Notes of many things 6: The revenge of the notes

Against leadership

The concept of “leadership” as it exists in the corporate world (and through metastasis, the public service, academia and occasionally even the arts) is cognitive sludge. Like all the worst concepts, it either means far too much or far too little. Either it means:

“Success is defined as directing people to do things, and having the capacity to do such, and this is something we should be aiming for all the time.”

Or it means something completely vacuous:

“At some point, most forms of success will inevitably involve influencing the behaviour of others, whether by example, or by giving them ideas, or by directing them, or by doing the first to do something. Anyway, this is good.”

It makes the core exemplar or prototype of success and what we should be striving for the manager, the general, the politician- and when called out on this, takes evasive action “No, you see, leadership could be anything at all- when you paint something inspirational and the world starts to copy you, that’s leadership. When you set a higher bar for customer service, that’s leadership. In fact, when you do anything at all that influences anyone, that’s leadership.”

It is beloved of CEOs and other corporate leaders because it redefines success in other areas in the language of what they do. It flatters their vanity, but I have no interest in flattering their vanity.

Einstein, David Hume, Edith Stein, Sophie Scholl none of these people were leaders except in a loose and misleading analogical sense that conceals far more than it reveals.

Making decisions ethically doesn’t always mean making them using clear rules

[I’m always in two minds about trigger warnings, but a potentially upsetting discussion of sexual violence follows]

If you try to be completely principled about morality, in the sense of making all moral calls on the basis of clear rules, you’ll go nuts. You can be a good person who genuinely cares about moral arguments and doesn’t just rationalise the result they want without claiming to make every decision in accordance with clear rules. You can and should make decisions on the basis of hard-to-articulate points of degree in some cases. Sometimes it’s okay to go “that’s too far man”.

There (was) a rape simulator game on Steam, it was banned. I’m glad it was banned from Steam. I’m glad people threatened Steam with boycotts etc. till Steam banned it. In general, I think there’s too much “civil society” censorship implemented by forcing platforms to take things down. In this case, I support market censorship. What’s the principled difference? No particular thing, I simply think it was simply above a certain badness threshold.

You must be careful playing this card, but there is a time and a place.

“Are you opposed to consensual non-consent? How is this game any different to a couple roleplaying?”

I dunno how exactly I’d draw the line, but for one thing, it’s apparent this game has attracted a much unhealthier crowd.

“How is a rape simulator any different from a murder simulator”

To start, we’ve already got a lot of murder simulators, so that cats out of the bag. Another point, it seems like almost everyone wants to play murder simulators, but a very particular sort of person it seems wants to play the rape simulator.

Some commentors objected to this note by saying that I did give reasons. This is true, but giving some reasons that weigh into a decision is very different to giving a rule or maxim.

To sum: Maybe I’m just making an apologia for my own narrow mindedness here, but it seems to me that sometimes something just exceeds a certain threshold, and you’ve got to say “Nuh-uh” even if you can’t give clear criteria. Agree or disagree?

Marxism and the tariffs

Lotta speculation on whether the Trump tariffs economic crash “disproves” Marxism as a mode of sociological and political analysis- an economic crisis caused by the will of one man. My answer: No.

1. The most important observation in this regard is that Trump did pull back from most of his tariffs and did so seemingly because the markets ordered him to.

2. The best variants of Marxism have always acknowledged a lot of room for agency, including individual agency.

3. Marxism has, for a long time, acknowledged the capacity of capital burn itself by getting too close to the far right. A lot of the “safeguards meant to stop government from blowing up the market” are much more fixed against the left than the right.

4. I think it was John Mearsheimer who said that theories are only meant to work in 80% of cases. Marxism is a theory; it abstracts away from some of the complexity of the real world, this is such a case.

5. Although a lot of this was pushed by Trump’s unique features and temperament, it does, to a degree, relate to objective factors. America is pushed in one direction by its capitalist, and increasingly in a contradictory direction by its striving to maintain its waning global hegemony. The striving for hegemony often exceeds that optimal for nurturing capital. While this isn’t strictly part of the basic Marxist theory, and theory of history focused on objective conditions will acknowledge that the fight for global power isn’t always reducible to the interests of national capital but follows its own partially independent logic.

Why the weak have so much trouble banding together against the strong

Yes, much of the reason that people go after the weak and not the strong when things go wrong is that it’s easier by definition to attack the weak than the strong, but there’s another factor. Elites are distant- cognitively, physically, and socially, and when things start going wrong, irritation is attracted to the near.

A few things have gone wrong lately, but right now, I was just served cold and stale pancakes (*). That feels so much more real than any struggles with those who hold power over me, let alone a government. Our political instincts were created for a pre-agricultural world in which “politically powerful but socially distant from you” would scarcely make sense. How many peasant revolts have been averted because it’s a more salient option to terrorise one’s family, yell at a shopkeeper, or speculate darkly about a new immigrant family?

(*) Of course I didn’t get mad, I’m not a dickhead, but surely, I wanted to.

In praise of the formal meeting

One of the major points of the timeless Tyranny of Structurelessness is that many people think of the committee, the parliament, the meeting etc. as places of scheming - in fact, they are the opposite. There is no more honourable way of making decisions than by meeting, with equal speaking and voting rights. It may not always be the best way to make decisions in each context, but it is the least duplicitous.

When you’re making decisions outside a committee by informal vibe, you can select who happens to be there when the conversation happens. You can choose who is “in the loop”, who “happens to be around” when the call is made. Typically, at a meeting, everyone speaks to everyone, everyone with membership can attend, and you can’t just change this at a whim. Even when attendance and speaking rights are manipulated it is at least obvious. The decisions of meetings can be vague, but they are less likely to be so than the informal compact- they invite far less executive discretion in their fulfilment. There is a formal stop and vote before each decision, rather than someone deciding that the meeting “seems to be heading” in the direction of a certain consensus, as often happens with chats.

Meetings are often despised by the cool and socially graceful as decision making mechanism for exactly these reasons. For people perceived as boring or graceless, meetings are the closest they’ll ever get to an equal say. Subsequently, there is a stereotype that such “bores” relish in meeting. Bores perhaps, but honest, thorough and principled bores.

Nets

The net likely had numerous independent origins. I wonder if any of its inventors were inspired by the way the light plays like a net on water.

Hardnosed Inc- a decision problem

You apply for a job with HardNose Inc. HardNose Inc are notorious for screening for “whingers”. They really don’t want to hire “whingers”. Apparently, they’re pretty good at it, picking up subtle clues that would elude others- sometimes they even know whether or not a person is a “whinger” better than the person themselves.

After you’ve left the interview, you reflect on two things:

1. Some aspects of the interview seem to have been a bit poorly run in a way that disadvantaged you. You still feel like there’s a reasonable chance you’ll get the job- so long as they didn’t think you’re a whinger- but if it weren’t for those unfair aspects your chances would be better. You reckon there’s a 60% chance you’ll get the job if you’re not a whinger and a 10% chance you’ll get the job if you are a whinger.

2. You have a friend who works for the company. It’s a long shot, but if you had whinge to him about the flaws in the process there’s a chance he will suggest internally correcting for those aspects of the interview that disadvantaged you, and there’s a 5% chance that will change the result so you get the job. Assume there’s no chance the company will find out you whinged to your friend either now or later.

However, if you do this, you will know that you are most definitely A WHINGER, and this will give you strong evidence you won’t get the job.

Should you whinge to your friend?

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