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

by Venkatesh Rao

  You cannot force complex intelligence to emerge on your schedule. We try to create complex intelligence by pursuing things called “ideas” that seem right to us, rather than mechanically working out inferences from facts.

  And our idea-pursuit instincts may not lead us along the same paths as those of others. Because every person spots and pursues ideas in complex situations differently, based on past experiences, learned pattern recognition skills and vast amounts of prior knowledge. You can only dimly understand what idea or pattern another person is pursuing through what they say.

  And when these paths of idea pursuit diverge, you must either capitulate and follow, or fight. If you like to wax spiritual about such stuff, you can tell yourself that you are just one tiny bundle of atoms that is part of a universe that is slowly figuring itself out and getting enlightened. You might have to fight today so that the whole world is slightly more enlightened tomorrow.

  This understanding of violence and conflict also reveals something about friendship, and an Eleanor Roosevelt quote captures it beautifully: “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.”

  But jumping straight to discussing ideas does not make yours a great mind. Discussing ideas is only a sign of great minds if events and people – both matters of context and motivation – have been adequately dealt with.

  When a friendship can stand the test of sometimes-diverging, sometimes-converging pursuit of individual ideas, it acquires great depth. Relationships based on false harmony and denial of ideas, or worse, one party cravenly abandoning their own ideas in the interests of preserving the relationship, are fundamentally weak, and not worth very much.

  The Basics of Negotiation

  I learned the basics of routine, everyday negotiation by noticing something very puzzling. The people who seemed to negotiate most successfully looked and acted nothing like the tough, ice-cold types you see in Hollywood movies. One guy couldn’t hold eye contact, stuttered, and smiled too much. He aggressively played lowball and won every time. Another time, I observed a thoroughly scatterbrained and frivolous-seeming woman (it was not an act), who chattered and whined incessantly, trying to work a deal. She won big.On the flip side, I’ve met people who look and act like Kevin Spacey in The Negotiator, but end up blowing sure-fire great deals (while retaining their pointless icy calm of course).

  When you negotiate based on how you think you should look and act, based on Hollywood stereotypes, you end up like George Costanza on Seinfeld. He attempts to put on a professional swagger and play hard-ball negotiator to close a deal with NBC. His swagger ends up trapping him into accepting a deal with less money than was originally being offered.

  People make this mistake for a simple reason: in routine negotiations, almost all the work is done away from the actual negotiating table, and before the critical face-to-face encounters. In many cases, the pre-work is so effective that the negotiation doesn’t happen at all, or if it happens, is a matter of ritual. The kind of tense, openly-adversarial zero-sum negotiation with a ticking clock that we see in movies is a very exceptional kind of negotiation. The kind of dull pre-work that is possible in routine negotiations is not possible, and there are artificially hard near-term deadlines. This puts a lot of tension and pressure into the live situation. The most common negotiations on the other hand, are the ones that don’t happen at all because a skilled person prevented things from getting to the table at all. Dull pre-work is substituted for live negotiation work, and instead of a fixed deadline, you get a smart person cherry-picking an ideal time to start the negotiations.

  Dealing with extreme negotiation situations is a very specialized skill that is very expensive and time-consuming to acquire, and completely worthless for everyday situations. When it comes to negotiation, bringing a gun to a knife fight is as pointless as bringing a knife to a gunfight. And bringing any sort of weapon to a negotiation that could be just a handshake is beyond stupid. Those professional level skills don’t apply to everyday situations, for exactly the same reasons that a surgeon can cut open your head and perform miracles, but can do nothing to get you to eat healthy and exercise. The surgeon’s solution – stomach stapling – is an extreme, exceptional intervention for those who fail to solve the problem of preventive health maintenance at an everyday level. And just as you wouldn’t attempt surgery on yourself when necessary, but hire a real surgeon, when you are actually faced with a “gunfight” negotiation, you should probably consider hiring a gunfighter rather than trying to become one through a weekend seminar.

  So how should you negotiate? There are only four basic elements you need to understand: information, creativity, trust and BATNA (“Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement,” the only technical term you really need to know). Here’s how they work together:

  Information is simple. The more there is that can be mutually agreed upon, the less there is to negotiate. This is the main reason unlikely people walk away winners. Good pre-work trumps good table-work every time. When you move one bit of information over from the “to be debated” column to the “common ground” column, you make the table-thumper one bit less effective. Part of the reason hostage negotiations are hard is because there is so little information, and so little time to discover it. 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.

  What does the information pre-work actually consist of? Definitions and technical analysis. You define all options, and use all the data to model the risks and rewards properly. Decision theory, game theory, statistics and Excel skills are all tools here. It is basically tedious gruntwork. Apparent “human” factors can be turned into data this way. One example is using discounting-based analysis of future payoffs to replace loosey-goosey talk of “win-win” outcomes with hard numbers.

  Creativity is harder. Given a pile of relevant information, and as much dull technical analysis as you can manage in the time available, you may still be left with far too much uncertainty about the different options and their relative desirability, leaving too much room for “he said she said” types of conflict and debate. Being creative means coming up with new options that make better use of the information available by lowering uncertainties all around. A classic example is to turn a conversation about a big 10-million-dollar deal into one about a short-term $100,000 deal by proposing a “pilot engagement.” Dating before marriage is another example. Again, if you do your creative thinking ahead of time, you’ll come up with solid and believable new options. Otherwise you will end up involved in the sort of annoying game of real-time creative storytelling that I described in my post “Bargaining with Your Right Brain.”

  Trust is harder still. Wherever possible, the smartest way to negotiate is to do a whole bunch of “discovery” pre-work conversations that serve two purposes. First, they help tease out what people know, and haven’t yet shared, all around. Second, you get a read on basic mutual trust levels among all parties. The key here is to not even attempt the negotiation until you’ve raised trust levels all around to a sufficiently high level. In your trust pre-work, you need to figure out several things. Who is negotiating in good faith, and who is negotiating in bad faith? Who is being free with information and who is being secretive? Who are your allies, who is hopelessly intransigent and needs to be neutralized, and who needs gentle persuasion over multiple interactions to come around? How much of all this trust information is common knowledge? You may need months of meetings (1:1, small groups, full groups) ostensibly dedicated to discovery and information sharing, before trust is sufficiently high that you can start “negotiations.” These can range from informal lunches, to parties to seminars aimed at “knowledge sharing.” Finally, you need to figure out one crucial thing: which parties are going to be dealing with each other extensively for an indeterminate amount of tim
e in the future, and who is going to exit the picture? About the only firm truth in negotiation is that people who are going to terminate all relationships and walk away very soon behave very differently from people who aren’t sure how much they’ll be dealing with each other in the future. Some part of this assertion can be codified, quantified and proved through game theory (it’s the basic insight behind the famous “iterated prisoner’s dilemma” theory of cooperation). But the phenomenon is much richer than the game theory models, and it is generally more useful to think of a situation in terms of the pasts and futures of all the interpersonal stories involved.

  The information, creativity and trust pre-work take time, and costs money. If the deal isn’t worth the pre-work, that’s one reason to walk away on Day 1. The fourth element, BATNA, doesn’t take much pre-work time (often only a few minutes if it isn’t blindingly obvious), but is the hardest element to master, because it is generally about walking away after putting in lots of expensive pre-work.

  Defining your BATNAs is therefore the hardest kind of pre-work, since they represent a potential cost that is more than the other three elements put together. As Kipling said in his classic poem If:

  If you can make one heap of all your winnings

  And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

  And lose, and start again at your beginnings

  ...

  you’ll be a Man my son!

  When you bargain for a cheap watch at a street market, you know that Being Willing To Walk Away (BWTWA) is your single most powerful weapon. BWTWA is the simplest example of a BATNA. More complex negotiations have other BATNAs, but all are forms of “walking away.” In the best case this simply means a lost opportunity (for a mutually-beneficial trade agreement for instance). In the worst case, it can mean armed conflict and real, as opposed to psychological losses. You can’t walk away from a mugger. Your BATNA for the “wallet for your life” deal offered by the mugger is to either run (and hope to get away) or fight (and hope to win).For a salary negotiation, your BATNA is to quit (possibly with the added cost of lost recommendations). For an entrepreneur who doesn’t like the terms offered by a VC, the BATNA may be to just shut down the company. BATNA is very hard for most people because the BATNA is always about a willingness to lose something, sometimes your life.

  There are BATNAs for every situation, but there are also life BATNAs: your baseline commitments to yourself that allow you to cheerfully walk away from anything. Here it pays to keep in mind that your ultimate BATNA to the whole “deal of life” is actually fixed and unchangeable: you are going to die (because your negotiating opponent, nature, is infinitely more powerful than you). If you are going to die anyway, it makes it much easier to accept “death” as a BATNA for specific situations. And since nearly all other BATNAs are preferable to death, that attitude makes you a very strong negotiator.

  The one BATNA that is worse than death is of course, torture, as illustrated by the booga-booga joke. Two men are shipwrecked on an island. The sadistic native chief offers each a deal: “Booga booga or death?” The first guy picks booga-booga, and is immediately subjected to hideous tortures, and finally let go, nearly dead. The second man decides he prefers death.“Fine,” says the chief. “Booga-booga him to death!” (A nice use of sadistic OR-XOR bluffing by the chief here!)

  Without a defined BATNA, negotiations are toothless. BATNAs are what make all negotiating at least “slightly evil.” You can add deceit, bad faith and bluffing to make the game as evil as you like, but even the baseline best-faith type of informed negotiation is “slightly evil” because your BATNA is a unilateral option that has consequences for others that they will be forced to live with. Anybody can accept consequences for themselves. It takes a slightly evil attitude to be willing to force potentially unpleasant consequences on others, regardless of what they want.

  Information, creativity, trust and BATNAs. That’s all there is to the basics.

  Decision

  Indifference to Sunk Costs

  Slightly evil people often appear to be extreme risk takers to others. This is actually far from the truth. They are often more conservative. One of the big factors that creates the illusion of the slightly evil being daring gamblers is indifference to sunk costs. Here’s an example. Suppose you’ve put in eleven months of work into building a piece of software. You have one month left to finish when you suddenly discover a fantastic open-source equivalent that you can work on tweaking for two weeks, and produce a better outcome than if you persevered and finished your own design. At this point, the fact of you having put in eleven months worth of hard work is basically irrelevant. You’ll deliver a better outcome faster if you were to just throw away your own work and use the open-source equivalent. And that’s the path the slightly evil decision-maker will invariably take.

  At least that’s the rational story. Or what appears to be a rational story. Actually, despite what the behavioral economists say, there is no absolute here. Nobody can tell you what subjective value to place on an outcome (women know this better than men; this is the generalization of “don’t tell me how to feel”). If the primary value you get out of your software projects is the ability to tell stories of how you delivered things under time pressure, having one more war story to tell is more valuable than delivering earlier, better and cheaper. If this is hard for you to understand, consider a different example. You are climbing up a mountain with no road to the top. Halfway up, you discover that there is in fact a road, and a passing driver offers you a lift. Do you accept or do you continue on your climbing path? There are many roads to the top of the mountain, and the view is not the same.

  Where it gets irrational is if you tell yourself one story to make the decision, but another to live out the consequences. If you make the “rational” decision but suffer the regret for the rest of your life of not achieving closure, completion and the addition of another software war story to tell your grandchildren, you are being irrational. And vice versa. This sort of irrationality is what motivates the process of “rationalization” at the individual level. At the collective level, rationalization is triggered by conflict between the stories told by different people.

  Let’s call consistency between the decision-making story (expected value of a decision) and the experienced ever-after story (realized value of the consequences) relative rationality, to distinguish it from the absolute one-size-fits all kind that behavioral economists like.

  When your personal relative rationality is a strong function of your subjective experiences, the decisions of those whose relative rationality is heavily weighted towards external realities will seem unduly risky to you. That’s because they’re callously throwing away things that seem valuable to you.

  In the sunk costs case, you will end up asking the slightly evil decision maker, “how could you throw it all away?” or “didn’t you feel like finishing just for the sake of closure?”

  The answer is that sunk costs only have a seductive appeal to those who are attached to their subjective past. They do not like the thought that the person they were, two days ago, was possibly engaged in futile activity. They want to behave in ways that redeem their past days.

  Slightly-evil people, either by nature or through cultivation, are simply incapable of thinking this way. They place the most value on external, tangible outcomes.

  Where this creates issues is in collaborative work. Slightly-evil people, through their sunk-costs indifference, can appear insensitive and callous to others with more subjective relative rationalities. Newbie slightly evil types often make the absolute-rationality mistake and attempt hopelessly to lecture their colleagues on why sunk costs don’t matter.

  The more sophisticated ones carry their analysis one step further: if your team-member’s subjective relative rationality causes him/her to react to decisions in ways that create real outcome issues for you, it will now cost you as well.

  In the software example, let’s say two people were involved, you and a frie
nd. If you are slightly evil, while your partner is heavily attached to closure and “finishing,” he may try very hard to make up rationalizations between your objective-weighted story and his subjective-weighted one (“we can’t use that open source thing; we haven’t tested it enough...”). If you make the sunk-costs-indifferent decision anyway, he may resent you and cause problems down the road.

  To the slightly evil, the answer is simple. Do the future real costs of the resentment for you outweigh the benefit of making the sunk-costs-indifferent decision? If so, it is worth humoring your colleague. If not, make the sunk-costs indifferent decisions and deal with the fallout.

  In this simple, made up example, most people would probably be capable of acting slightly evil. As things get more complex and subjective, objective and social consequences blend together into messy stories that are very hard to analyze. In such situations, sunk-cost indifference turns into that philosophical attitude we know as realism.

  Vindictiveness and Revenge

  Is it rational to practice revengeful behaviors? The very thought is anathema to positive-thinking win-win types, and at a very superficial level of analysis, revenge is an irrational thing. It seems worse than doing nothing in response to a provocation – you waste time and effort causing pain to others and pay the opportunity cost of not doing something more positive/win-win with that time/effort. So is there ever a good reason to do something so apparently stupid?

  Revenge emerges when you add up two traits: an innate tendency towards vindictiveness and a capacity for long-range planning. Vindictiveness is simpler and much more fundamental. In tribal societies it leads to vendetta dynamics. In civilized societies, it leads to revenge dynamics.

  And strange as it may seem, vindictiveness and vendettas are quite rational, but revenge is not.