Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths (Ribbonfarm Roughs 1)

by Venkatesh Rao

  How evil is this tactic?

  It is good if you are shooting down a truly flawed and stupid point. You are saving everybody time and helping an idiot avoid embarrassment.

  It is slightly evil if you are using the tactic to stop a shaky argument in its tracks, but the argument you want to build up in its stead is equally shaky (i.e., you are ensuring that your smarter tactics win the day, because you aren’t sure that substance will).

  It is plain evil when it is evil by whatever standards you maintain that allow you to sleep at night. I am not your priest. Draw your own lines in the sand.

  There’s a lot more of course, there are good and bad times/places/status situations to interrupt this way, and it can backfire if you use the tactic at the wrong time. A fairly safe time/place to use it is when you control the meeting both substantively and procedurally (for example, you are the chair and also have dictatorial authority over the decisions being made).

  On Dodging Decisions

  Question evasion is a highly-recognizable behavior, even when done well. Politicians provide us with a lot of examples and practice, so most of us are pretty good at detecting evasion (dealing with it is a different matter). But you probably haven’t thought much about a close cousin: dodging decisions. We are often put in the position of having to make decisions that are framed in such a way that all the options are bad. The best way to dodge such a decision is to replace it with another one that allows you to do what you want with far less blowback. I’ve never watched the TV thriller 24 regularly, but the other day, I caught a glimpse of a first-season episode with a scene that showcased decision-dodging very well. I call this tactic “emotional charging.”

  In this episode, super-agent Jack Bauer is at a hospital with his wife, along with the father of a critically-injured teenage girl. Bauer’s daughter is missing and the injured girl is the last person who saw her.

  The doctor steps out into the lobby and informs the group that the girl is conscious. Bauer immediately requests permission to ask the girl a few questions. The doctor passes the question to the girl’s father. The father, for reasons we learn later, does not want the girl questioned. His response is the perfect dodge: “Let me go in and check if she is up to it first.”

  Compare this to the straight refusal, “no,” which would invite argument and debate. By changing the “can I question her?” decision to a “let me judge if she’s up to it” decision, the father created a safe way to say no later. “Up to it” is a judgment call that provides wide latitude. More importantly, it is a subjective judgement masquerading as a data-driven one, where even medical professionals would have a tough time over-riding a parent, let alone a third party. Unlike a straight refusal, the “up to it” decision also buys an indeterminate amount of time.

  As you might expect, Bauer and his wife accept the idea. You can’t really argue with such a reasonable-sounding dodge that doesn’t comprehensively say “no,” but moves the “maybe yes” to a place from where it can slide effectively into a “no.”

  It turns out later that the “father” is not really the girl’s father (who has been murdered), but one of the bad guys. He heads in and quietly murders the girl, since she does know important things, and comes back out and feeds Bauer’s wife a lie that allows him to kidnap her (Bauer has been called away in the interim).

  But even without such a high-stakes reason to dodge, the impersonator’s decision-dodging tactic is well worth learning. The key is to make the original decision dependent on another decision which requires your subjective interpretation of some emotion-laden missing information. Imagine if the father had been the real father, and the superficial situation had actually played out:

  Father: I am sorry, but she seems really on the brink, I can’t risk letting you question her.

  Bauer: I understand how you feel, but my daughter could be in real danger, it’ll only be a minute, and I am sure she can handle it.

  Father (angrily): That’s easy for you to say; it’s not your daughter in there fighting for her life. If it were your daughter in there, you wouldn’t allow it either.

  The displacement to a more subjective and emotional decision cannot be challenged easily, especially because the emotion sneaks in later (the original dodge, remember, looks like a quest for missing objective information). If the judgment is questioned, there is a legitimate excuse to get angry. This is why I call the move “emotional charging.” Every significant “people” decision is like a battery which can be charged up with useful emotion if you think hard enough. 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. Every emotional-charging decision dodge is a case of seeking refuge in the fortress of “don’t tell me how to feel.”

  Emotional charging, when available for use, is vastly preferable to more common decision-dodging moves such as referral to a committee (this cedes too much autonomy to a body that could potentially run amok and not fulfill its appointed “death by consultation” role). The nice thing about the emotional charging tactic is that you still get to decide, and you still get to choose the option you wanted in the original decision. Emotional charging can also help you reel in and speed up a decision that’s outside your locus of control, unlike many one-way dodging tactics that can only delay a decision. An example in Star Wars, is Senator Palpatine using the excuse of violence in Naboo to grab power, while making it seem like a subjective emotional burden. It is one of the rare interesting pieces of action in the otherwise psychologically tame Star Wars saga.

  The technique is particularly effective against those who pride themselves on being “data-driven” decision-makers. Subjectivity is their Achilles heel.

  Inside the Tempo

  We’ve come a long way and covered a lot of ground. So in this chapter, I am going to try and put the whole Be Slightly Evil philosophy in perspective and introduce a capstone idea that will hopefully pull together the material we’ve explored in previous chapters.

  This is the murky idea of being inside the tempo of an opponent, arguably one of the most difficult ideas to understand in adversarial decision-making. The idea is often referred to as being inside the decision-cycle, where the reference is to the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) model developed by John Boyd, but I prefer inside the tempo because it gets away from the specific structural idea of a “cycle.” The word tempo goes beyond just the rhythms of an adversarial decision process to its emotions and energy flows.

  The idea has been best articulated in the world of Boydian strategic thinking, but versions exist in most sophisticated decision-making domains. In business for instance, “inside the tempo,” properly understood, corresponds to the idea of disruption in Clayton Christensen’s sense. In games like chess and martial arts, “inside the tempo” is about playing your opponent rather than the game (as Boyd said, “fight the enemy, not the terrain”).

  The idea actually applies to cooperative decision-making as well (an attentive parent or teacher can be “inside the tempo” of a child’s behavior for instance), but adversarial contexts tend to bring out the richness of the model better.

  Being inside an adversary’s tempo is all about wrangling luck to exploit habits.

  Wrangling Luck

  To a first approximation, the difference between artificial games and life is that in life, luck is a variable you can influence much more powerfully. This is because you get to change rules in open-ended ways instead of just operating within a closed set of rules and a pair of dice. So the open game of life, to a large extent, is about wrangling luck by playing with rules.

  Real life is uncertain and messy for everybody, and an adversary is anyone who is trying to create better-than-random conditions for themselves by creating worse-than-random conditions for you, via the meta-game of rule-making and rule-breaking. To compete, you must do the same where necessary.

  To get inside the tempo of an adversary is
to recognize and exploit the ways in which he or she (or it, in the case of organizations) is a creature of habit. And we all are creatures of habit to some extent because we possess limited attention. Winning in competitive settings is about exploiting your adversary’s habits before he/she/it can exploit yours.

  There are many ways to exploit others’ habits, but wrangling luck is perhaps the most powerful way. Wrangling luck effectively creates a sort of “competitive climate” comprising patterns of serendipity and its opposite, zemblanity.

  Competitive Climates

  You’re in a world where luck is the scarce resource, because there are more ways for things to go wrong than right. If you can direct more luck towards yourself and more misfortune towards your adversary, you’ve amplified the effectiveness of just about everything else you do.

  In open competitive environments, luck is not just about die-rolls or card shuffles. It is a control variable. The control variable. In the overall game of life, your big goal is to drive serendipity towards yourself and its opposite, zemblanity (there, you learned a new word) towards your adversaries.

  When luck is being consciously wrangled in a real-life game, winning feels like things miraculously going your way, things falling into place for you just right, unreasonably out of proportion to your actions. This is serendipity.

  By contrast, losing feels like an overpowering sense of doom and snowballing misfortunes out of proportion to your sins and stupidity. This is zemblanity.

  Creating patterns of serendipity and zemblanity that favor you and disadvantage your adversaries is perhaps the most general goal in competitive behavior.

  The first order of business, once you’ve decided to start wrangling luck in a domain, is to create a real-world game.

  There are two distinct setup moves, people moves and process moves. A fundamental tenet of luck wrangling is that you do people before process. This means creating a configuration of alliances and oppositions to create a pattern of conflict (for the Boydians among you, I mean something slightly different from what you might assume).

  Creating Patterns of Conflict

  The more real the game, the less trivial the problem of setting up patterns of conflict. In a chess game, two people simply sit down across from each other. In a pickup soccer game, captains might take turns picking players and get the game going within minutes.

  In real-life adversarial environments, the decision of when to cooperate or compete becomes non-trivial and highly situation-dependent. It can be a harder problem than the actual procedural game-play. In fact, if you create the right configuration of alliances and oppositions, the game might be over before it begins, once the configuration is signaled to all parties. Weaker alliances often simply give up in the face of invincible opposition, offering walkovers.

  So before you even make an opening move, you have to calibrate the default level of competitiveness or cooperativeness with which you approach a situation and create the right configuration.

  Being combative when it’s time to cooperate, or trying to broker peace when there is clearly some competitive energy needed, can actually backfire. As the counterintuitive old saying goes (overloaded a bit), if you want peace, prepare for war, if you want war, prepare for peace.

  But it is possible to get too clever in the people-setup stage. Let’s do a side-bar on loyalty.

  Slightly Evil Loyalty

  How do you do manage your loyalties so you are being neither child-like, nor all Game of Thrones about it? I’ll offer you three laws, but not justify them in detail. That would be a separate 5000-word essay.

  For the first law, in place of win-win or no-deal, I offer you: adult-adult or no deal.

  Broken promises are inevitable under conditions of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). It is important to avoid demanding, or promising, absolute loyalty. Dealing with people who trade in childlike absolute loyalties is not worth it unless they are actually children.

  When you deal with adults, loyalty is not a value you have to apply but a budget you have to manage. In everyday life, you may never have to choose between a girlfriend and an idealistic politician as Batman was forced to, by the Joker, but you’re probably going to be disappointing people throughout your life. Managing how you spread the disappointment around is how you manage your loyalty budget.

  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.

  It is possible to use loyalty itself as a game variable. You can win confidence in order to betray it. You can act adversarial to gain attention in order to win an alliance.

  But most of us are not living a spy-versus-spy life game. In everyday life, people will forgive broken promises with just a sincere apology, but not bad-faith promises. Faking good faith consistently is more trouble than it is worth.

  The third law of slightly evil loyalty: never be your own #1.

  Consider your actions under situations of severe, but not absurd stress. Not thought experiments involving torture by evil dictators, but realistic stresses such as losing half your savings and being forced to choose which of two children to send to college. Think about making a list of assorted people in your life, in decreasing order of the severity of situations that might lead you to betray them. So a child might top the list, and a random, but nice-seeming waiter might be at the bottom.

  Now put yourself on that list, in the right position: what sort of stress would make you break promises to yourself? You will likely find that you won’t be putting yourself at the top of the list. Most of us will have at least one person we would put ahead of ourselves. That’s the paradox of being slightly evil: it is far easier to Be Slightly Evil on behalf of someone else. If this seems like a particularly complex point, that’s because it is. Don’t worry if you don’t get it immediately.

  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

  Once you’ve created a pattern of conflict that respects the three laws, it’s time to frame rules of engagement: unilateral agreements with yourself that limit how you act. This is the process setup stage.

  Rules of Engagement

  Rules of engagement are about much more than modeling the ethics of how you enter the fray in a domain. Those are an important but relatively minor part of the work involved.

  A more important function of rules of engagement is to manage risk. Limiting the damage when things go wrong.

  But the primary purpose is directing luck towards yourself. The most important work involved in creating rules of engagement is figuring out how to stack the odds in your favor before you begin playing, by deploying your existing advantages.

  Few artificial competitions have this feature (an example is the America’s Cup sailing competition, where winning teams get to define the rules for the next competition).

  In artificial games, rules of engagement are mostly about picking the right game to play. So a poker player might survey a room and pick a table.

  But real life is about creating games, which means drawing your own boundaries, picking which rules to bend or break, and which rules to try and enforce. By creating a pattern of conflict through cooperation/competition/loyalty decisions, you’ve already drawn a boundary, and drawn people into the fray whether they want to play or not.

  If you’ve been smart, you’ve chosen to draw a boundary in a way that offers some potential for rule-making and rule-breaking, which generally means you’ve circumscribed a region that is not entirely and unambiguously governed by any single existing game. If you’re lucky, you might even have a some no-rules virgin territory to work with. If not, you’ll have a domain of overlapping games, none of which dictates all the action.

  The biggest characteristic of such an enviro
nment is that it is somewhere between complex and chaotic, so you have to be constantly modeling and remodeling it just to maintain situation awareness, even if you’re doing nothing more than observing.

  Any set of rules of engagement that actually gets you and others moving from a state of situation-aware immobility in the face of such “chaoplexity” is a real-world game. Unlike formal games, real-world games can be understood as collisions between competing sets of rules of engagement, independently selected by the players. Sets of rules that can be arbitrarily and unilaterally changed as play progresses.

  Why focus on rules you make for yourself? What about rules agreed to by consensus among all players? Rules inherited from society?

  To focus on convention and social rules is to put the cart before the horse. Ultimately, the only rules that actually matter in competition are the ones individuals and organizations impose on themselves and voluntarily follow. Other rules in the environment are not rules at all, but risks to be modeled and managed. If you decide not to pay your taxes because the government has lost legitimacy in your view, you have to deal with the risk of getting caught and punished by forces more powerful than you.