"BE SLIGHTLY EVIL: A PLAYBOOK FOR SOCIOPATHS" by Venkatesh Rao

• Tempo was a book about decision-making based on a rather ambitious Grand Design that covered a lot of territory I was already familiar with.
• “The Gervais Principle” was a series I wrote on ribbonfarm.com about organizational politics and decision-making.
• As you learn more, you should have less need for moral opinions.
• I am endlessly fascinated by the idea of entropy. It suggests that not only is the universe indifferent to our presence, it is at least mildly hostile to it.
• in life you eventually have to decide whether to be somebody, or do something.
• The straight path in your head turns into spaghetti in the real world.
• If you are driven by your own principles, you’ll generally search desperately for a calling, and when you find one, it will consume your life.
• As Shaw said, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him. The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself. All progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
• If you are reasonable, and decide to simply be somebody, you can achieve your “be somebody” objective and wrap up your very successful life, having offended nobody, and with nobody caring that you actually lived.
• If you are unreasonable, even if you actually manage to find a calling and do something that you will be remembered for, chances are high you’ll die destitute and unrecognized, after a lifetime of maneuvering, fighting and making implacable enemies and loyal-to-the-death friends at every turn.
• Realism is a way of viewing the world, pragmatism is the related way of acting within it.
• Action for the Slightly Evil favors chaos creation.
• if you don’t know who the sucker is, it is probably you).
• When you are genuinely in a fight, you don’t want a fair fight if you can help it. You should prefer a dumb enemy over a smart one.
• You can only stabilize at Slightly Evil if you make sure you always “pick on someone your own size” in a general sense.
• “When you give people power, they basically start acting like fools.
• Reality is usually somewhere between neutral and slightly unpleasant,
• In America, all politics and religion has been idealist for the last century.
• Felt status, played status and perceived status have almost nothing to do with each other at a fundamental level.
• Status is a variable whose importance is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• The best way to break patterns in random ways is simply to play situations in ways that suit your situational objectives.
• Even if you are only slightly evil, you need to pick one of these two styles; obvious wolf, or wolf in sheep’s clothing? I recommend “obvious wolf,” but done intelligently.
• To wield influence, it pays to appear predictable in very simple ways around others. Fly your true colors high.
• Trying to be yourself and expressing your true personality in every situation certainly is a very adolescent thing to do. Expressing yourself completely is downright childish. That amounts to publishing all your buttons for anybody to push.
• I believe that all organizations are psychic prisons.
• every kind of social context has certain prison-like elements.
• The smart way is to acknowledge the reality of true conflict and judiciously decide, for each obstacle, whether to go through it or around it.
• Going around is generally cheaper and less damaging.
• Plowing through an element of opposition demonstrates a willingness to fight when necessary, force of will and social intelligence in navigating status hierarchies.
• “Going through” is almost never the right strategy when dealing with staff. You must pick somebody with line responsibilities.
• Playing exactly by the rules is a powerful form of industrial collective action known as “work to rule,”†† in which workers stick religiously to their job descriptions, defined policies and procedures.
• Rules are most often designed to protect and insure rather than enable and create.
• If your team can’t escape certain consequences when things go wrong, by saying “my manager said it was okay,” you are not doing enough for them.
• Confirmation bias is the tendency of human beings to preferentially seek out information that confirms their existing beliefs.
• one of the easiest ways to figure someone out is to look at the information they choose to consume.
• Drawing conclusions from people’s reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the most robust ways to read people.
• Most people are far too cautious about making such judgments out of a sense of political correctness. Don’t be.
• First, lying and lie-detection are extremely non-trivial disciplines.
• To lie at a level that can fool experts who are used to being lied to (such as cops or polygraph machines), or to lie-detect at that skill level, takes years of practice.
• Second, in case you hadn’t noticed, very few well-adjusted people (“well-adjusted” is not a compliment in my book) lie outright about anything consequential.
• The point is, the everyday social world is not a harsh and dangerous one built on widespread deceit. It is mostly a slightly timid, risk-averse and benign world, full of people who are uncomfortable lying about anything serious.
• The lying happens at the extremes: lots of little white lies on one end, that don’t matter and don’t snowball, and a smaller world of professional, risk-managed, money-making lying on the other end, that includes marketers, cops, con-men and spies.
• For everyday use, being able to tell apart people who are telling the truth from people who think they are telling the truth, is a far more important skill than lie detection. There are two important pseudo-truth-telling behaviors.
• The first behavior is candor. When somebody leans back, opens with something like “let me be completely honest here,” and says things in a very sincere, disarming and open way, chances are they believe what they are saying.
• Truth-telling requires you to first calmly separate your feelings from the facts and tell yourself the truth before you tell others. Candid people often fail to separate things this way and blurt out unprocessed thoughts.
• The second behavior is cursing. When somebody gets mad and offers an opinion interspersed with curses.
• Cold-blooded listening is, for slightly evil sociopaths, what nice, good-natured “active listening” is for losers.
• the only way to get to total impassivity in the face of strident criticism and insults is practice.
• Assuming that pseudo-technical labeling equals inoculation is a delusion pattern peculiar to geekdom.
• An interpersonal interaction is open if both parties are seeking to trade or discover information. It is closed if even one party is seeking status validation, conflict or harmony instead.
• So you get the following four basic types of attitude informing an interaction: Condescension: I am better than you and for you Contempt: I am better than you and against you Supplication: I am worse than you and for you Insolence: I am worse than you and against you
• The key to conflict without ego is the observation that you cannot get mad at facts.
• in routine negotiations, almost all the work is done away from the actual negotiating table, and before the critical face-to-face encounters.
• The best way to avoid negotiation altogether is to do so much pre-work that you understand the other parties’ options, costs and benefits better than they do, and can actually work out the “best for everybody” solution before you even get to the table.
• Revenge emerges when you add up two traits: an innate tendency towards vindictiveness and a capacity for long-range planning.
• The modern world is an uneasy mix of tribal and non-tribal dynamics.
• never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
• Our world is not fully civilized.
• To put it in the context of the most familiar battleground for most of us, if you do not push back when pushed in the office, you will have people walking all over you.
• Status is a matter of social perception.
• If you aren’t deceiving others, you are likely deceiving yourself. Or you’re in denial.
• Any sort of deception, to be justifiable within your personal morality, needs to be driven by a certain amount of moral certainty regarding your own intentions.
• When a true failure looms, you must play or be played.
• Wanting to be liked is a significant need that must be overcome on the slightly evil path.
• In information wars, filters are power and useless data are weapons.
• When two parties have divergent agendas, the party that controls data flows is usually the one that wins. To control how a decision is framed and made, you have to control the data flows that feed into that decision.
• being intelligently data-driven is simply about asking the right questions at the right time, which is something that takes hard thinking and a sense of timing rather than technical skills.It
• more data is only useful if it is being generated and intelligently analyzed faster than options are expiring due to a ticking clock.
• They key is to recognize that CDDDs do everything they do out of risk aversion, but are hazy about what data reduce what risks and uncertainties.
• If you know that a decision will tend towards a default option you like, if left unmade, you can suggest delaying or deferring a decision until more data is in.
• More generally, sending people off on useless learning missions and digital wild-goose chases is one of the best ways to distract them from substantive issues.
• A real thinker will not move on to technical questions about sampling (“is this i.i.d?”) before thinking through the qualitative and narrative questions (“are women really the target market here?”).
• Sometimes conversations just start off wrong. So wrong that you need to hit the reboot button.
• The basic trick is simple: you repeat all or part of their opening line, but with zero emotional content. Deadpan.
• When faced with an emotionally charged stimulus, your own emotional reaction will race ahead and censor the options generated by your cognitive reaction.
• The key to giving way graciously, as it happens, is to slow your movements down to below the walking tempo of the oncomer. This is a status win because slow movements are associated with higher status.
• The problem here with K is that she forgot the first rule of dueling: as the challenged party, you need to exercise your prerogative to choose the time, place and manner of combat.
• Impro by Keith Johnstone.
• Here’s the effective method: you need to interrupt as soon as you’ve roughly understood that there is an objectionable point being made (which can be before the speaker has finished making it), and before you’ve decided what to say. You do so by thinking out aloud, going “Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!” or “Ehhhhummmmmm!” clearly, and stretching out your interrupt phrase over several seconds, until the interruptee shuts up and looks towards you.
• Important people feel confident enough about their situational status to effectively say, “I disagree, but I am important enough that you should all shut up and wait while I figure out why, even if it means wasting 10 seconds of everybody’s time.”
• Question evasion is a highly-recognizable behavior, even when done well.
• The key is to make the original decision dependent on another decision which requires your subjective interpretation of some emotion-laden missing information.
• By injecting enough subjective and emotion-laden information into a decision indirectly, you can make it impossible for others to question your right to make the call unilaterally.
• For the first law, in place of win-win or no-deal, I offer you: adult-adult or no deal.
• It is important to avoid demanding, or promising, absolute loyalty.
• When you deal with adults, loyalty is not a value you have to apply but a budget you have to manage.
• The second law is about drawing a good line in the sand between slightly evil and true evil: any loyalty you offer or accept has to be contingent but sincere.
• The third law of slightly evil loyalty: never be your own #1.
• To summarize: Adult-adult or no deal: don’t ask for, or offer, absolute loyalties Contingent but sincere: don’t play loyalty games Don’t be your own #1: it is easier to Be Slightly Evil on behalf of others
• Ultimately, the only rules that actually matter in competition are the ones individuals and organizations impose on themselves and voluntarily follow.
• Habits and automation are at the heart of the vulnerability that makes inside-the-tempo attacks possible.