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Comment by 23B1 | Hacker News Reader

I always love it when this pops up. I'm unfamiliar with the origins of this particular version, but the Office of Strategic Services, working alongside the SOE and other Allied intelligence agencies distributed a wide array of manuals, pamphlets, and propaganda like this starting in WWII.

I'm a former Green Beret, and we reference a lot of this stuff when studying guerrilla warfare (we call it Unconventional Warfare). Here's a graphic I love to reference – the Soro pyramid. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Original-version-of-the-...

and here's an updated one: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333222899/figure/fi...

This shows how sabotage, resistance, and underground activities progress towards full-on guerrilla war.

It was deeply frustrating for me to get out of the service and go to work in large organizations who seemingly employed these very techniques as a matter of practice!

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Organizations, large and small, are all pathological. It isn't an epidemic of terrible social accidents, it's inherent to organizations as a method of grouping humans.

Essentially, people (and AFAIK, all primates) have a built in behavioural system to take excess credit for wins and minimize blame for losses. The details are a nasty tangle of evolutionary psychology but the consequences, in groups, are blame deficits. These deficits typically manifest as a simultaneous doublethink mix of low morale and unrealistic optimism. That's the pathology.

Good personnel management is about leveraging this instead of fighting it. I recommend The Organization Man (1956) and Moral Mazes (1988) if you want to read on the topic and/or fall asleep fast but if somebody knows a more recent text on the topic, please suggest it.

The Gervais Principle comes to mind.

Took a quick skim at that blog:

* It seems initially derivative of Moral Mazes - there are a couple sentences almost lifted wholesale.

* Part three seems more psychoanalytic than Moral Mazes and quite original.

* The fannish references to The Office are kinda irritating IMO. Might be less so if I'd watched more than a few episodes, probably the same for others.

I'm gonna give it a deeper look though.

A great read. Dude is a good writer.

Terrible point though. It's a humor post masquerading as a business / organizational analysis.

It filters 1950s mgmt books through a humorous comic and then through a fictional TV show. An organization viewed through the lens of fiction, then viewed through the lens of more fiction (a comic), and then through some old business management books. Very Simulation-vs-Simulacra.

> Essentially, people (and AFAIK, all primates) have a built in behavioural system to take excess credit for wins and minimize blame for losses.

Where did you get this from? Seems like a cynical view. I think it's just one end of a spectrum. I've definitely worked with people like this, but I also some that do the opposite - wins are for the team, failures are on them.

It applies at the team level as well. Those team players you know probably sing the victories of the team just a little more loudly than they televise their own failures.

It isn’t really that Machiavellian. At any operational level, humans and human organizations give more attention to their own successes than failures.

I initially came across it in somebody's review of The Red Queen but idk who. The book isn't exactly a must-read, though.

I was skeptical at first but I keep seeing the behaviour around me.

Taking credit for unearned wins while sloughing off deserved blame isn't general to hominids; the name for that pathology is narcissism. I'm not saying you're wrong to diagnose certain persons or organizations with that, but "cynical" is right.

You misunderstand. I'm not talking about manufacturing unearned credit or totally eliminating earned blame, I'm talking about distorting existing, deserved credit/blame to be moderately larger/smaller.

So, some organizations or individuals have a tendency to do this, and the tendency can be measured on a spectrum. There's an opposing spectrum that you're excluding, right? The people who take blame for things they rightly don't have to take blame for, who clean up messes that aren't their responsibility, and who shun credit. There are those people, and (we) keep the world running.

Claiming that the psychology you're projecting is universal is cynical because it excludes those people, or worse attempts to paint their efforts as merely meta-narcissistic victimhood, when lots of people actually just try to correct problems and get shit done.

I can't say that I've ever worked with anyone like that but my experience can't be universal.

I've never worked for a company with fewer than 200 employees, so maybe there's a correlation there.

I've never worked for a company with more than 30 employees or so, or on a team larger than 4... so it may be that the self-effacing people I'm describing tend to show up in smaller organizations. Or it may be that small teams bring out a side of people that's more willing to share the glory and shoulder the blame.

I've certainly worked with the type of people you're describing, but they stand out like a sore thumb in a smaller work environment. Their ego becomes a subject of contempt.

And also, just on a human level, there are many of us who don't aspire to glory. It might be as simple as having an internal sense of pride in knowing you did a job well, even if no one will ever know that you were the one who did it. I have a lot of friends who fit that description, who simply enjoy tinkering and building things and want little to do with the rest of the world. They make great employees for companies, but they're often overlooked because they don't promote themselves.

It doesn't address this dynamic in particular, but reinventing organizations by Frederic Laloux is one text that makes me optimistic about the possibility of improving human organizational practices.

The most relevant prescription that book makes to your point is probably the proper diffusion of responsibility through empowering everyone to make executive decisions so long as they consult everyone that will be affected first. It's an interesting book.

Interesting how the quality of diagramming is plainly worse in 2013 than in 1966. The 1966 original is more easy to read: the typeface is pleasantly wider, there is no red or blue text on a saturated yellow background. It looks better overall. One part of it is technical limitations (you can't abuse color when you print in monochrome), but it is also that the 1966 version was most likely done by a specialist, and the 2013 version wasn't.

I suspect in 1966 you would send it to typesetters / a graphics department and in 2013 someone does it themselves with a computer. If you have a diagram/graphic made by someone who specialises in making diagrams/graphics, it will likely be better than something made for the same cost in 1966.

And as a matter of substance -- the right-hand vertical black bar on the earlier version says, "Preparation of parallel hierarchies for taking over government positions", but on the newer version, the same text appears on both vertical bars.

That theme as shown in the earlier version seems important, and it's just not there in the newer one.

In current terms, you could see the militia movement in the US as relating to that theme.

While I can appreciate the simplicity of the older version, the lack of padding around text + monochrome made this a sea of black marks to me. Basically illegible. 2013 was much easier to read

It feels like this is happening to the entire country right now.

Yeah, the interesting thing is that we're doing it to ourselves despite our (ostensibly) global supremacy.

Having spent a lot of time looking at what unwinds a country – and I'm no sociologist or geopolitical expert – it generally seems to me that the institutions upon which we depend are unwinding. Pick any – government, business, the economy, the press, the concept of truth.

Maybe those weren't perfect to begin with, but I always tell folks that it's a great opportunity to rebuild those institutions better, instead of sitting around waiting for the apocalypse.

I'm very happy, for instance, to see all the new thinking around the institution education. We all knew it was going to become undone with the democratization of information via the internet, but thanks to COVID, a lot of people are reflecting on the value of sending their kids to (globally underperforming) public schools, or going into debt for college.

> I always tell folks that it's a great opportunity to rebuild those institutions better

One of the big problems right now is that it's easier than ever to just burn down institutions for the sake of a little social or financial profit-- far easier than actually building them up. It's no wonder most people take the easy and profitable road instead of the challenging and unrewarding one.

It's not that this potential didn't exist before, but it is more frictionless than ever thanks to the democratization of information afforded by the internet. There's probably a Turchin-esque "elite overproduction" angle to it as well, where previously the institutions had enough slots to absorb all the talented people who might go this route and give them rewards consummate with their status of keeping the machine running; now there aren't and so people who get left out turn to burning it down instead.

And the lack of antitrust enforcement. It used to be that the power to increase prices was a bust-able monopoly then it somehow all became perverted under Reagan to where actual increased prices are all that matter but those increases are always years later. The bad guys won. Only now are the tides starting to turn.

As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide. I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us.

— lincoln

The term I've heard is 'empire fatigue' - what happens when a global empire is so good at funnelling resources towards the center that the easiest way for anyone trying to get resources for themselves is to get it from inside rather than outside the empire. The fall of Rome is an excellent example, once warring with neighbours became a net cost even in victory, Roman politicians switched to warring with other Roman politicians at an alarming speed.

I was a high school level teacher for about ten years before shifting into tech last year.

To whatever degree we are seeing renewed attention on education due to the Covid disruption, I have trouble sharing your optimism. I feel that we have, in large part, lost the thread on the core responsibilities of public education (leading to unfocused initiatives, weakened internal processes/expectations, wasted resources, reduced teaching candidate quality/numbers, etc). It’s also hard to discuss public education in a productive manner because the circumstances, funding, student population, social problems, etc. all differ so much town-to-town, state-to-state, and so on. The job I did as a HS English teacher in a competitive, wealthy Suburban school district is almost entirely different than the work of my sister teaching Special Ed in a struggling Florida elementary school.

Even here, I hesitate to comment because the conversation is Too Big to adequately engage in this format. My short thesis: we need to do less, much better with higher expectations for everyone involved.

this is basically a manual for how our federal government works.

Ray Dalio’s book was helpful in understanding this period of time, as well as The Fourth Turning.

Definitely just part of the cycle of civilization. Might be helpful to pull up that that framework in order to understand what’s happening.

I’d love to hear any other titles like this. I’m almost done with Disunited Nations by Zehan. Some interesting ideas in there, but the book isn’t as interesting as his ongoing YouTube posts have been this far — just got it today so I’m only have way done.

Which book by East Dalio was it?

Ray*

We've definitely passed the middle of the underground items in the US :/

This would make a great meme template. Add a 'you are here' indicator and comment on any recent news story.

Q-anon is pretty near the top, I'd imagine.

They get a lot of foreign and domestic help, though.

I have been wondering... who's the author of the original Soro Pyramid?

SORO = Special Operations Research Office

I believe it was originally found in this publication: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Human-Factors-Consider...

which you can read here: https://books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&vid=LCCN6...

Without any military experience but some interest in history, this feels a little tainted with domestic propaganda; the entire pyramid, even the new version, regards existing institutions as inherently righteous and legitimate, and those exerting guerrilla tactics as inherently morally corrupted (e.g. achieving their goals using lies, influenced by foreign agents).

The older version is especially hilarious, considering the CIA applied the same external influence to terrorists and guerrilla forces in South America and the Middle East they revile as "communist" in there.

I didn't get that sense at all. I'm with you in not trusting the CIA, but I feel like this is a fairly realstic view of how things actually happen, which they probably intentionally used as part of the process of destabilizing foreign governments they dislike.

edit: I see - the "original" one is a lot more explicitly targeting communist gurellias

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