Before we examine the implications of this, a couple more pieces of evidence/illustration.
First, the Amazon Leadership principle #4: "Good leaders are right, a lot."
Conversation
This is, in my experience... basically true. Good leaders are weirdly, presciently, right. In a series of uncertain, ambiguous decisions, where rational analysis might expect say a 30% hit rate, they're hitting 80-90, even 100% for brief periods.
2
33
This is more than Taleb's "fooled by randomness" effect because it's not like betting on the market. This is "being right a lot" due to the world having arranged itself in your local neighborhood to consistently prove your theory right.
6
1
54
Second piece of... not evidence, but... illuminating narrative false-color from a perceptive observer, Douglas Adams In Hitchhiker's Guide.
1
12
Zaphod Beeblebrox goes into the Total Perspective Vortex and, much to the amazement of the others, does NOT come out stark raving mad from having gazed into the void and realized his own utter insignificance (which is what the machine is supposed to do)
1
26
Instead he comes out feeling validated: the TPV validates what he already believes: he is the most important guy in the universe.
The reason, in the book, is simple: they are in a universe that was created for Zaphod so he's obviously the most important person in it.
2
1
27
So successful people develop a genuine local Midas touch that makes them BOTH winners and "right a lot" ... in their sphere of influence/within their reality distortion field. Which can be as big as a large corporation or a third of a nation, and last as long as 10-15 years.
3
2
41
These are crazy conditions, right? No normal human mind could get through the stress of being so much rightness, so much winning, without developing an epistemology based on the locally simplest Occam's Razor: your theory of your own success is right, as far as your eye can see.
2
2
40
Worse, you NEED this epistemology to function. It has to become an efficient System 1, thin-slicing decision system that's second nature, because your success has now created oversubscription.
1
3
32
You have a queue winding around the block, with people hoping your oracular midas touch can do its presciently "true and winning" thing with whatever you're bringing to that success party. You have to apply your success theory in fast-mode, like a trained deep neural net.
4
22
To be clear, this is not something ordinary people experience. It's not the normal fundamental attribution error that average mediocre types might develop. It's that on steroids, plus several other dynamics creating a perfect storm of high confidence belief in yourself.
Replying to
Regular people don't experience this. We are always aware of the zone and strength of our "rightness" and "winning." If we wander outside, we instantly doubt ourselves and incline towards trusting others over ourselves when it sounds like they know what they're talking about.
1
32
A person in the grips of a CE, otoh, has to work extraordinarily hard to even find the boundary of their rightness/winningness, because it is so big and comprehensive.
2
22
This is the reason, for eg., there's that folktale trope of a king disguising himself as a commoner to wander the city at night to try and see the world without the reality distortion field in effect where his presence alters whatever he's trying to observe accurately.
1
3
45
Now here's where things start to go wrong, due to factor 4 -- broad curiosity. Charismatic epistemology wouldn't lead to problems if it sort of stayed contained within its zone of strong truth. But generative and talented people are rarely that narrow in outlook.
3
38
So when they slow down with age or tire of their formulaic success pattern, and let their mind wander to things far afield... they find it really hard to suspend their RDF and walk the streets of reality like commoners in rags.
1
1
31
At this point, it's hard to illustrate what happens next without either making up fake examples, or subtweeting real people which is why I was reluctant to do this thread 🤣
2
1
20
Suffice it to say, their "win rate" starts dropping sharply, and their ability to "be right a lot" requires more and more... epicycles. They never quite get to entertaining the possibility that they're outside their zone.
1
31
Prognosis:
-- win rate drops
-- takes more and work to be less and less right
-- theories get more convoluted, with more epicycles, less of that sweet occam-razor sharp elegance
3
1
36
Here a funny thing happens, involving others in their RDF. Haters and critics are as irrelevant to the epistemology as ever, because they've already been proven wrong long ago during the apogee of the CE's success.
But true believers... hmm there's trouble with them.
1
20
The thing is, the ability of true believers to do various validating things relative to the charismatic epistemology is dependent on the theories arising from that epistemology being elegant, simple, powerful, and effective.
1
1
15
As the CE starts to get overextended and develop epicyclic clutter, it becomes hard for true believers to even pretend in the Winning and Rightness theater, because it's too complicated now.
1
18
A dark cartoon version of this played out, for eg. in QAnon circles leading up to, and beyond, election night. Something very like this happens around every late stage charismatic epistemology that is wandering abroad far from where the world is flat.
1
18
The central charismatic figure at this point can react in many ways.
Some react by progressively cutting off people who are starting to stumble. The circle of "good people" starts to shrink and tighten. More and more people get cut out. It's a LIFO effect.
2
20
The healthiest reaction is to recognize what's going on, and *realize that there is no easy way out.* The only way out is to take a looong break where you stop running the success script entirely, and wait for the RDF to wane and dissipate and ultimately collapse.
1
21
This will happen because if you just stop using the charismatic epistemology, it will stop feeding large groups of people and developing in strength. My guess is a field that takes 10 years to build up takes about 1-2 years to dissipate.
1
16
The only way to accelerate the field decay is to make a radical leap into a new endeavor where your CE is not just slightly fraying at the edges, but wildly wrong in ways that make you a fumbling beginner from day 1.
2
2
26
Many even-headed big successes seem to do this naturally. They reboot in ways that make them a beginner again. A good heuristic for doing this is to find another, equally successful person whose CE is dramatically different from yours.
2
1
35
There's a lot more to say... including about dark descents into hell, phenomena that arise in response like "hater" patterns, Big Man Straussian theorizing cottage industries... it's a whole extended universe.
1
20
But I don't want to write a whole grand unified thesis here. So I'll close with a personal angle. One reason I've developed these theories is that I've spent a lot of time around people with charismatic epistemologies, and built something of a career out of pen-testing them.
3
23
The reason I have this career is that many in the early stages of success and a modest RDF dimly recognize the risks and want it challenged enough to prevent cancerous over-extension, but not so much that it gets undermined even where/when it works.
2
29
Haters and actually hostile critics are like actual hackers in this picture. They’ll actually cause damage if you let them into the RDF out of naive belief in “critical skepticism.” Their anger and resentment will seek to replace the RDF with a self-destructive alternative.
2
29
You want someone who is not hostile but also has relative natural immunity to the RDF by virtue of lacking the ability to profit from it. If you were not a talented engineer/designer you’d have been less susceptible to Jobs’ RDF: you can’t work for it, it can’t work for you.
1
35
But there are 2 other reasons I ended up accidentally being a connoisseur and wrangler of charismatic epistemologies: mediocrity and social media.
1
21
First, I spent ~20y, age 15-35 having my sheer ordinariness and mediocrity drilled into me. I wasn’t right a lot, I wasn’t winning a lot. I wasn’t wrong a lot, I wasn’t losing a lot. I had an average amount of good and bad luck.
1
29
For about 5 minutes after making it into IIT (which all of India believes is a Special Thing), I believed I was special. That self-congratulation party ended rapidly when I found myself strictly in the middle of the s distribution and with legit special geniuses all around.
1
38
Second, age 35, I became “internet famous” via a viral blog post. And the sheer mind-boggling vacuity and inconsequentiality of that “arrival” served as a vaccine against ever developing a charismatic epistemology myself.
4
52
People think I’m humble-bragging or being self-deprecating when I insist on my own mediocrity. It’s not. Do you know what it means to have 45k followers or a blog with a 14y history of multiple viral hits, and many famous friends?
It’s about the same as being a middle manager 🤣
5
5
95
But because people believe internet reputational currency is worth a lot more than it is, you get what I think of as a “fake reality distortion field” or fRDF that can’t actually generate the winning and rightness of the real thing.
2
41
I often get mentioned in the same breath with people with comparable social media reputations but a lot more behind it.
One sign: startup rubes sometimes assume I’m rich and approach me for funding. Not intros, actual funding.
Also various requests for magic I can’t perform.
2
33
This is like a vaccine. Having an fRDF with middle-manager mediocrity behind it means you get inoculated against developing a charismatic epistemology yourself.
It’s not always effective. Curiously it’s in the online minor leagues that people develop the most CE from fRDFs.
1
25
Show replies
