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I "suffer" the same character "flaw," which has routinely limited my ability to affect change within the companies for which I've worked. I can't count the numb

I "suffer" the same character "flaw," which has routinely limited my ability to affect change within the companies for which I've worked. I can't count the number of times that my suggestion to use a better technical choice has been overruled by people with a personal agenda that had nothing to do with technology. Additionally, I've had to work closely with a couple of genuine sociopaths, who have mislead powerful people to benefit personally, while putting the (very large) company in an objectively worse place, and at a competitive disadvantage. Would you be willing to compromise your position with an individual, or limited set of people, to achieve a large, positive organizational change?

pmichaud 8y ago
This gets complicated. At risk of putting something that could be misquoted, I am generally willing to play the game that people force me to play. I want to play the "everyone gets along and supports each others' goals by being respectful of each others' dignity and agency" game, but if someone wants to try to mug me for my wallet, then I'm going to defend myself with force. Similarly, if someone's epistemic process is "whatever I think works best for me, fuck everyone else" then I'll try to cause them to think that what I want happens to be what's best for them through whatever means happen to work. But it's tricky because maybe they have strong internal epistemics, while perpetrating manipulation on everyone else, and therefore I'm actually equivocating and doing a golden rule thing where I'm not respecting their actual epistemic process, but rather the epistemic process they are trying to enforce on others. In the case of people acting in good faith, there's little or no difference. In the case of a bad actor, there may be a huge difference. When I posted I was imaging the "good faith" scenario. Maybe the switch to "I respect the epistemics that people try to enforce on others" is fine, but it's not exactly how I put it in the post you're replying to. In practicality, just given the tiny summary you provided, my move would be to cause those powerful people to correctly see what was true or false according to their epistemics, ie. I'd try to counteract the manipulation. And if I were dealing with a bad actor I'd try to do it in a way that didn't position me as their enemy, but rather make it seem to them like they just failed to mislead the powerful person the way they had hoped.

pmichaud 8y ago

This gets complicated. At risk of putting something that could be misquoted, I am generally willing to play the game that people force me to play. I want to play the "everyone gets along and supports each others' goals by being respectful of each others' dignity and agency" game, but if someone wants to try to mug me for my wallet, then I'm going to defend myself with force. Similarly, if someone's epistemic process is "whatever I think works best for me, fuck everyone else" then I'll try to cause them to think that what I want happens to be what's best for them through whatever means happen to work. But it's tricky because maybe they have strong internal epistemics, while perpetrating manipulation on everyone else, and therefore I'm actually equivocating and doing a golden rule thing where I'm not respecting their actual epistemic process, but rather the epistemic process they are trying to enforce on others. In the case of people acting in good faith, there's little or no difference. In the case of a bad actor, there may be a huge difference. When I posted I was imaging the "good faith" scenario. Maybe the switch to "I respect the epistemics that people try to enforce on others" is fine, but it's not exactly how I put it in the post you're replying to. In practicality, just given the tiny summary you provided, my move would be to cause those powerful people to correctly see what was true or false according to their epistemics, ie. I'd try to counteract the manipulation. And if I were dealing with a bad actor I'd try to do it in a way that didn't position me as their enemy, but rather make it seem to them like they just failed to mislead the powerful person the way they had hoped.