was a decade of betrayal that brutalized the older, paternalistic corporations. Given, by a private equity tempter, the option of becoming CEO immediately through chicanery, instead of working toward it for 20 years, many took the former. Knives came out, backs were stabbed, and the most trusting corporations got screwed.

Since the dust settled, around 1995, the predominant managerial attitude has been Theory Z. Theory X isn’t socially acceptable, and Theory Y’s failure is still too recently remembered. What’s Theory Z? Theory X takes a pessimistic view of workers and distrusts everyone. Theory Y takes an optimistic view of human nature and becomes too trusting. Theory Z is the most realistic of the three: it assumes that people are indifferent to large organizations (even their employers) but loyal to those close to them (family, friends, immediate colleagues, distant co-workers; probably in that order). Human nature is neither egoistic or altruistic, but localistic. This was an improvement insofar as it holds a more realistic view of how people are. It’s still wrong, though.

What’s wrong with Theory Z? It’s teamist. Now, when you have genuine teamwork, that’s a great thing. You get synergy, multiplier effects, team convexity– whatever you want to call it, I think we all agree that it’s powerful. The problem with the Theory-Z company is that it tries to enforce team cohesion. Don’t hire older people; they might like different music! Buy a foosball table, because 9:30pm diversions are how creativity happens! This is more of a cargo cult than anything founded in reasonable business principles, and it’s generally ineffective. Teamism reduces diversity and makes it harder to bring in talent (which is critical, in a convex world). It also tends toward general mediocrity.

Each Theory had a root delusion in it. Theory X’s delusion was that morale didn’t matter; workers were just machines. Theory Y’s delusion is rooted in the tendency for “too good” people to think everyone else is as decent as they are; it fell when the 1980s made vapid elitism “sexy” again, and opportunities to make obscene wealth in betraying one’s employer emerged. Theory Z’s delusion is that a set of people who share nothing other than a common manager constitute a genuine (synergistic) team. See, in an open-allocation world, you’re likely to get team synergies because of the self-organization. People would naturally tend to form teams where they make each other more productive (multiplier effects). It happens at the grass-roots level, but can’t be forced in people who are deprived of autonomy. With closed-allocation, you don’t get that. People (with diverging interests) are brought together by force outside of their control and told to be a team. Closed-allocation Theory Z lives in denial of how rare those synergistic effects actually are.

I mentioned, previously an alternative to these 3 theories that I’ve called Theory A, which is a more sober and realistic slant on Theory Y: trust employees with their own time and energy; distrust those who want to control others. I’ll return to that in Part 22, the conclusion.

Morality, civility, and social acceptability

The MacLeod Sociopaths that run large organizations are a corrosive force, but what defines them isn’t true psychopathy, although some of them are that. There are also plenty of genuinely good people who fit the MacLeod Sociopath archetype. I am among them. What makes them dangerous is that the organization has no means to audit them. If it’s run by “good Sociopaths” (whom I’ve taken to calling Technocrats) then it will be a good organization. However, if it’s run by the bad kind, it will degenerate. So, with the so-called Sociopaths (while it is less necessary for the Losers and Clueless) it is important to understand the moral composition of that set.

I’ve put a lot of effort into defining good and evil, and that’s a big topic I don’t have much room for, so let me be brief on them. Good is motivated by concerns like compassion, social justice, honesty, and virtue. Evil is militant localism or selfishness. In an organizational context, or from a perspective of individual fitness, both are maladaptive when taken to the extreme. Extreme good is self-sacrifice and martyrdom that tends to take a person out of the gene pool, and certainly isn’t good for the bottom line; extreme evil is perverse sadism that actually gets in a person’s way, as opposed to the moderate psychopathy of corporate criminals.

Law and chaos are the extremes of a civil spectrum, which I cribbed from AD&D. Lawful people have faith in institutions and chaotic people tend to distrust them. Lawful good sees institutions as tending to be more just and fair than individual people; chaotic good finds them to be corrupt. Lawful neutrality sees institutions as being efficient and respectable; chaotic neutrality finds them inefficient and deserving of destruction. Lawful evil sees institutions as a magnifier of strength and admires their power; chaotic evil sees them as obstructions that get in the way of raw, human dominance. 

Morality and civil bias, in people, seem to be orthogonal. In the AD&D system, each spectrum has three levels, producing 9 alignments. I focused on the careers of each here. In reality, though, there’s a continuous spectrum. For now, I’m just going to assume a Gaussian distribution, mean 0 and standard deviation 1, with the two dimensions being uncorrelated.

MacLeod Losers tend to be civilly neutral, and Clueless tend to be lawful; but MacLeod Sociopaths come from all over the map. Why? To understand that, we need to focus on a concept that I call well-adjustment. To start, humans don’t actually value extremes in goodness or in law. Extreme good leads to martyrdom, and most people who are more than 3 standard deviations of good are taken to be neurotic narcissists, rather than being admired. Extremely lawful people tend to be rigid, conformist, and are therefore not much liked either. I contend that there’s a point of maximum well-adjustment that represents what our society says people are supposed to be. I’d put it somewhere in the ballpark of 1 standard deviation of good, and 1 of law, or the point (1, 1). If we use +x to represent law, -x to represent chaos, +y to represent good, and -y to represent evil, we get the well-adjustment formula:

Here, low f means that one is more well-adjusted. It’s better to be good than evil, and to be lawful than chaotic, but it’s best to be at (1, 1) exactly. But wait! Is there really a difference between (1, 1) and (0, 0)? Or between (5, 5) and (5, 6)? Not really, I don’t think. Well-adjustment tends to be a binary relationship, so I’m going to put f through a logistic transform where 0.0 means total ill-adjustment at 1.0 means well-adjustment. Middling values represent a “fringe” of people who will be well-adjusted in some circumstances but fail, socially speaking, in others. Based on my experience, I’d guess that this:

is a good estimate. If your squared distance from the point of maximal well-adjustment is less than 4, you’re good. If it’s more than 8, you’re probably ill-adjusted– too good, too evil, too lawful, or too chaotic. What gives us, in the 2-D moral/civil space, is a well-adjustment function looking exactly like this:

whose contours look like this:

Now, I don’t know whether the actual well-adjustment function that drives human social behavior has such a perfect circular shape. I doubt it does. It’s probably some kind of contiguous oval, though. The white part is a plateau of high (near 1.0) social adjustment. People in this space tend to get along with everyone. Or, if they have social problems, it has little to do with their moral or civil alignments, which are socially acceptable. The red outside is a deep sea (near 0.0) of social maladjustment. It turns out that if you’re 2 standard deviations of evil and of chaos, you have a hard time making friends.

In other words, we have a social adjustment function that’s almost binary, but there’s a really interesting circular fringe that produces well-adjustment values between 0.1 and 0.9. Why would that be important? Because that’s where the MacLeod Sociopaths comes from.

Well-adjusted people don’t rise in organizations. Why? Because organizations know exactly how to make it so that well-adjusted, normal people don’t mind being at the bottom, and will slightly prefer it if that’s where the organization thinks they belong. It’s like Brave New World, where the lower castes (e.g. Gammas) are convinced that they are happiest where they are. If you’re on that white plateau of well-adjustment, you’ll probably never be fired. You’ll always have friends wherever you go. You can get comfortable as a MacLeod Loser, or maybe Clueless. You don’t worry. You don’t feel a strong need to rise quickly in an orgnaization.

Of course, the extremely ill-adjusted people in the red don’t rise either. That should not surprise anyone. Unless they become very good at hiding their alignments, they are too dysfunctional to have a shot in social organizations like a modern corporation. To put it bluntly, no one likes them.

However, let’s say that a Technocrat has 1.25 standard deviations of law and chaos each, making her well-adjustment level 0.65. She’s clearly in that fringe category. What does this mean? It means that she’ll be socially acceptable in about 65% of all contexts. The MacLeod Loser career isn’t an option for her. She might get along with one set of managers and co-workers, but as they change, things may turn against her. Over time, something will break. This gives her a natural up-or-out impetus. If she doesn’t keep learning new things and advancing her career, she could be hosed. She’s liked by more people than dislike her, but she can’t rely on being well-liked as it were a given.

It’s people on the fringe who tend to rise to the top of, and run, organizations, because they can never get cozy on the bottom. We can graph “fringeness”, measured as the magnitude of the slope (derivative) of the well-adjustment function and you get contours like this:

It’s a ring-shaped fringe. Nothing too surprising. The perfection of the circular ring is, of course, an artifact of the model. I don’t know if it’s this neat in the real world, but the idea there is correct. Now, here’s where things get interesting. What does that picture tell us? Not that much aside from what we already know: the most ambitious (and, eventually, most successful) people in an organization will be those who are not so close to the “point of maximal well-adjustment” to get along in any context, but not so far from it as to be rejected out of hand.

But how does this give us the observed battle royale between chaotic good and lawful evil? Up there, it just looks like a circle. 

Okay, so we see the point (3, 3) in that circular band. How common is it for someone to be 3 standard deviations of lawful and 3 standard deviations of good? Not common at all. 3-sigma events are rare (about 1 in 740) so a person who was 3 deviations from the norm in both would be 1-in-548,000– a true rarity. Let’s multiply this “fringeness” function we’ve graphed by the (Gaussian) population density at each point.

That’s what the fringe, weighted by population density, looks like. There’s a lack of presence of people at positions like (3, 3) because there’s almost no one there. There’s a clear crescent “C” shape and it contains a disproportionate share of two kinds of people. It has a lot of lawful evil in the bottom right, and a lot of chaotic good in the top left, in addition to some neutral “swing players” who will tend to side (with unity in their group) with one or the other. How they swing tends to determine the moral character of an organization. If they side with the chaotic good, then they’ll create a company like Valve. If they side with lawful evil, you get the typical MacLeod process.

That’s the theoretical reason why organizations come down to an apocalyptic battle between chaotic good (Technocrats) and lawful evil (corrosive Sociopaths, in the MacLeod process). How does this usually play out? Well, we know what lawful evil does. It uses the credibility black market to gain power in the organization. How should chaotic good fight against this? It seems that convexity plays to our advantage, insofar as the MacLeod process can no longer be afforded. In the long term, the firm can only survive if people like us (chaotic good) win. How do we turn that into victory in the short term?

So what’s a Technocrat to do? And how can a company be built to prevent it from undergoing MacLeod corrosion? What’s missing in the self-executive and guild cultures that a 5th “new” type of culture might be able to fix? That’s where I intend to go next.

Take a break, breathe a little. I’ll be back in about a week to Solve It.

Many of these branches meet in churches…

The following reflects my own personal experience, which occurred just a few years ago:

The first time I attended a meeting as a guest, everything seemed all right. There was a fairly even mix of people of different ages, both men and women. The head of the local chapter was a woman probably in her 60s. People were not overly friendly, but they didn’t seem, in any way,  abnormal.

My reason for going was partly just to be around some decent people. I suffered a setback to my health and well-being after a violent crime a few years prior to this and I was, also, coming out of a period of time wherein I was dealing with threats of bodily harm from some drug dealers who moved in next door.  In short, I was still trying to heal myself from all my ordeals by being around some people who would – I hoped – not turn out to be psychotic assholes.

I was interested in the organization and actually purchased a membership. About this time,  everything changed. They had been meeting in some kind of a Christian church, but they changed to meeting at a Unity Church.

Unity Church is a New Age Christian organization. They are big into crazy things like “The Secret” or “Law of Attraction.” I had already had a couple of bad experiences with Unity people prior to this. But, we were only meeting at the church. What I didn’t yet know was that a large number of the members were Unity members, also.

My past experience with Unity involved a rapist who ingratiated himself to women through the church and tried to present himself as a harmless, New Age guy so he could literally put his hands on women in some disgusting way.  This person had been a prospective real estate client of mine, but it was obvious to me what he was and he was, in fact, a rapist.

Unity people believe that they manifest their own reality – which is completely nuts. It’s, also, a built in excuse for criminal activity. For example, a rapist using Unity philosophy would rape, then say that the victim attracted the experience to herself by her thoughts. Unity philosophy, also, keeps other people from intervening in a bad situation because they believe that everyone is creating their own experience – even bad experiences are something you’re supposed to learn from.

Also, they’re really scared of people like me. It’s a mutual hatred, at this point, because of their behavior. Lots of kooks are attracted to Unity. I was about to have an experience with another crazy one via Toastmasters.

Just a short time after I purchased my membership and they began meeting at this new church, the Unity church,  the group, also, acquired a new member. I remember seeing the guy for the first time.  An nice older man who was a Toastmaster member was sitting next to me at the meeting room in the Unity Church when this man came in for the first time and we both did a double take out of alarm. He was wearing a uniform – it was an Emergency Services or EMT type of uniform. There was something very disconcerting about this guy beyond his uniform, which is what I think made us both do an alarmed double-take upon his entry.

By the next meeting, this man, who as a brand new member on his first day, completely dominated the meeting. He was the only man there that day besides the elderly man and I felt like he thought it was his right, by virtue of his ownership of a penis, to control and dominate the entire room. This guy had a look that I can still remember – I can clearly recall his face with my eyes wide open because he was so scary to me.

But, this wasn’t the reason I never went back. That guy was scary and a lot of the people had become rude. It seemed like once they had my membership money they were a lot less nice than before.

I gave my first speech, which they call the “Icebreaker.” It was supposed to be a speech where you introduce and tell something about yourself. This is hard for me. I’d rather talk about anything else, mainly because my life seems like it has been a horror movie. I have had a lot of bad experiences with crazy people pretty much my whole life.  I tried to put a  positive spin on how I came to be where I am.

I gave the speech. I guess I did all right. I don’t know. I went over on my time, but they were not clear about indicating this, which annoyed me a little. They seemed to expect new members to know things you couldn’t possibly know. I found that unpleasant, but not a big deal.

When the meeting was over, I went outside and was talking with a friend who had come with me as a guest that day. Our conversation was interrupted by this very tall, gangly middle-aged woman. I don’t remember how she disrupted our discussion, but she did and she started going on about something I said in my speech.

In the speech, I talked about how I used to travel, but stopped after I was assaulted by Customs agents back in the late 1990s.  It’s true. (It was a very terrifying, very verbally abusive and terrifying gang-style sexual assault.)  I didn’t go into any details about it in the speech. I just mentioned it as the reason I stopped traveling and settled in one place.

The woman had fixated on this one brief sentence in my 10 minute or maybe 15 minute-long speech. She started yelling, flailing her arms and literally jumping up and down – in fact, she hopped from side to side like a gigantic bird. This is something I saw the prime minister of Australia do when she was angry. See the video of the prime minister hopping:

The woman who accosted me was not from this country – she wasn’t from Australia, either, but from another fairly geographically close country I won’t mention. Maybe this is something people do when they’re angry in these countries… I don’t know. I’d never seen it before. But, this woman was angry and she was angry with me.

She kept going on and on about this one line in my speech.

“I have never been assaulted in an airport. Oh! Because I’m not a beautiful woman like you.”

“You should read the book, “The Secret,” then you would understand that you attract these experiences to you. You had this experience so you could learn from it…”

She went on like this for a good fifteen or twenty minutes, maybe longer. She blamed me for being assaulted. She blamed me for not having proper thoughts.  And, strangely, she seemed envious in some way that she was not being assaulted in airports – this last part has really stuck with me. I have begun to understand that there is an envy of victims and survivors – just like the example with the book being stolen. If you have something valuable or desirable enough for someone to take or defile, then other people – who don’t, apparently – are envious, angry and hateful with you, the victims.

This is what I learned about victim-blaming and the envy of victims from this experience.

I, also, learned to stay the hell away from anything to do with Unity church. If anyone tells me they have anything to do with that organization from now on, the conversation is over and I’m leaving.  My experience with these people has been consistently that bad. There’s no such thing as sanity in religion, but some religious organizations are crazier and more destructive than others. Unity must be one of the worst.

I, also, learned not to join anymore organizations. I was sort of persuaded to do this by a friend at the time who is very much a joiner and has actually profited from his associations. Of course, he’s a man. He’s, also, a mason. I don’t think there are any valuable organizations for women… nobody wants to treat women like human beings, it seems – not even other women.

I don’t know what the deal was with the creepy guy with the weird eyes. But, I probably dodged a bullet by getting out of there – in other words, the crazy lady might have inadvertently done me a favor – because I am a magnet for stalkers and crazies I barely know trying to figure out where I live. That guy had a very high creep factor, coupled with his domineering attitude toward women.

I, also, learned more about the cult of “The Secret” or “Law of Attraction.” If anyone tells you they’re into this stuff or that you should read that book, run like hell! Many victimizers are into that philosophy. It’s how they justify the harm they cause to other people. The first person who ever recommended “The Secret” to me turned out to be a total con artist – if there is any justice, at all, this person ought to be behind bars.  The philosophy of “The Secret” and “Law of Attraction” is very damaging to anyone who is a crime survivor of any kind or anyone who has been involved in an accident.

So, with regard to Toastmasters, I say, “Tread with care.” If they meet at a Unity Church (and apparently lots of them do), give it a pass.  That “Icebreaker” speech they ask you to give is just a set up so someone can attack you… that was my experience. Furthermore, no one actually critiqued the speech – except to tell me too late that I’d gone over on my time! So, I have no idea how you could improve your abilities by meeting with these people.  Their main concern is if you say “Ah” or “Um” while you’re speaking… it’s pointless. It seems to mainly be a place for people who are afraid to be in front of an audience – a problem I’ve never had. I just wanted to be better at making and giving presentations, but Toastmasters is really not the place to learn that. Furthermore, if you are a person who is a little bit shy, a bad experience like the one I had could really do you in.

Here’s some more on the dangers of “The Secret”:

Sociopathy and The Secret/Law of Attraction

In reading a particular comment ( from a friend of a friend on Facebook), the callousness was just beyond what is tolerable to me. I love the ‘block’ feature on Facebook- best to get cold, uncaring people out of anything I may read. The actual friend is very kind.  The point that the icy hearted individual made was valid in some ways- many, many kids/people get hurt every day.  That’s very true.  But when he asked why he should care (and then said he didn’t) it just hit me wrong.  I don’t have room for people like that, even in the periphery, of my life.  True, many kids get hurt; many get hurt much more severely than Wade did.  But why not be thankful for the positive prognosis of one who we all did hear about?  Why is that such a ‘waste’?  Why not care for the ones we have names for?  Why not try a bit of compassion and gratitude for some good news once in a while?  I’ve seen many, many  severe injuries in the years I worked as an RN.  It’s nice to hear that someone is going to be OK.  I’m happy for the kid.  Why is that so hard for some to grasp?  Good news is a gift we can all appreciate, if we so choose. But some people just can’t see past their own noses.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been offended by this person’s seemingly minute view of humanity.  But today, I erased him from my life by blocking him (who I only see in replies to someone I do care about).  There isn’t room for those who simply don’t care about anything except how it effects them.  He’s not the first. He won’t be the last.  I don’t know him in person, so he’s no loss in my life.  But I wonder what makes someone so cold.  It’s sad.  Maybe nobody showed him any compassion when he was in pain at some point. Or maybe he’s just a jerk… but most jerks have reasons for their behavior and outlook on life.  I’ve blocked ‘family’ members who have added nothing but pain and/or negativity; someone I don’t know has no room in my life when they do the same.

One more way to increase positivity in my life is to delete the negative.  That is a choice I can make to make my life better.  It costs me nothing to care about someone I hear about; I don’t have to know them to be thankful for their good news. I can’t imagine just not caring.  And I can’t imagine that blocking this person will be anything but good.

Sidenote:  after his attorney told the Judge she would “update” her on his criminal case sentencing.  I have seen nothing to indicate that has been done.  Probably because they didn’t like the outcome.  They thought with the lies in his Psychologist letter and Psychiatrist letter along with his glowing reports from his family that he would get off entirely.  Well, after my complaint – they did not enter Dr. P’s letter of lies, and Dr. L’s letter they did enter was changed so it didn’t say how he had been staying on medication when that is false.  He was sentenced to jail for 8 months and is now a convicted felon.  He did win in the sense that he can do work release and/or home confinement (if he qualifies) – and I don’t know what you need to do to qualify for that so he can take care of his psycho gf who is strangely enough mimicking me and claiming to have PTSD when all reports I have of her – she is the perpetrator.

There is one question now in hindsight I wish I had thought to ask Dr. L on the witness stand – “why are you willing to diagnosis his psycho gf with PTSD via letter to get the B/S a lighter sentence in a criminal case when you haven’t even seen her, but yet you can’t tell the court what type of parent the man you have been seeing for 2 years will be?”  Seriously – the Psychologist is either getting paid BIG BUCKS to lie for these people, or he is disordered too and getting a kick out of this drama.

I also found it odd that the B/S stopped going to see Dr. L after trial last summer and then showed up there in February when he knew we’d be back in court and the ONLY note Dr. L put in his file for that meeting in February that he brought to court was that the B/S was engaged to his psycho girlfriend and planning their wedding.  Coincidence???  I think not.  They obviously just wanted to torment the victim again in this case.  Sick fucks!!!

Strangely, I don’t care if he marries her.  I care that the crazy people stay FAR AWAY from me and my kids period.  I’ve seen “Silver Linings Playbook”.  Maybe it takes 2 crazies to make it work – who knows?  And if that works for them, more power to it . . . but that does NOT mean the 2 crazies should be allowed anywhere near me and Lil Miss!  Let them kill each other, as I’m sure they eventually will.  Leave us out of it!

For what do you work? Money.

For what does a politician work? Money.

For what does a medical doctor work? Money.

For what does everyone work? Money.

Money is a universal object of exchange. You can exchange nearly everything for money. For most people money means nothing else than something which keeps you alive. For a minority of people money has a different meaning as it is a synonym for power, control and influence. When you belong to this minority then more money means more power and more power can never be enough power.

This minority longs for absolute power, for total control and it has no scruples to sacrifice everything which is necessary to gain this power in the quickest and most comprehensive way – power at all costs. Certainly not the minority pays these costs but the majority of people. The majority of people is asked to make the sacrifices, so that the majority can be controlled and influenced in the most efficient way according to the will of the minority.

So when money becomes a synonym for power and domination, then it is not good, not neutral, not life spending but it is nourishing desires, selfish desires, desires for the dark side of the human being, the destructive and self-destructive side.

We can witness and examine every day the consequences of this problem: Destruction and self-destruction, suffering, pain, terror, selfishness, dullness, evil propaganda, lies, fakes, death, slavery….

Nearly every aspect of society and life is corrupted, perverted by money, by the longing for selfish power.

Take a doctor. Do you think a doctor is able to focus only on the well-being of his patients? Do you think a doctor is independent?

Take the pharmaceutical industry. Do you really think that these companies focus only on the well-being of people?

Take the politicians. Do you think they really want to serve the interests and the well-being of the people who voted for them?

The list is nearly endless. Health or progress or benefits are only side effects for most professions but never the main focus, not even something useful or something to wish for. With good things you simply cannot make money and money is what it is all about. Money means power. And some of us cannot get enough of it. Some of us have no heart and no conscience. They lack of compassion but they have great egos and a great desire for power.

The consequences we all have to bear. We all have to pay a high price for this misuse.

Now imagine that mankind would follow the natural values of life. Imagine that society would follow wisdom as the crown of all values and virtues. Wisdom requests love and love comes along with compassion and compassion with care and all is reflected in wisdom and understanding.

Now imagine that a politician would have his main focus on wisdom and with this on love, understanding and compassion. Imagine that money would be still there but only in its original meaning as an object for exchange. Imagine that money would be only an unimportant side effect and not more. What do you think, how would such a politician behave like?

Now imagine that a doctor would give healing treatments with a main focus on the well-being of his patients, just because wisdom requests this. Imagine that a doctor would be driven by true compassion, understanding and care. What do you think? What would happen?

Now imagine that you would work, just because you know that you do the right thing, that your work makes sense, that your work is necessary for society, that it is wise to work for yourself and society. Imagine that money would be just something unimportant, a side effect of your professional activities. Imagine that you would work for a real sense instead for pure money. What would change for you? How would you feel?

Imagine all people worldwide would orientate themselves on the highest value, on wisdom and with this on love, compassion, understanding, on real sense for you, society and creation, on real care. What would happen?

Imagine we would install real values above the human selfishness and dullness. Imagine we would educate our children to follow these values. Imagine we all would follow real values.

With the implementation of binding values in the human society our world would turn into a real paradise for everyone and every being in shortest time.

Let wisdom and love rule and you will receive true happiness.

Let money become what it really is – just an object of exchange.

Heal money from being misused and perverted by a power-hungry minority of sociopaths.

Let us work together on the reinstallation of divine wisdom and divine love for the sake of everyone and every being.

Total power for wisdom and love!

True brotherhood for mankind!

And a paradise for all of us!

In love, light and service,

Ray del Sole

PS: Do you agree? Do you want to serve divine wisdom and divine love? Then join us at SURA – The International Theistic Federation!

“Emotional Blindness” and the Sociopath

Editor’s note: The following article was submitted by the Lovefraud reader who comments as “Pearl.”

By Pearl

Someone on this blog once mentioned a book by Alice Miller and Andrew Jenkins, and it caught my attention. So now I’m reading The Truth Will Set You Free—Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self.

Even though I’m only about halfway through the book, I wanted to share parts of it because it is so important to what a lot of us are working on — forgiving ourselves and trying to understand why this (fraud) happened to us. I know this won’t apply or appeal to everyone, but it might help some of you as it has me. Miller’s ideas help me understand why I was susceptible and forgive myself for my blindness — my inability to spot a “bad guy.”

Miller focuses on childhood — on how corporal punishment (spanking/whipping) and humiliation — cause a type of blindness in adulthood that can lead to being manipulated and UNABLE TO SEE THROUGH LIES. She emphasizes that the kind of parenting and education aimed at breaking a child’s will and making that child into an obedient subject by means of overt or covert coercion, manipulation and emotional blackmail leaves long-lasting imprints on the way we think and relate to one another as adults.

Here is the cycle as she sees it:

“Traditional methods of upbringing, which have included corporal punishment, lead a child to DENY suffering and humiliation. (Can anyone related to having a high pain threshold? Where did I get that bruise or cut—I don’t remember getting it? Ever feel humiliated at being spanked, paddled or whipped as a child? Ever experience a parent being insensitive to suffering?)

“This denial, although essential if the child is to SURVIVE, will later cause emotional blindness.

“Emotional blindness produces “barriers in the mind” erected to guard against dangers. This means that early denied traumas become encoded in the brain, and even though they no longer pose a threat, they continue to have a subtle, destructive impact. (The memory of how to respond to such crappy behavior from our parents and authority figures is still there.)

“Barriers in the mind keep us from learning new information, putting it to good use, and shedding old, outdated behaviors.

“Our bodies retain a complete memory of the humiliations we suffered, driving us to inflict unconsciously on the next generation what we endured in childhood, unless we become aware of the cause of our behavior, which is embedded in the history of our own childhoods.”

As children, some of us learned to suppress and deny natural feelings. Some of us lived in a world where our feelings were ignored and denied.

All the beaten child remembers is FEAR and the face of the ANGRY parent, not why the beating was taking place. The child may even assume he had been naughty and deserved the punishment. Miller writes that in the absence of a witness who can empathize with us in childhood and genuinely listen to us, we have no other way of protecting ourselves from the pain but to close our minds to it.

In a bid to blot the fear and pain of our abused younger self, we erase what we know can help us, we can fall prey to the seductiveness of sects and cults, and FAIL TO SEE THROUGH ALL KINDS OF LIES.

Having this information helps me understand why I was “ripe for the picking.” It also goes a long way toward helping me forgive myself and move on in the healing process.

Link to original article.

You see it all the time in discussions with statists, they’ll boldly claim that “we” have enough resources to take care of all the people who either cannot or will not support themselves and that any other use of those resources is selfish.  Whenever you ask them what level of income should be taxed the highest, mysteriously (or not) it’s always just above the level they think they could comfortably earn.  It’s easy to see why: everyone knows their own circumstances best, and if you ask any particular person whether they could use a little more money, they would invariably say yes.  So that means that at my particular income level I’m just a little bit away from being really comfortable to the point where I have enough excess cash not to miss a bit.  So that means that, obviously, I can’t be expected to support someone else.  However, someone who does have that extra bit of income obviously doesn’t need it because if I can live comfortably on my income, then you could too.  So the really punitive taxation should start just above wherever you are on the income spread.

The other really repellent thing about modern socialists is this my-way-or-the-highway attitude toward charitable spending. In fact, one of the comments on the article linked earlier sums it up perfectly:

Great comment. Very reminiscent of J.K. Rowling’s comments when asked why she doesn’t flee to some ‘tax haven’ to save a few more million quid. When she was at her lowest ebb the big bad state kept her from destitution and allowed her that little bit of elbow room to start her creative career. Now that she is a squillionaire she is happy to contribute back to the system that kept her and her children from having to beg on the streets.

It’s a level of common decency and honest reflection that the sociopathic ‘Atlas Shrugged’ crowd seem incapable of grasping.

Forcing someone, with threats of violence, to give away the fruits of their labour is common decency, where as believing people are best able to decide for themselves which charities they want to support is sociopathic?  Really?

I’m really glad that there are people feel that they want to give away upwards of 40% of their income to things they see as worthwhile causes.  It’s a testament to the generosity of the human spirit, and crucially There would be nothing in a free society that prevented them from doing so.  However, when you force someone to do it, whether they want to or not, whether they can afford it or not, then despite the stated aims I, and many others, find it repugnant.  Especially so when the supposedly benevolent state officials clip a nice fat cut off the top and pay themselves a generous salary, far in excess of what is paid for the same work in the productive sector of the economy.  A salary which any child could see is necessarily exempt from taxes precisely because it is paid out of tax income.

What amuses me most when statists (of all parties) accuse libertarians of being anti-social, is that they clearly haven’t thought things through at all.  When you spend all of your time as an entrepreneur trying to think up ways to best serve other people (which in a system of free, voluntary exchanges is the only way to get them to give you money) then you’re a selfish evil brute, but when you sit on your ass with your hand out demanding that you be given your “share” then you’re definitely an upstanding pillar of the community.  What are these people smoking?

So I found this today and just began to wonder.. 

Why are we so uppity about a person committing suicide?  Why do we step in?  Why do we feel the need to surround a person, corner them, talk them out of it.. is it a martyr syndrome?  Do those strangers on the bridge ever meet again?

Well.. never mind.. I’m pretty sure the years of religious dogma have something to do with it.. there is no death with dignity.. only death while shitting your pants in a mcdonalds crapper due to a massive coronary from eating their shitty food..  

In a bacterium colony, it can be seen to strengthen the colony.. 

If a person was truly deficient, felt deficient, like they didn’t belong, there was no one.. who are we to tell them they’re not?  

Somewhat a morbid thought, I know.. and NO.. I’m not thinking about suicide myself.. 

I guess I wonder because I have met some really repulsive people in my lifetime.  I have dated people who used their knowledge of a system and diagnosis to take as much advantage of every single person they could.. I’ve met people who just whined and cried and were nothing but a drain on society, on their family.. if these kinds of people somehow recognized that they didn’t belong.. wouldn’t it be strengthening the human race ultimately?

Ponderances.. that’s all these are.. 

Yeah..

Ponderances.. 

It’s as if the status quo of unlawful wars, secret courts, arbitrary arrests without warrants and stealing of people’s hard earned savings is not to be challenged. Instead, it is the individual who will have to learn to cope psychologically with the brutal and harsh change from the normally upheld values of peace, order, harmony and respect for one another.

For instance, the new psychotherapy program of Mindfulness has been stolen from the path of Buddhism, which is a spiritual path. Now stripped of it mystical meanings and purpose, it has been turned into a training where the person is taught how not to think.

But by taking meditation out of context from its spirituality, the meditation technique has been turned into one of simple brainwashing. If we can’t think, or believe it’s wrong to think, how will we be able to cogitate through the problems we’re being presented with in the situation of being ruled by those who are using and abusing this world as if it was their own private fiefdom?

You only have to look at the television scheduling after nine pm (known as ‘the watershed’) to see how our values are being changed for us. You’d be hard put to find a movie, series, documentary or one-off drama that is not, in some way, showing violence in one form or another. It’s as if the attempt is to desensitise us to violence and war. So we have to ask the question, who organises this picture programming? Because they’re not called television programmes for nothing.

The answer is that it is those who have got themselves into positions of power, who have lower empathic feelings for the rest of humanity than the rest of us. They can be termed wolves in sheep’s clothing. They are also called sociopaths.

So while we keep thinking, to try to organise to find a way to change society for the better, by voting into power people that have similar humane values to the rest of us, how can we protect ourselves from such inhumane types? The first step is learning to recognise them.

I’m very grateful to Mike the Health Ranger, over at Natural News, for providing this ten-point plan for recognising sociopaths.

10 signs for spotting a sociopath

#1) Sociopaths are charming. Sociopaths have high charisma and tend to attract a following just because people want to be around them. They have a “glow” about them that attracts people who typically seek guidance or direction. They often appear to be sexy or have a strong sexual attraction. Not all sexy people are sociopaths, obviously, but watch out for over-the-top sexual appetites and weird fetishes.

#2) Sociopaths are more spontaneous and intense than other people. They tend to do bizarre, sometimes erratic things that most regular people wouldn’t do. They are unbound by normal social contracts. Their behavior often seems irrational or extremely risky.

#3) Sociopaths are incapable of feeling shame, guilt or remorse. Their brains simply lack the circuitry to process such emotions. This allows them to betray people, threaten people or harm people without giving it a second thought. They pursue any action that serves their own self interest even if it seriously harms others. This is why you will find many very “successful” sociopaths in high levels of government, in any nation.

#4) Sociopaths invent outrageous lies about their experiences. They wildly exaggerate things to the point of absurdity, but when they describe it to you in a storytelling format, for some reason it sounds believable at the time.

#5) Sociopaths seek to dominate others and “win” at all costs. They hate to lose any argument or fight and will viciously defend their web of lies, even to the point of logical absurdity.

#6) Sociopaths tend to be highly intelligent, but they use their brainpower to deceive others rather than empower them. Their high IQs often makes them dangerous. This is why many of the best-known serial killers who successfully evaded law enforcement were sociopaths.

#7) Sociopaths are incapable of love and are entirely self-serving. They may feign love or compassion in order to get what they want, but they don’t actually FEEL love in the way that you or I do.

#8) Sociopaths speak poetically. They are master wordsmiths, able to deliver a running “stream of consciousness” monologue that is both intriguing and hypnotic. They are expert storytellers and even poets. As a great example of this in action, watch here.

#9) Sociopaths never apologize. They are never wrong. They never feel guilt. They can never apologize. Even if shown proof that they were wrong, they will refuse to apologize and instead go on the attack.

#10) Sociopaths are delusional and literally believe that what they say becomes truth merely because they say it! Charles Manson, the sociopathic murderer, is famous for saying, “I’ve never killed anyone! I don’t need to kill anyone! I THINK it! I have it HERE! (Pointing to his temple.) I don’t need to live in this physical realm…”

Watch Charles Manson saying this at the 3:05 mark .

How to dispel illusion and get to the truth

Sociopaths are masters at weaving elaborate fictional explanations to justify their actions. When caught red-handed, they respond with anger and threats, then weave new fabrications to explain away whatever they were caught doing.

A sociopath caught red-handed with a suitcase full of cash he just stole, for example, might declare he had actually rescued the money from being stolen by someone else, and that he was attempting to find its rightful owner. He’s the hero, see? And yet, in reality, he will simply pocket the money and keep it. If you question him about the money, he will attack you for questioning his honesty.

Sociopaths are masters are presenting themselves as heroes with high morals and philosophy, yet underneath it they are the true criminal minds in society who steal, undermine, deceive, and often incite emotional chaos among entire communities. They are masters at turning one group of people against another group while proclaiming themselves to be the one true savior. Wherever they go, they create strife, argument and hatred, yet they utterly fail to see their own role in creating it. They are delusional at so many levels that their brains defy logical reasoning.

You cannot reason with a sociopath. Attempting to do so only wastes your time and annoys the sociopath.

Tip for exposing sociopaths: Start fact-checking something they claim

One simple method for dispelling sociopathic delusion is to start fact checking their claims. Do any of their claims actually check out? If you start digging, you will usually find a pattern of frequent inconsistencies. Confront the suspected sociopath with an inconsistency and see what happens: Most sociopaths will become angry or aggressive when their integrity is questioned, whereas a sane person would simply be happy to help clear up any misinformation or misunderstanding.

Beware of fact-checking the sociopath by asking other people under his or her influence. A sociopath will usually have a small group of cult-like followers who not only believe their fictional tales, but who actually internalize those fictions to the point where they rewrite their own memories to be consistent with them. If a guru-style sociopath talks about his “levitation sessions” over and over again, some of his believers will sooner or later start to form false memories in which they imagine seeing him levitate off the floor. So if you ask those people, “Did you actually ever see this person levitate?” They will enthusiastically say, “Yes!” Because in their own minds, that illusion has become something indistinguishable from a vivid memory.

Much the same thing is true with sociopathic politicians. If a particularly charismatic politician claims he has “created millions of jobs” even though his economic policies have actually destroyed jobs and caused widespread unemployment, his cult-like followers will repeat his lie and publicly proclaim how many jobs that person has created.

That’s why fact-checking a sociopath requires evidence from outside his circle of influence. Does anything he say actually check out in the real world, outside his sphere of direct control? If not, you’ve probably spotted a sociopath.

Sociopaths never answer facts; they always attack the messenger

Another very valuable red flag to recognize when trying to spot a sociopath is to see how they deal with attacks on their own integrity. If a sociopath is presented with a collection of facts, documents and evidence showing that he lied or deceived, he will refuse to address the evidence and, instead, attack the messenger!

If you really try to nail a sociopath down to answering a documented allegation, they will quickly turn on you, denounce you, and declare that you too are secretly plotting against them. Anyone who does not fall for the brainwashing of the sociopath is sooner or later kicked out of the circle and then wildly disparaged by the remaining members of the cult group.

Inventing bizarre tales

One of the easiest signs to spot is how sociopaths exaggerate things to an irrational absurdity. In the sociopath’s world, every explanation is more intense and more heroic-sounding than the way it really went down. Where a normal person might say, “I vomited last night,” a sociopath would say, “I vomited up a 27-foot tapeworm!”

And a truly psychotic sociopath might even add details such as, “And then the tapeworm climbed up the wall and jumped on me and tried to strangle me!”

You might laugh at such an explanation, but I know lots of similar examples that have been believed by irrational cult followers. In fact, this example was patterned off of a real live person who had attracted quite a cult following in a particularly odd, fringe corner of dietary fads. (He also teaches his cult followers to eat rotten, putrefied meat as a form of medicine.)

Every story the sociopath weaves, often on the spur of the moment, is impossible to either confirm or deny. No one can prove him wrong, since they weren’t there, so he can spin whatever details into the story he wants. “After eating this, I had a three-hour ejaculation!” Or, “The Dalai Lama wanted to anoint me as a spiritual leader, but I declined, telling him that I only needed faith, not any official recognition.”

How can anyone disprove such a claim? They can’t. So the sociopaths relies on these un-provable, unsubstantiated claims to build up a false aura of authority, spirituality or knowledge. This creeps up on followers like a serpent, slithering into their brains and taking hold of their belief systems before they realize what has happened.

As a survivor of the Jim Jones “Jonestown” mass suicide says in a PBS documentary video (see link below), “Everything was plausible [at the time], except in retrospect the whole thing seems bizarre.”

That’s how sociopaths operate. As they’re speaking, they capture your imagination and sound reasonable, even authoritative. But in the clear light of day, what they are actually saying is absurd… even dangerous.

But no matter what fictions are presented by the sociopath, they always present him in the light of a hero — sometimes even a saint — who sacrifices his life for the good of others. He often talks of “healing” or “detoxification” or being “cleansed.” When he is exposed by truth-tellers, he merely accuses the truth-tellers of being secret undercover agents. When he is accused of sexual assault by one of his own followers (a common occurrence in these circles), he denounces her as an enemy or a spy.

The ultimate destination of a sociopath is to destroy himself and take as many willing victims with him as possible. This is the Jim Jones scenario: Drink the Kool-Aid laced with poison, and thereby prove your worth to your entire cult group.

For more about holistic health and spiritual healing, join us at The Therapy Book by clicking on the book cover below.

Read more of this article at Natural News

I hope you find Erol’s comedy as hilarious as I do, delivering truth through selfless love and ridicule. He’s a living Christ, which most people can’t get their heads around, even though performing miracles and exposing evil whilst championing moral truth is a give away. He doesn’t really do a lot of self promotion, in the same way Van Gogh didn’t sell a painting in his lifetime, tormented to the end, by bragging psychopaths.

Having read over many so-called feminist posts I wish I could ‘disabuse’ the legitimate writers of the pernicious ‘influence’ upon their thinking of feminism. It’s neuro-anatomically easier for a good woman to put herself in the shoes of an innocent man, innocence existing far more so on the male side of the imaginary ‘divide.’ My talks with Erol made me realise, that I’ve been brain-sullied by propaganda my whole life, which was successfully getting me to maniacally ‘compete’ with men, to ensure my own secret late-night misery and further widen a divide between men and women across the board, which produces the fatherless children which the ‘system’ is after.

The system re-lies on you being ‘reactionary’ to simple fact, for everyone’s sake don’t be, use your affective empathy. Everything you’re objectified by and the daily harassment you’re subjected to is deliberately and ruthlessly aimed at you by Zionists and their army of sexual deviants, through ‘every’ outlet of the media, as ‘they’ need badly-raised children to protect themselves so they can carry on with their ‘tradition,’ as best lampooned by Saint Mel Gibson in Apocalypto.

To sum up feminism, ‘it’s all bullshit,’ as feminism is simply exploiting the default mindset of gullible females, until they become ‘inconsolably’ raging, man-hating, thankless, power-lusting bigoted lunatics, which they’ll subsequently take-out on their unsurprisingly fatherless children. Which is also what the Zionist ‘programmers’ want your children to go to primary school ‘for.’

http://thefatherlessgeneration.wordpress.com/statistics/

They know there’s an ‘explosion’ of sexual activity amongst ‘fatherless’ children, after they teach infants sex ed, compared to schools where it’s ‘not’ taught. They know there’s an exponential increase in drug taking and ‘suicide’ when they teach those ‘pseudo-preventative’ classes too.

The epitome of evil is to ‘deceive’ in order to commit an offence against an innocent. Our anger shouldn’t be turned towards innocent men, it ‘should’ be turned towards those stirring-it and ourselves for ‘falling’ for it, when coupled to our ‘reliable’ programmed reaction to those provocations and atypical blame-shifting bogus rage issues.

In brief, a minimum of 2 thirds of abused children are abused by single mums who were culturally encouraged, by moral-imbeciles, to believe they were going to be Zsa Zsa Gabor, who then ends up fighting with everyone who isn’t good-enough for Zsa Zsa, until they’re left alone, with their winnings, fatherless children. Whom their then ingrained-lust for dominance and imbalanced obedience, et al, is taken out on those fatherless children, especially by those who get sexual-pleasure from outing their ‘frustrations’ on ‘innocents.’

Which in turn, means those children are 2 thirds more likely to become anti-social personality disordered & ripe for exploitation to protect the interests of the genocidal Zionists and join their army of sexual deviants.

The cold hard ‘facts’ their ever-stirring media falsely portrays, to further their agenda, as regards fatherless children speak for themselves. It’s also a cold hard fact that women have ‘smaller’ brains than innocent near-perfect ‘good’ men, who are the number one victim of ‘all’ atrocities so that the ‘beasts’ in seats of power, lusting after our children, can have them more easily and de’moral’ise them and their estranged fathers into ‘self destruction’ more easily. As fatherless children are 2 thirds more likely to kill ‘themselves,’ when raised ‘exclusively’ by the marauding entitled Zsa Zsa. Coincidence?

I see in many feminist posts that their ‘infantile’ confirmatory-biased anger has been ‘co-opted,’ as I was, by my brain-sullying propaganda and determination to get pseudo-revenge against 100% innocent men, who’ve got nothing to do with my totalitarian dictate, that he be essentially psychic. My best advice is doubt your ‘reaction’ to truth and relax, because if it’s not fact, ‘after’ you’ve ‘checked’ at-length, you don’t have-to believe it, then when you find out how far you’ve been duped you’ll question your way out of the cave into ‘peaceful’ sunshine. Although don’t expect many to follow.

Behind ‘every’ seat of pseudo-power is a paedophile land-baron. Unsurprisingly they’re after our children and want us corralled in cities far from their estates and being oppressed and slowly-killed with our Children, the next-in-line for bondage. They’re megalomaniacal-psychopaths and can rely on ourselves being similar-enough to ‘ingrain’ their self-destructive ‘programming’ into our brains from infancy. When a woman’s saving ‘grace’ is that, unlike male psychopaths, even if she’s a psychopath, women have 30% affective empathy, where male psychopaths would have none.

But it’s that fact that allows us to be fooled by their countless media outlets and to fool ourselves into the bargain, that we’re caring and fair people, when our actions tell a completely different story and our fatherless children’s fate and our own outcome is ‘mindlessly’ predictable. 90% of western females are bi-sexual psychopaths. We don’t have the amygdaloid capacity for the depth necessary to love and bullshit ourselves about that ‘fact’ constantly. When, as Erol taught me, a lie can ‘never’ be a lie, now consider the volume of lies a woman tells herself on a daily basis and realise ‘why’ she’s so easily hurt and due to her neuro-anatomical limited function, in key areas of the brain, seeks revenge against innocent honest moral people living an ‘seemingly’ enviable honest life.

We don’t know their hardship or life story but can actually hate them if they’re happy, as it confirms our bias that men have it easier, when that ‘couldn’t be further from the ‘truth.’ Programmed thoughts which the paedophiles on high behind them can ‘rely’ on, bombarding us with propaganda to target men with our unjustifiable proto-emotional hate, instead of ‘surrendering’ to their moral compass and having ‘love’ in our lives, which the psychopaths don’t want us to have.

Thus feminist podium bashers are hate-spewers teaching us to destroy ourselves and our children, whilst ‘appearing’ to be our saviours, all the while ‘encouraging’ us to attack and shun the only chance we have at a life worth living whilst in bloom. It goes unreported that countless men kill themselves nightly as a direct result of the cruelty of bitter female psychopaths. The children of those single mother are more easily hoovered into the paedophile ring behind child services.

When I first started learning from Erol, I was ridiculously reactionary, due to my Zionist programming. None the less, I persevered and he selflessly taught me what his Christlike brain can ‘see,’ in the valley of the ‘blind,’ where 1 eyed megalomaniacal paedophiles (see, the mason symbol,) believe that they’re king, but assassinate ‘human’ Kings who ‘can’ see what they’re up to. (Eg. Martin Luther King.)

Most westerners don’t have that great a capacity for moral conscience across their frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex’s, which if they don’t use they ‘lose.’ That’s why we’re taught that ‘morality’ is just our opinion and the truth is just our opinion, to simply doubt those modules of the brain and ‘surrender’ to our immoral misleaders. When morality is the law of the universe, like gravity, both of which are invisible at first, but just try throwing yourself out the window and see if gravity cares about your ignorance.

Morality works the same way and since ‘understanding’ that fact from Erol, which psychopaths don’t want you to know, (which is their M.O. to a ‘T,’) I’ve been able to witness miracles unfolding in my life, at the pace I’m prepared to ‘do’ what it ‘takes.’ Even though, like 90% of women, I’ve no in-built moral compass, so I’m essentially insane without a moral guide, if left alone to create the narrative of my hyper-defensive ‘imaginary’ self image. Thus why surrendering to a ‘good’ man, 30 out of ‘every’ 100 being so, is the wisest thing any woman could ever do for her self and more importantly her children, let alone that other mother’s son.

When reading this, I don’t ‘expect’ a different result from you, than the 1 Erol got when he 1st spoke truth to me. Suffice to say, try and understand, as that will give you the peace I wish you knew, whilst ‘keeping’ your wonderful and admirable fire, necessary to oust Nero from his fiddle and Hilary from her toilet-throne. Love will come into your life thereafter. (You’re welcome.)

In a nutshell, the way we’re raised means females struggle to make it out of infancy and our automatic ‘denial’ and autistically-pretending our way through semantic-attacks aimed at hurting other’s feelings is simply moral-imbecility, since we have been ingrained to be like ‘them.’ I repeat, our saving ‘grace’ is that they can ‘never’ take away a woman’s affective empathy, even-though they ‘atrophy’ our hippocampus. Which we must ‘exercise,’ by looking beyond the end of our own stung nose ‘and’ past the ‘entirely’ Zionist run media, to the ‘real’ crime figures, seen throwing themselves off bridges ‘every’ night, suffering from brain-damage in their prefrontal cortex, due to having had the ‘raging’ result of Zsa Zsa endlessly willfully taking out her power-lust out on his nerves, destroying his life and moving on to her next ‘game,’ thinking even-more highly of herself and her powers-invisible, whilst lizards in wigs behind her cream themselves in Kangaroo courts, licking their lips with forked tongues and hiding ‘our sworn enemy’ on their estates behind them.

The facts speak for themselves, 3 innocent good family men, throw themselves off of nearly every bridge in the country, ‘every’ night, bar none, yet you ‘never’ read about that ‘deliberate’ result, in the Zionist media encouraging and getting-off on it, you never read that ‘innocent’ men are the number 1 victim of ‘every’ crime bar none. You never read what ‘they’ don’t want you to know, as otherwise you’d stop hating men and be ‘human’ towards them and see what ‘they’ have done to yourself and are ‘still’ trying to do to you, (which they get pleasure from,) as otherwise you’d ‘correctly’ take your fire out on ‘them.’ Instead of marching impotently or ignorantly.

To conclude, you’ll be glad to read, if you’ve got this far and have an open mind, I respect you and what the sowers of sorrows don’t understand is, they’ve built fema camps for us and enraged generations of otherwise-innocent women and hammered the most hated of all people on earth, innocent moral empathic family men and are abusing all our children daily. Yet ‘we’ can turn the tables on those ‘inbred’ psychopath voids, destroying our children, we ‘can’ put ‘them’ in the fema camps and all we need to do is turn our anger, away from innocent men, and instead towards the megalomaniacal psychopath paedophiles, who are 100% guilty of being able to rely on ‘us’ to destroy ourselves, due to our trampoline-brained rigid aloplastic imaginary-self-image defence mechanism. Which began the day ‘we’ started concentration-campus in infancy and were taught to COMPETE and that we’re ‘equal’ to a near-perfect ‘wholly-different’ endangered-species, whom we we were made and evolved to ‘compliment’ and support, who’s morality would grant our children’s wishes and our own childhood wishes, of a romance that would make life worth living and which would help ‘save us from ourselves.’

I don’t know about you, but I love a real man who doesn’t let me away with anything, as I forget myself from time to time and so still weakly ‘choose’ to factor out my disrespectful urge control, when I unconsciously want, ahem, chocolate. Men have been taught to feel insecure about providing us with ‘consequence,’ as our shrieking-projection makes them self-examine insecurely, due to their moral conscience and deeper capacity for human feelings beyond our capacity to feel and over the long term causes them PTSD. Where all of the above is leading us, as hard as it may be to believe, is WW3, thanks to our programming by Zionist lunatics, as ‘war = dead children’ and dead innocent men, whilst the paedophile baron proudly titillates itself, sitting miles from their cannons, they throw our children in front of, on the massive farmlands home and dry.

http://Christlike.be ~ (Erol is a living Christ, a Christ is simply a more ‘evolved’ moral and compassionate mind, the kind of mind Zionists assassinate routinely out of existential jealousy as Zionists are an evolutionary cul-de-sac that want ‘everyone’ extinct so ‘baby gets’ to evolve beyond the point we’re at now, because we’re all ‘more’ evolved than they are. The present-day ‘misleaders’ are far worse only because they’ve got technology to expose us to genocidal megadeath which previous megalomaniacal cults didn’t have, however, the incumbent killed most of the following; Jesus of Nazareth, his cousin John the Baptist, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Che Guevara, Bob Marley, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Socrates, Gandhi, et al.)

Cheers,
Cheryl.

“No, you can’t. Go buy it for yourself.”

“But, I promise to return it.”

“I know you’ll return it, Dave (mutual friend) wouldn’t return it but you would.”

“But, if I buy it for myself then the author (a writer that cashed in on exploiting my pals) will get my money, and that bothers me.”

“Sorry, can’t help you, that’s your issue.”

My friend says “no,” without reservation, many times per day. He’s a grandmaster of “no.”

++

The ability to say “no” frees us from the emotional drain of doing what we don’t want to do AND frees those around us to be open about their needs & desires.

Everyone is better off.

Running a major corporation, dealing with a demanding friend or guiding an energetic preschooler, puts us in a position where we will never be able to meet every request. We will never meet the demands of the world, or our inbox.

To protect our ability to do what needs to be done, we need to create a habit of shedding what we can’t do.

It’s OK to say “no.”

++

Another example. Over at Endurance Corner, we host training camps for triathletes. At the start of camp, I often say:

We’re here to support your camp. Feel free to ask us for anything you need. If we can get it done for you then we will make it happen. If we can’t get it done then we will tell you why.

Ask me anything.

If I can serve you then I will do it.

If I can’t serve you then I will tell you why.

++

Much of the stress we experience in our lives comes from a reluctance to say “no.”

Toxic people and sociopaths use this reluctance against us. It’s a form of abuse and they feed off the abuse. We’re not doing anyone any good by complying with their wishes.

Within your Family Web, see if you can get everyone to agree that it is OK to say “no.”

It’s better for everyone.

Stay tuned for a hopefully (in hindsight) somewhat humorous and slightly educational series on what NOT to do when trying to “release the kraken” (and have him stay away).

Please note that I haven’t yet succeeded (for a long time I thought I did, though), so chances are I’ll be letting off some steam here from time to time. I’m also hoping you folks will weigh in with your own experiences – what worked and what didn’t. My target audience, though, is those who are just waking up to what they’re dealing with and who need some real-world stories from people who’ve already been there, and hopefully learn from our mistakes and successes.

More to come!

There are a few concepts that deserve further exploration: growth, risk, and chaos.

Growth, and how it influences behavior

Macroscopic economic growth is a fairly modern phenomenon. Before 1700, global economic growth was never faster than 0.3% per year, and generally slower. Most people who were rich had made others poor to get there. A zero-sum approach to human problems made sense. Conservative, religious institutions had a lot of power, and for understandable reasons. If large-scale material growth is not to be expected, then people need to organize themselves in a way that does the best with what is available. Religion gave people access to social plans that had been tested by time. Some of its dictates were nonsense; some were incredibly valuable. On the whole, it probably did more good than harm from a single-time perspective (its retardation of progress requiring another discussion).

A late 18th-century Anglican clergyman named Thomas Malthus is notorious for having been “wrong” in his thesis about population sustainability– he predicted a mid-19th century calamity in England. In truth, he wasn’t that wrong with most assumptions. By 1798, economic growth had accelerated to just under 1 percent per year. He asserted that exponential population gains would outpace economic growth, which he modelled as linear. On that, he was incorrect. On the conclusion– that the economy was not growing fast enough to support human population growth, and that the latter would be checked by famine, disease, or war– he was still right. Malthusian catastrophes are all over the place in history. One was to see it is that the Industrial Revolution intervened. A darker view is that the 19th-century English catastrophe was outsourced to Ireland.

Religious institutions, being conservative while expansive both in time and space, were storehouses of “big picture” knowledge about a society’s history and evolution. Typical people saw rises and falls: frenzied victories, hideous defeats, tribal and racial hatreds, and the formation and dissolution of societies and cultures. There’d be spells of peace and war, and control would pass from one set of hands to another, but global progress was rare until the 18th or 19th century. Religion– and, later, the narrative-driven nation-state– emerged to create order in an almost zero-sum world where it was inconceivable that any economy could grow at a rate comparable to the human desire to populate. It didn’t solve the problem, but it provided explanations and planning. Over time, religion’s central role was eclipsed when competent outsiders and specialists began attacking human problems. One of those specialties was economics, truly a “dismal science” in a time of sub-1 percent growth, explanatory of famine and war.

Clearly, we live in a different time. Economic growth is faster than population increases, so the average person’s standard of living is improving. We hit a phase change at some point between 1725 and 1925, the exact date of it still being debated, at which point economic growth stopped being subsumed by population increases, enabling genuine long-term improvement. The zero-sum outlook no longer makes sense. Progress and growth are now expected. So what causes economic growth? Where does it come from?

“Improvement of processes” is a common first answer. The Industrial Revolution enabled us to get better at stuff. It’s the culmination of thousands of years of progress. Writing gave us stable history. Mathematics gave us precision and mechanisms for solving problems. Empiricism and science gave us the ability to measure things. Technology made us more powerful, more productive. Each invention or innovation we kicked out pushed us forward, and the economic value of our knowledge base has been a faster-than-linear function of its size, while that knowledge base itself grows exponentially. We’ve had an ongoing story of faster-than-exponential growth going back to the advent of sexual reproduction 1.2 billion years ago due to a self-accelerating improvement of processes, but it’s still a bit vague what that means. We should find “improvement of processes” to be intensely suspect. Why aren’t processes already in the improved state?

Almost always, improvements come from outsiders, so the macroscopic change is a “creative destruction” driven by replacement. Most of China’s lasting intellectual accomplishments came from the “outside elite” of its scholarly civil-service structure, and not the upper-crust mandarins. Greek philosophical advancements are not owed to reputable clerics of that time, but to heathens, many of whom disavowed the traditional gods and were persecuted for doing so. In medieval Europe, a despised class of merchants grew richer and, eventually, more powerful than the hereditary aristocracy. Large companies are often defeated by innovative small ones run by people the conglomerate would never hire. Social substructures seem to have a “natural growth rate” that, to the extent that it evolves, decreases over time as the substructure reaches saturation or even decline. What drives the faster-than-exponential growth seen thus far is the generation of new ones with faster growth rates. Where do those come from? There is, metaphorically, a place where genuine creation occurs. Chaos. Nothing begets something because there is no nothing. The closest this world (possibly the universe, possibly any universe) has to nothing is pure chaos, which is still fundamentally creative. I’ll get back to that concept.

In 2013, most genuine growth– of the economy, of human knowledge, of technology– comes not from established entities but from new ones trying to force their way into existence as they emerge out of chaos. Large, established organizations have given up on progress, by cutting R&D funding and focusing on next-quarter profits. Progress has also given up on them. The smartest and most ambitious people, who wish to harness chaos for new creation (or, to see it more cynically, enrichment beyond the pittance judged fair by some massive organization) generally lack interest in the corporate behemoths with entrenched processes and slow growth. Don Draper, in departing from a sclerotic corporation (in which his advertising agency had become a subsidiary) to form a new one, said it best:

Who the hell is in charge, a bunch of accountants trying to make a dollar into a dollar ten? I want to work. I want to build something of my own.

Draper (a MacLeod Sociopath, without question) doesn’t want the restrained, conservative growth of a bulky corporate enterprise. He wants something more rapid, personal, and fun. So he left an existing substructure to form a new one.

That was 1963, when the first hints of a technological era just appearing. In 1863, industrial growth actually was the most exciting game in town, and people would have been thrilled at the prospect of turning “a dollar into a dollar ten”. For millennia, humanity had been in a zero-sum arrangement where being powerful meant dominating and controlling other people. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Colosseum to the aristocracy of the Southern United States was a trail of monuments that required slavery. Industry provided a way out: the possibility to turn $1.00 into $1.10 without hurting anyone. Compared to the zero-sum squabbling, that was immensely progressive. With industry catching on, nations all over the world abolished slavery in the mid-19th century. Getting rich no longer required making others poor, or unfree, or dead. The downside of this was turning work into something often too stable and boring to excite the Don Drapers of the world.

Why is it so common to call someone like Don Draper a sociopath? The state of society delivers a prevailing growth rate. For agrarian societies, it was near zero. For industrial ones, it was slow (1 to 5 percent per year). As we move into the technological era, it might become higher. Whatever that rate is, evidence strongly suggests that there will always be people who want to grow their fortune at a faster clip. One way to do this is to steal. That’s what war (ending lives to rob the dead) and slavery (stealing freedom and autonomy) were about. The other, much harder, way is through new invention and the creation of value that didn’t exist previously. It might like these are being put forward as vice and virtue, eternally separate. It’s not so. It’s a lot more complicated. Is mining for gold, diluting its financial value in the same way as counterfeiting does, a zero-sum theft of financial value that delivers nothing to the world? Or is it, since the yellow metal has some hedonic value in so far as people like to look at it, a productive activity? This is hard to answer. Additionally, how does an enlightened or altruistic industrialist (circa 1750) ensure deliverance of value when powerful forces will divert any produce to zero- or negative-sum pursuits, such as warfare? How does the engineer make sure his efforts are used to build more plowshares rather than swords? I don’t think he can. In any case, that’s not important from a macro perspective. New invention and raw theft both come from a class of rule-breakers who aren’t content to have their fortunes grow at the prevailing rate.

The problem of chaos

Often, “chaos” is used to describe squalor or malfunction, but its original meaning is closer to abyss, or the formless void from which the universe emerged. It’s not “nothingness”, because things (such as the universe) come from it. One might think of it as a pregnant silence, or a blank canvas. It’s creative emptiness.

Experientially, we know that the best way to create a chaos is to clear something away. Many meditation practices can be viewed this way. The principled and mindful attention, with a calming intent, to thought processes leads us away from the toxic, repetitive, and mostly negative thoughts that occur in conditioned life. We create a chaos into which new forms of thoughts and experience– which wouldn’t have otherwise existed– can come into being. Sensory deprivation, sleep, and dreaming are also forms of chaos, in so far as they induce experiences that seem not to be produced by the objective world.

Chaos, as a source of something, we welcome so long as we trust our ability to filter the positive from the negative. Chaos, as a state of nothing, we view negatively. We strive to differentiate ourselves from the scarcity, formlessness, and indifference of primordial chaos. It is an open question how far chaos is to be desired. It’s chaos that creates the need to build, and that gives us the tools to do it. Law, order, and structure with intent toward permanence are built by some to protect people against the pain of chaos. However, an alternative approach (more common in Eastern religions) is to embrace chaos and impermanence– to recognize that it is better to adapt to chaos than to cling to the flimsy things that we invent to protect ourselves from it.

It is reductive and useless to call chaos “good” or “bad”. It’s neither. Nor is it random. In fact, some aspects of it (such as unexplored mathematics) are quite structured. It is, however, unexplored and mostly incomprehensible. People find it discomforting, the ultimate chaos (from a human viewpoint) being death. There are, however, degrees to which people accept or avoid it. Those who engage chaos directly will be more creative, but also more volatile. Stepping back from the metaphysics, we have (in chaos) a way to understand economic progress. In pre-industrial times, a person wanting to become rich without harm to others might search for gold. The earth itself was once a chaos. The Greeks acknowledged this by assessing ownership of all material wealth to the temperamental god of the underworld: Hades.

In 2013, gold is a effectively a commodity. It is expensive per ounce, but because a large amount of human service is required to produce that ounce (reflecting the metal’s rarity). Nothing special distinguishes that service. So, those who aspire to wealth (or growth) in 2013 are not likely to dig for gold. The technocrats don’t have a special proclivity for digging the earth in search of a yellow metal. They leave that to the specialists who have the equipment. Instead, they mine chaos.

Entrepreneurs and innovators scan various chaoses with the hope of putting something together that is of value to other people. Transfer occurs from one chaos (unrealized ideas) to a painful one that there is benefit in filling (unmet human desires). It might be called “magic”. It isn’t. However, it’s unpredictable and intermittent by nature. Once that chaotic transmission is completed, the work involved is no longer inherently exciting. It’s a commodity. (Making easier the jobs of those who have to do it, on the other hand, remains potentially fruitful.) Once the chaos is taken out of the equation, what remains is dull labor.

From chaos, we can understand the nature of convexity. There are some people who have the skill to go “into” chaos (or, at least, a subchaos related to a specialty) and find something useful. To the unskilled, chaos simply looks “random” and dark. To continue the metaphor of chaos as a space, the improbability of a find is (to an unskilled person) an exponential function of how deep into chaos it lives, because more “lucky” steps are required for an unskilled person to get there, and the multiplication of low probabilities has that effect. In other words, the farther a find or job is from the well-ordered and easily understood territory, the more that personal skill and knowledge matter, it’s likely an exponential relationship. Things being valuable in proportion to their rarity, we see where convexity comes from.

The risk thing

Industrial businesses begin as chaos-mining operations, but after carving out a space of order, seek to protect it. Standardization becomes the goal. We can’t exactly quantify (or even perfectly define) chaos, but we can quantify risk. Risk and chaos are fairly related. Risk pertains to how interactions with chaos might affect an entity’s economic health. It’s not concerned with the whole of chaos, but only about what threats might come out of it. Financial risk is even measurable, to some degree, enabling portfolio managers to discuss “how much risk” the company has. We’ve now seen a mature commoditization of that kind of risk, with markets able to price assets not only based on their expected (average-case) yield but to account of risk according to what the principal players find desirable.

All else the same, risk is considered undesirable. Most people would rather have $5 million than a 50% chance at $10 million. Let’s separate the value of an asset into its mean value and a zero-mean risk variable. The first possibility is that one has $5 million. The second is that one has $5 million plus a 50% chance of winning $5 million and a 50% chance of losing $5 million. Most people would value that zero-mean risk negatively. A person with the latter portfolio might be inclined to “sell” that risk for -$10,000– that is, to pay $10,000 for someone else to take that variation and have a solid $4.99 million instead. Much of finance is about figuring out fair prices at which to transfer risk.

I’ve previously discussed law and chaos in the context of alignment. Are these connected with the chaos described above? Absolutely. Risk and chaos aren’t the same thing; the latter is an injection from chaos known to have an effect on one’s well-being. Computationally, we process risk because chaos is beyond what we can quantify. Civil alignment correlates to a person’s attraction or repulsion to chaos. Lawful people tend, in general, to have faith in the infrastructure that humans have created to hold chaos at bay. They prefer by-the-book solutions to problems because they fear the chaos of improvisation. Chaotic people, on the other hand, see chaos as potentially beneficial. They want to mine it. Measured in terms of risk, lawful people are, in general, going to be more risk averse. Chaotic people tend to be risk seekers.

This is not necessarily true, however, in terms of financial risk, on account of its commoditzation. Financial risk can be separated into an expected value and a zero-mean random variable whose variability itself can be measured. This enables the commoditization (measurement, trade) of financial risk. That’s not to say that there aren’t black swan, out-of-context, risks out there (that rarely follow Gaussian distributions) but those are often placed in a different category. Because of this commoditization, financial risk has largely been divorced from a personal law/chaos bias. Lawful people with means will pursue investment strategies with high volatility in order to get high returns; those with less means or likely to need liquidity soon might favor less volatile strategies. However, it has little to do with a person’s often visceral reaction to chaos.

If financial risk is a commodity, it can be allocated. Traders have risk allotments based on past performance and seniority that represent how much risk they can take on behalf of the firm. Such rules are necessary to resolve the conflict of interest that exists. Traders, usually paid on commission, have an upside-biased risk profile: making $40 million is twice as good as making $20 million, but losing $20 million and losing $40 million are identical– both result in getting fired, but there’s no further consequence. Without risk limits, traders would have the incentive to take on risks that the firm (absorbing wins and losses) would not want.

Typical business organizations do not have as well-formed an understanding of risk as trading desks, because financial risk has been mostly commoditized, while the performance and chaotic risks that businesses deal with cannot be. However, that mentality is still in force. The organization earns a profit because it takes on risk: otherwise, in a competitive market, there should not be profits. There is, therefore, a certain amount of risk to be expected, and little more should be tolerated. As a trading desk would distribute risk allocations among its traders, a standard business organization attempts to create a risk allocation regime for its people. The firm must allow some small set of people to take chaotic risks, because the world is lawless and volatile and a firm that ignores chaos outright will struggle to thrive. Those people are called executives. Then there are people trusted with financial and performance risks (such as assessing people to be hired and fired). Those categories of risk are seen as “less dangerous” because financial risk is easy to measure, and performance risk over concave labor, while not directly tradable, falls within a tight bell curve. Those people are called managers. Workers, in this model, should not be trusted with any risk at all. As the organization sees it, they already bring too much risk by walking in the door to have any right to ask for more.

In the optimization model put forward for the corporation, I discussed the idea that a manager’s job is to hill climb to the top of a neighborhood (gradient ascent) and find a local maximum, while executives are trusted with non-local explorations that might lead to finding better hills. Non-locality implies that the executive is going into uncharted territory, or engaging directly with chaos. He’s not, however, typically allowed to go very far in, but he has some non-zero chaotic risk allocation.

The human side

One way to view the organization’s miserly risk allocation protocol is to say that it’s inhumane and demoralizing. Engagement with chaos is part of what makes us human, is it not? Most Americans participate in activities that are more industrious and difficult– such as picking their own fruit, open-source programming, and independent writing– than their pointless, subordinate office jobs. Even risk-taking is a hobbyist activity, if sometimes a destructive one, in the form of gambling (engagement with an otherwise uninteresting chaos). “Work”, for most people, is a boring and unhealthy psychological monoculture, leading to the question: why do people tolerate it in the first place?

Risk and chaos are the forces at play. Deep into chaos is somewhere that most people don’t want to be. It’s lonely, unsettling, and weird. Without financial constraints, most people would still fall into routines over time: people, places and work that make them happy. So there is an inherent willingness for those who are more chaos-averse to enter the ordered zone of a facile subordinate position. There are psychological reasons for people to take the MacLeod Loser deal. Many people would rather have the comfort of a stable group than attempt to lead it and risk rejection or group dissolution. Organizations exist to diminish chaotic risk for themselves, but in doing so, create a realm that is highly ordered and allow the chaos-averse to make a home there.

There are also the financial aspects, and that discussion becomes a bit less humane. People make the financial Loser deal because most of them have no choice. They need a stable monthly income. That trade, both from a micro- and macroeconomic perspective, tends to get worse over time. The low savings of lifetime wage-takers forces them to continue making this risk-reducing trade, limiting their leverage, and consigning them to take deals that are increasingly risky (end of corporate loyalty) but increasingly costly to them. It’s a feedback loop that keeps “the 99%” tied in to a certain pattern where they are forced to buy risk reduction, even if it brings them down to a subsistence wage.

There are some, however, who react with a certain insubordination. They get what business corporations are about and learn quickly how to play them. Initially, they will not be allocated chaotic risk by their firms. They just take it. These are the MacLeod Sociopaths.

Convexity and chaotic acceleration

Business corporations exist to create a process that reliably generates income. Their initial architects might glance around in chaos early on to find a source of profit, but once that is accomplished, they are almost all about law. What little engagement with chaos the firm needs is handled by a nerve center containing a small set of people called “executives”. Everything else lives in, or is forced to live in, the concave, far-from-chaos world of “another day, another dollar”.

The industrial world began when scientific advances altered the labor model. I’ve discussed concavity and convexity, but what’s the labor model that has been with humanity for most of its existence, before the industrial era? A binary one, in which there are compliance and noncompliance. That’s the world of slave labor. A noncompliant person was beaten, a compliant one was not. This judgment of compliance might not have had any connection with reality, of course, and hardworking people frequently got the “noncompliant” treatment. It was about emotion and perceived loyalty. The industrial world, in which productivity was derived from systems of conditions rather than exertion alone, encouraged people to look into concerns like morale and quality of training as “hidden” force multipliers that mattered at scale, far more than individual perceptions of loyalty. It no longer matted how many compliant people one had, but how they were arranged. The concave model replaced the binary loyalty-based model of slave labor, and it became clear that coercive labor was no longer tenable. Semi-coercive wage labor, with the worker financially dependent but free enough to change bosses, won out.

Since the 1940s, the binary model of labor has returned, but in a different and benign form: computing. Given a job, properly specified, a computer will do it without complaint. Such machines are extremely good at following deterministic laws. In almost all cases, a computer program will get the right answer to a well-formed problem either 100% of the time, or 0% (a bug). Exceptions (non-deterministic “Heisenbugs”) exist and are extremely painful to deal with, but they tend to be rare in critical components, at least by human standards. Almost no human could multiply two 100-by-100 matrices without mistakes. If the labor is intrinsically binary in value, we can specify requirements and usually program to them. If it is concave, we can often specify what perfect completion (or, at least, an arbitrarily close approximation) is and program for that. Work that lives in the lawful world that human society has already explored is all being done, or will soon be done, by machines.

What’s left for us to do? Convexity, which will require us to move away from semi-coercive labor to a fully free system based on intrinsic motivation. The industrial world saw risk as a commodity that could transferred, and allocated the right to take risks to a small number of people. That works for the typical financial (or performance) risk, since it can be separated into a constant expected value and zero-mean random variable, the latter of which can be traded (often “synthetically” through derivate contracts). In the convex world this separation of risk cannot be performed. It doesn’t make sense. Workers not allowed to take creative risks won’t create. It won’t be useful to employ them, then. The three-tiered corporation ceases to be functional.

What remains, once the machines have conquered the concave world, is the chaos of an unsolved problem. Can we handle it, as humans? Sure. We always have. But how will corporations survive it? They exist to produce law but, in the technological era, the rate at which a company will need to grow to be competitive is one that is innately chaotic. Some companies claim (most, without meaning it) that they want every employee to participate in the growth process. Not so far from now, that will be reality, but that requires a dramatically different view of the organization.

I was interacting with a blogger friend tonight who does not think there are sociopaths, only people who accuse each other of being sociopaths.

I don’t agree, but as always, blueness makes good points. This has become yet another stolen term. We throw language at each other, we steal it, we co-opt it for our own selfish purposes. We treat it like crap, flinging it at each other.

What does “natural” mean these days? Absolutely nothing. It doesn’t even have a legal definition.

What’s a sociopath? Somebody you don’t like, blueness says. I will argue that some people are likable and dangerous, people with the morals of housecats. Except we like housecats. There’s that. 

Maybe a sociopath is just feral. Except feral predators don’t try to trick you. They lie in wait, but you’re supposed to know how to watch out for that. They don’t show up in coffee shops and sweet talk you.

I’m trying to work with the concept that there aren’t any sociopaths, even though I don’t buy it, because I respect blueness a great deal, and when a friend tries to get something across, I try to listen.

If there aren’t any sociopaths, what else isn’t there? 

I’ll leave it at that.