The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development | Hacker News Reader

The Gervais Principle III: The Curse of Development

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91 pointsshalmanese27 comments

This guy is remarkable at both analysis (which is pretty common in our line of work) and rhetoric (which isn't so much). I'm not sure why but my mind keeps returning to the thought of him having the makings of a ridiculously effective attorney. Anyways, this was very well written. Definitely worth a read.

He is exceptionally well read

I thought this paragraph was a work of art:

The term “arrested development” is now deprecated by professional psychologists, and has been replaced by “developmentally disabled.” This is good news for us pop psychologists hawking crude over-simplifications about functional adults, since we can safely steal the term. I assume you are not retarded enough to read this as a theory of clinical developmental-disablement.

The juxtaposition of the nuances of lay psychology against the word 'retarded' is jarring.. but I like it.

"We can state the root cause of the Dwight-Phyllis dynamic as follows: the depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party."

There's some interesting analysis to the post - which seems as relevant to game theory as to developmental psychology, however...

Its practical application / warning seems to me (as it resonates with my personal experience, too):

Know when not to enter a game on terms that are stacked against you.

cf: A jogger beside my car challenges me to see who can get to the office faster. When I accept he says, "well, we have to level the field: get out of your car," knowing that with us both on foot his regular training makes him the winner.

i.e., know that there are some discussions where rational-analytic ability are irrelevant. Try talking rationally about politics/religion with a dedicated know-nothing. Or convincing a 4 year-old that he'll someday be interesting in engaging reproductive parts with another human being for the pleasure of it.

The irony is that he says "well, we have to level the field: get out of your car" knowing full well that he's actually just unleveling it in his direction.

These are interesting, but I can't shake the feeling that someone could produce an equally well-written series that drew completely opposite conclusions and I would find it just as convincing.

This is why we see so many articles on HN about writing well. It is a skill I want to have!

My friend Jon's response:

This is really a stupid article. Attempting to generalize institutional truths from a show that sensationalizes the workings of one individual company is just silly, almost as silly as basing any kind of argument on moronic caricatures of "personality types" like "the sociopath." The show isn't brilliant because it examines the modern corporation, its brilliant because it takes a very generic, very relateable institutional setting and then uses it to examine the characters, which are not abstract caricatures but in fact very complicated and dynamic.

"If you leave out the clear marked-for-clueless characters like Dwight and Andy, you are left with the two most interesting characters in the show: the will-he-won’t-he sociopath-in-the-making, Jim, and the strange Toby. Toby is a curious case — intellectually a sociopath, but without the energy or ambition to be an active sociopath."

Dwight and Andy are much more interesting characters than just "they're clueless because they like the company"- Dwight especially- and Toby is actually one of the least interesting on the show, hes mostly just there as a foil for Michael. Note as well, that this is sort of a vulgar Marxist argument, "corporations are made of sociopathic exploiters and clueless exploited," except that, unlike Marx, it rests upon the notion that the institution can be explained through the actions of specific individuals or "character types," rather than the complex social structres with which the institution interacts, most importantly the dynamics of a global economy. This is what so absurd, ultimately, about those stupid fucking books in the airport about "packing your parachute" and shit, individual firms might perform better than others based upon managerial skills, but an entire sector or economy over a longer term is going to be determined by much bigger factors than just "can the sociopath find saps to do his grunt work." Continuing with the vulgar Marxism, he points to the idea of 'alienation,' that 'clueless' people like Michael and Dwight have a masochistic relationship to the firm, which he uses to argue that this is why Michael gets promoted, the firm needs idiots in the middle because they are company men despite being idiots. Alienation, in this context, that they want to find their work meaningful but it simply isn't, it exists for some purpose other than the one that they wish to find in it. This is, of course, essentially the absurdity of Michael's character, he is a hyperbolic representation of the alienated reality of working at a corporation insofar as he has no separation between his public and private life. This isn't because "organizations are essentially run by stupid people because only an idiot would believe in an organization instead of rationally maximizing his utility," but because particular organizations- capital - are subject to a logic that is alien to the interests of the people that operate the institution, the profit motive. I think part of the reason for these idiot management books is that they attempt to deal with this basic reality- people have to be managed despite it being ultimately despotic- without being honest about the inequalities that constitute capitalism. How can you get someone to "believe" in a corporation if they aren't part of its decision making process? Anarchy in the market and despotism in the factory. It is asinine to generalize "institutions" in general without recognizing the historical specificity at work. Not only that, but it misses why the Office is such a fantastic show.

That was just brilliant. I hadn't read the previous installations before, but I finally did. I bought him a coffee.

Is anyone else troubled by the fact that these psychological studies, once you've been exposed to them, seem indispensable to everyday life, but you just can't get used to the idea of actually studying them much?

Maybe it's just the clinical or analytical nature of formal psychology that makes it hard to swallow. Perhaps reading the Proverbs or other sage literature dispenses the same helpful advice, but without the clinical self-awareness.

And, aren't psychologists the ultimate sociopaths, distorting the metaphysics or their surroundings?

Speaking as a former psych major, I don't think there's any real psychology behind his writing, aside from the basic concept of a sociopath. His writing is closer to philosophy or pop psychology, and there is nothing clinical or formal about it...

> And, aren't psychologists the ultimate sociopaths, distorting the metaphysics or their surroundings?

No. Writing a paper about SQL injection attacks is much different than using a SQL injection attack to grab credit card numbers.

there is nothing clinical or formal about it

But do you think he's wrong? and if so, where?

I don't think my psych major qualifies me to say that any more than anyone else.

It's one of those essays that sounds deep, but I am questioning exactly how deep it really is. Oh well, I am still questioning then.

It's another prism. Add it to your toolkit, apply, observe. Don't ever settle for just one, though.

Exactly. His ideas aren't science, even social science.

His philosophy is a prism--like analyzing a story in terms of Jungian archetypes, or a picture in terms of phallic imagery. There isn't a falsifiable theory in there anywhere. Yes this applies to Freud too, which is why his ideas have largely been discredited and ignored in mainstream psychology for years.

Come on... do you think the theory holds ground?

I don't think the author makes a claim that he is a psychologist, he refers himself as pop psychologist,probably jokingly

From the article:

  The term arrested development is now deprecated by
  professional psychologists and has been replaced by 
  developmentally disabled.This is good news for <b>us pop 
  psychologists</b> hawking crude over-simplifications about
  functional adults, since we can safely steal the term.

What I really enjoy about these is that they are written from the point of view of his "sociopath" rather then the more conventional "loser" observer.

You get a sense of being disgust at all these "transactions" leading nowhere.

If you read the previous articles on a small little screen like my laptop, this will turn the scroll bars into a reasonable size by hiding all of the comments:

  javascript:void(jQuery('dd, dt').hide())

You might enjoy viewing the article using Readability. Not only does it make the text bigger and easier to read, it suppresses comments and other additional content.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Hollywood loves to take a small, clever European movie and turn it into a big, stupid American one. This strikes me as the application of the Hollywood process to Stephen Potter's _One-Upmanship_.

Yet another emotionally unpleasant yet viciously necessary dose of reality.

Which part did you find unpleasant.

The ones that hit home ?

Do you want to elaborate?

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