Robert Greene's third law of power is to "conceal your intentions." To use red herrings and smoke screens to distract your enemy and hide your aims. So their attempts at sabotage will hit the wrong mark.

Sure, if you're starting a business, you'll probably want to keep your proprietary technology secret.¹ And you shouldn't leave your hand out in the open while you're playing cards.

But what Greene gets wrong (and it's the same mistake over and over again) is that intentions are not as mutually exclusive in daily interactions² as on Greene's contrived battlefield.

1 Projects/Rationalia/LW/Concepts/Game Theory

The kinds of games we usually play are not zero-sum. Both players stand to win.

When you do find yourself at an impasse, first consider whether you can change the rules. If you stumble into a game of prisoner's dilemma, your optimal outcome is the worst possible outcome for your opponent and vice-versa. It would seem your intentions are opposed. But if you change the rules so you're playing iterated prisoner's dilemma, well, suddenly, the stable strategy, tit for tat, allows for mutual cooperation.

Rather than conceal our intentions, our first effort should be to align them. That requires us to be honest³ about what we want.

This isn't just some romantic drivel about needing world peace and unity. Real-life games are in constant flux. The rules are not set in stone, and we have some say in which rule book we choose to play by.

Of course, you won't always be able to align your intentions. If you're competing for the same finite, indivisible resource, only one of you can come out on top.

When you find yourself in such a situation, unless you already have a decisive advantage, your first reaction should be to flee. Quit the game. The world is probably big enough for the both of you if you just get out of each other's way. Because conflict is for suckers.

In ecology, "conflict is for suckers" is formalized as Gause's law or the 12th law of cooperation: Be radically honest. It's why you won't find "perfect competitors" in nature. If two species start out occupying the same niche, then the slightest advantage in one will compound over millions of years to become a dominant position. The pressure pushes the other species to differentiate or go extinct.

Beyond ecology, a corollary is that we should preemptively avoid competition through specialization. In entrepreneurship, this becomes the competitive exclusion principle's advice to build a monopoly (because, as he puts it, "competition is for losers")⁴. In families, Gause's law might explain why siblings drift into different subjects. In academia, why disciplines fracture into ever more specialized fields. In management, why Thiel recommends that every employee take on a unique role:

"The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict." — Peter Thiel ⁴

When your intentions conflict with those of another–the two of you are stuck in a zero-sum struggle—take a step back. Consider whether the prize is really worth it. Rather than conceal your intentions, change arenas (or inspire the other to leave). Better to differentiate your intentions.

Sometimes you can't run. Because the stakes of quitting would be too high. That's the moment when Greene's battlefield tactics start to make sense. When maybe, just maybe, you should consider concealing your intentions. But these tactics of deceit and insincerity should be your last option. Don't stoop low until all other options are exhausted.

Summary

If you find yourself in a conflict of intentions:

1. Try to align your intentions. Change the rules of the game you're playing.
2. If that doesn't work, differentiate your intentions. Quit the game or get the other player to quit the game.
3. If all else fails, resort to Greene and conceal your intentions.

Footnotes

Robert Greene's second law of power is to never put too much trust in friends and to learn how to use enemies.

Specifically, Greene warns us to be wary of mixing "friendship" with professional relationships. Even among the preeminently reasonable, "friendship" can fester into cronyism: you're more likely to hold those you like to lower standards or to avoid healthy confrontation in order to curry favor. "Enemies," in contrast, have something to prove to you. Bring them under your wing, and they will fight twice as hard to redeem themselves.

As with all of Greene's laws, there's a hint of truth here. "Friends" really can encourage the worst in each other. It might explain why, when corporates hire consultants for "rebalancing human capital" (or whatever euphemism for "firing people" happens to be in vogue), useless executives are safe while those on the work floor are sacrificed en masse. Why, at the end of it all, the bosses get to take home a restructuring bonus. Management really can suck.

However. . . .

You've probably already realized, by my use of quotes, that I take issue with Greene's definition of "friend." Excuse the ad hominem, but Greene seems to be using "friend" the way somebody might who's never actually had a "friend."

Here, we can take a lesson from the ancients, and go all the way back to Aristotle who described three types of friendship:

1. Friends of utility: those who "love each other . . . in so far as some benefit accrues to them from each other.”"
2. Friends of pleasure: those whose company we enjoy "not because of what they are in themselves, but because they are agreeable to us"
3. Friends of good: those who "wish each alike the other’s good in respect of their goodness."

Greene's "friends" fall almost solely in the first category with perhaps a few stragglers in the second. His nihilism doesn't recognize anything so abstract as virtue. His cynicism doesn't recognize anything so sappy as loving an other for the sake of the other.

It is, of course, this "truer" friendship, we romantics have in mind when we speak of "friendship." The friendship of an Aristotle or a Seneca:

A man makes a friend, not "'for the purpose of having someone to come and sit beside his bed when he is ill or come to his rescue when he is hard up or thrown into chains,' but so that on the contrary he may have someone by whose bedside he himself may sit or whom he may himself release when that person is held prisoner by hostile hands. Anyone thinking of his own interests and seeking out friendship with this in view is making a great mistake." — Literature Notes/Books/Philosophy/Letters from a Stoic

While Greene's followers are busy magnifying their egos, the rest of us are busy trying to do the opposite: to shrink our heads and silence the incessant whining of our inner voice. Friendship is an exercise in ego death—in separating ourselves from ourselves.

A friendship out of appreciation for each other's virtue, built around the pursuit of mutual improvement, does not corrupt. It welcomes harsh truths and demands hard work.

But you don't need to have this perfect ideal of friendship to get the benefits. A Gallup study in the late '90s found that "I have a best friend at work" is a consistent correlate with employee retention, productivity, and profitability.¹ It pays to mix friendships with professional relationships. Even normal (non-"best") friendships correlate positively with job productivity. Up to a point that is: too many friendships and your emotional exhaustion will offset the gains (Methot et al. 2015).

For anyone trying to build healthier relationships, "not putting too much trust in each other," is just about the worst advice you could give.

To build healthy relationships in any domain requires trust. With married couples, trust is a strong correlate of level of commitment, and it's reciprocated more often than expressions of love (Larzelere & Huston 1980). So too, trust is indispensable in professional relationships. Here it is especially trust between different occupational layers that matters (Cho & Park 2011).

All this may sound trite and obvious, but it's always harder to act it out in practice. Many of us have a natural reticence to trusting others. Though we obviously should not put our trust in everyone, we might do well to grant our closest companions yet more.

The importance of sacrificing the semblance of security for trust helps explain the cult of vulnerability of Brené Brown and collaborators. We need to be proactively vulnerable.

Larzelere & Huston (1980) identify two key parts of trust:

1. Believing the other to be benevolent and truly want what is best for the other.
2. Believing the other to be honest.

Over the long run, you can't fake either of these. Either you really do want what is best for the other, or acts of selfishness will slip through. Either you really are honest, or your lies will eventually contradict themselves and come tumbling down. You have to want what is best for the other before you can expect the other to want what is best for you. You have to be honest to get honesty.

It comes back to Seneca . . .

"If you wish to be loved, love." — Seneca

Footnotes

Robert Greene's first law of power is to never outshine the master. Humans are petty and quick to envy, he reasons. So if you give your superior an unadulterated taste of your potential, they will feel jealous at best and threatened at worst. Better if you stay out of the spotlight to avoid conflict. You can revenge yourself when the tables turn.

Of course Greene has a point. There are envious and incompetent people out there. Some of them happen to be bosses. But not all bosses happen to be envious and incompetent.

Even if the manager class appears to be more envious and incompetent than the general population,¹ that's hardly enough evidence to justify groveling before every superior.

Choose Your Boss

Ultimately, you choose where to work, who to work for, and what kind of culture to belong to.² So if you can, choose to work with a boss who doesn't have the kind of insecurity that requires them to put everyone else down.

If you can't choose your boss (because you've applied to a faceless corporate) and end up having a problem with them, well, that's what HR departments are for. And if both your boss and the corporate checks and balances are dysfunctional, go look for a new job because you've found rot at the company's foundations.

A great boss gets their employees to go beyond what they expected from themselves. They take pride when you flourish. Choose a boss with the confidence to let you shine.

Now, I hate to admit it, but I don't have a long career of working in corporate yet, so much of this is romantic hypothesizing. I'll make sure to come back to this when I've had more hours in the field.

Beyond what the individual can do, there's a lot that an organization can do to avoid paltry squabbling among its members:

Squash the Hierarchy

Hierarchies are not evil. They are inevitable consequences of the need to bring information together in one place so that important, long-term decisions can be made with sufficient oversight.

But overly rigid hierarchies are fragile and corruptible: 2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Peter principle. In retaliation, we've seen a few companies try out "2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Dilbert principle".

There are different philosophies, but they generally generally share:

1. A restricted selection of job titles (2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Putt's law has two kinds of managers, when the rules for rising become clear, the nefarious begin to game the system eschews titles of all kinds).
2. Self-organizing "squads" or "circles" (with self-elected project leads). Think Google's flat organization but 100% of the time.
3. A short-term, piecemeal take on problem-solving (much like in agile development).

The success of companies like Zappos, Valve, and 20% time show that this structure can work, especially with smaller companies and predictable business models (e.g., retail). But it's an open question to what extent these structures can scale. And how well they can translate to markets that require longer-term planning (e.g., building a rocket that can get to Mars). And there's a separate question as to whether these organizations are truly "flat":

"[Valve] is a pseudo-flat structure where, at least in small groups, you're all peers and make decisions together . . . . But the one thing I found out the hard way is that there is actually a hidden layer of powerful management structure in the company and it felt a lot like high school. There are popular kids that have acquired power in the company, then there's the trouble makers, and everyone in between." — Jeri Ellsworth

Hierarchies emerge naturally because of cumulative advantage (among other reasons). Small differences in reach and influence compound over time, so power centralizes. With money, "Zappos" (the Matthew effect"). So too with influence in organizations.

There's a balance between the extremes of rigid military hierarchy and hippy pseudo-flatness. To reach that balance, perhaps the most important thing to develop an active disrespect for chain of command.

In a 2018 memo to Tesla's employees, Valve had the following to say:

"Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the “chain of command”. Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere."

Musk's main complaint is that chains of command distort information (think the telephone game). And "[t]he way to solve this is [to] allow free flow of information between all levels." In addition, an overly strict chain of command carries the risk of eroding accountability: your chance at promotion becomes solely determined by how you appear to your superiors and not how you act to your underlings.

When an employee is welcomed to bring complaints about a boss to the boss's boss (and is actually heard), hierarchies avoid becoming too rigid. This aim is also why many companies engage in some form of regular peer review. So that employees' opinions about bosses are formally brought into decisions about promotions.

Separate Concerns

Next to subverting hierarchies and conducting peer reviews, another way to limit bosses feeling threatened is to draw a clearer separation of concerns between technical and managerial employees (and with any other relevant categories). To separate "boss" from "manager". This disentangles promotional ladders, which prevents the managers from feeling directly in competition with their best employees.

Take a lesson from Patagonia's in the rich get richer and the poor get poorer:

"The best thing I did as a manager at PayPal was to make every person in the company responsible for doing just one thing. Every employee's one thing was unique, and everyone knew I would evaluate him only on that one thing. I had started doing this just to simplify the task of managing people. But then I noticed a deeper result: defining roles reduced conflict."

As companies get bigger, some redundancy in roles will be inevitable. But this principle of Thiel's (a corollary of 3 Resources/Rationalia/EA/Topics/Elon Musk) continues to apply: clear role definitions prevent conflict.³ Say I'm a project lead whose highest hope is to one day reach C-suite. And I've just taken on a mid-level dev who is scarily competent. With a clear separation of concerns, promoting this dev to senior dev, then tech lead, etc. no longer means creating a rival for my next promotion. I feel safer.

Manage Expectations

Even if you have the most competent manager in the world, they may still have a good reason to be unhappy when you outshine them.

Managers aren't just about managing and organizing people; a core part of their responsibility is to manage and communicate expectations. When you outshine, you fail to meet your expectations. You fail towards the more positive direction of the two, but it remains a failure in communication—in keeping your manager informed of where you are and what you're capable of. Enough of these failures, in either direction, and you make the manager's job unnecessarily difficult.

An organization's ability to match expectations to reality is largely function of its development strategy (e.g., Scrum, Kanban, Extreme programming). So if you exceed expectations, it usually also means you're not cooperating with the development workflows. For people to come together to do more than they could individually, they have to sacrifice some autonomy. If you can thrive individually but fail to make the sacrifice so you can thrive collectively, you probably should be on your own.

The other risk with "outshining", in the sense of you taking the spotlight, is that you may present a fragmented image of your team when the situation calls for unity. This is probably why strict hierarchy remains the structure of choice where the cost of internal discord is high (such as in the military). The seemingly minor disagreement between you and your manager, once out in the open, may grow into dissension. And dissension metastasizes.

When you set high expectations for yourself and meet them, that's not outshining. It's shining, but it's not shining any more than you ought to.

Summary

When you choose a new job, you choose your boss. So choose someone who has little envy and enough self-assurance to let you shine. And if you can't choose, make sure the company has checks and balances to handle petty managers.

If you are the boss, think about ways to make protect your employees from less savory managers. You have three main options:

1. Squash the hierarchy: Experiment with flatter structures, trim the bureaucratese job titles, and try out Peter Thiel.
2. Separate concerns: Establish clearer role definitions and disentangle the promotional ladders to prevent managers and workers from competing with each other.
3. Manage expectations: You want your employees to shine, not necessarily to outshine. To that end, make sure your systems of planning actually match reality. Sample a variety of agile development methods and find what works.

Footnotes

This is the third part in a four-part series on memorizing statistics. Here, we focus on memorizing sequences.

1. 1 Projects/Writing/02 Series/Memorizing/Memorizing numbers (start here)
2. 1 Projects/Writing/02 Series/Memorizing/Memorizing units
3. 1 Projects/Writing/02 Series/Memorizing/Memorizing sequences (you are here)
4. Memorizing sources (to be written)

Throughout the series, we've been building on top of a spaced repetition system (SRS).¹ That's because—whatever the subject matter—memorizing requires repetition, and our drive towards efficiency (read: laziness) means we want to minimize the frequency of repetition. Enter the unreasonably efficient SRS.

With an SRS memorizing becomes a choice. You just deposit a nugget of information in your deck of flashcards, and the information will eventually come to rest in your long-term memory banks. Usually.

Sometimes, getting a bit to stick requires more effort. Such was the case with with numbers (start of this series) and units (part 1) because these types of data interfere. When you attempt to deposit 18.6% in your mental bank, you're liable to withdraw 16.8% or something altogether different.

For numbers, the solution was to use mnemonic techniques like the part 2. These hijack our strong visual machinery to separate numbers out of interference's reach. With units, the solution was to avoid memorizing as much possible. Instead, to develop a physical intuition that would make the units self-evident. And when that fails, to use Major system.

Here with sequences, the difficulty is elsewhere: a sequence presents too much information to recall all at once. Suppose we wanted to memorize the stages of the cement-manufacturing process:²

Cement manufacturing

1. Mining raw materials: limestone, clay, sand, & slate
2. Crushing and grinding hard materials; Stirring of soft materials
3. Blending in right proportions
4. Burning in a kiln to produce "clinker"
5. Grinding the clinker with gypsum

Naïvely, we could put this on the back of a flashcard and write something on the front like, "what are the 5 stages in the manufacturing process of cement"? But flashcards are supposed to be atomic. As cards get larger, the odds that we forget one item increase towards certainty. Big cards are bad.

Fortunately, we have better options.

1. Break it Apart

The first thing we could do is to divide the sequence of 5 stages into 5 different cards:

What is the first stage in the manufacturing process of cement? […]

What is the second stage in the manufacturing process of cement? […]

With simple examples, this may be more than enough. But this approach hides several weaknesses.

First, with a sequence, we often care more about relative order than absolute order. Say I forget whether "clinker" is what goes into the kiln or what comes out of it. I'd have to call to mind stage 4 and stage 5 separately then compare their abstract ordinals to resolve my confusion. Better to skip the labels and learn directly that grinding clinker follows burning in the kiln.

Second, your choice in labels might not be universal. Two different people could disagree about how to classify the stages of cement manufacturing (maybe mining & extraction fall outside of "manufacturing"). A third might expect more granularity in your description.

Finally, reducing a sequence to numbers again risks the interference effect. You might accidentally swap two steps in your head.

2. Use Overlapping Cloze and Images

With a little extra effort, we can get around these problems.

To emphasize relative order over absolute order, use overlapping cloze-deletions (i.e., fill-in-the-blank). Rather than prompt each step in isolation, provide the previous or surrounding steps as context. Check out this Anki plug-in to make overlaps easier.

What is the next stage in cement-manufacturing?

1. …
2. Crushing and grinding hard materials; Stirring of soft materials
3. […]
4. …
5. …

---

1. …
2. Crushing and grinding hard materials; Stirring of soft materials
3. Blending in right proportions
4. …
5. …

Better still to shift to images so you can take advantage of your visual and spatial brain powers. Use the Image Occlusion Enhanced plugin (by the same author) for the visual equivalent of cloze-deletions. Hide part of a sequence diagram and prompt yourself to fill it in. Not only is this often easier to memorize, but you avoid the risk of "locking-in" too rigid a sequence: with a picture, you can always add in additional intermediate steps later.

What is the first stage in cement manufacturing? memory pegs

1. Mining raw materials: limestone, clay, sand, & slate³

3. Use Memory Pegs

What if the sequence we're trying to memorize is intractably numerical. Then, how to avoid interference?

Suppose we wanted to memorize the order of the biggest emitters of CO₂ (from WRI 2020). And we have to know the explicit rankings. ⁴

GHG emissions by country

1. 🇨🇳 China: 11.8 GtCO₂e
2. 🇺🇸 USA: 5.77 GtCO₂e
3. 🇮🇳 India: 3.36 GtCO₂e
4. 🇪🇺 EU: 3.20 GtCO₂e
5. 🇷🇺 Russia: 2.46 GtCO₂e
6. 🇮🇩 Indonesia: 2.28 GtCO₂e
7. 🇧🇷 Brazil: 1.39 GtCO₂e
8. 🇯🇵 Japan: 1.24 GtCO₂e
9. 🇮🇷 Iran: 0.882 GtCO₂e
10. 🇰🇷 South Korea: 0.671 GtCO₂e

Now, you could use the technique we explored in (the part 1) to memorize the amount of emissions.

E.g.: to convert 11.8 GtCO2e into letters ("TTF") then into words ("too tough") and make a mental association (China becomes an impassive bouncer). But we care about rankings not absolute terms.

If we try to apply the Major system to the single digits of a (short) list of rankings, the technique breaks down. It's difficult to make sticky words & images when you have only one letter to work with. E.g. 1st -> "T" -> ?, 2nd -> "N" -> ?, etc.

Instead, we're going to use perhaps the simplest mnemonic technique: the memory peg. Ahead of time, we associate an object (a "memory peg") to the ten (or more⁵) numbers we'd like to be able to memorize.

To make it easier, a common choice is to make the initial association by rhyme or sound.

Memory pegs

1. One -> Gun
2. Two -> Shoe
3. Three -> Tree
4. Four -> Door
5. Five -> Hive
6. Six -> Bricks
7. Seven -> Heaven
8. Eight -> Plate
9. Nine -> Wine
10. Ten -> Hen

We actually already saw this technique in Major system, where we created a memory peg for each unit we might want to remember. This is the same idea but for numbers. And it makes sense to use whenever your numbers are single digits. Moreover, you can use this technique in conjunction with the previous techniques.

Then when it comes to memorizing the numbers, we instead make an association with the memory pegs.

E.g.:

1. 🇨🇳 China: I'll leave it to you to make an association between China and guns, violence, genocide. Very difficult.
2. 🇺🇸 USA: How about imagining Trump leading a ritual burning of Nike shoes because of Colin Kaepernick while the QAnon shaman dances over the flames.
3. etc.

When we get past 2 digits to memorize, it's natural to graduate to the part 2. In either case, you'll still want to prompt yourself with flashcards you've made on Anki.

4. Use a Memory Palace

If you need something more powerful, you can use a memory palace (aka "method of loci").

The premise is simple. Visualize a place you know well. Then, mentally fill this location with the items you'd like to memorize. Move through the location (in your mind) and pass the items in the order you'd like to retrieve them. It helps to make the items as grotesque and lewd as you can.

Our brains are highly adept at visual and spatial reasoning. The memory palace hijacks this ability to store potentially incredible amounts of information.⁶ It's the foundation for the strong memories of professional mnemonists and indigenous communities the world over (Kelly 2019).

In my personal experience, I don't end up using the memory palace often because I find it requires too much time compared to the other approaches (at least for simple sequences and non-prose). This is probably more evidence that I am a novice mnemonist than that the memory palace is excessive (professional mnemonists can memorize decks of cards using memory palaces in minutes⁷). With more experience, the time it takes will go down, but the benefits will remain high.

But until we novices get to the level of expert, simpler techniques have more than enough to offer. They bridge the gap and keep us motivated at our growing memories as we develop yet better techniques. (2 Areas/Principles/Laws/Benford's law)

Conclusion

Try it all, and see what works.

Footnotes

One of the challenges with 3 Resources/Concepts/Health is that the science seems to change constantly. Animal fats were fine, then evil, and now okay again (read: the holy of holies if you're in the keto cult). Breakfast was the most important meal of the day until the intermittent fast took its place. Coffee caused cancer, cured cancer, and who knows what it does now. We were supposed to avoid exercise to preserve energy. Now, if you don't exercise, you're pretty much committing suicide by attrition.

So too with Sleep. Neuroscientist Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep is one of the more recent examples of popular-health-science-gone-viral. The thesis is that we should be getting more sleep. Sounds reasonable enough.

Quackery

Only it turns out that the book may contain a host of erroneous claims. Most interestingly, the sacred eight hours a night may be a myth. You might be able to get by fine with seven hours or even six hours. Now, if you've been sticking to the recommendations like I have, two additional productive hours a day would be life-changing. It could mean years of being awake added to an already short existence.

But they'd better be "productive". And I don't want to be the fool hopping from trend to trend at the whims of popular opinion only to have to swing back to eight hours when that again becomes fashionable. Especially when health science in particular is so fickle. How are we outsiders, too busy to go into the primary literature ourselves, to judge these claims?

Null hypothesis

First, the evidence of absence deserves greater credibility than the evidence of presence. In complex systems (like the human body) it's difficult to come up with anything that looks like a clear one-sided correlation.

So a scientific¹ claim that the amount we sleep has a definitive causal relationship with mortality and cancer risk warrants greater skepticism than the scientific claim that sleep has no consistent effect in any yet-observable way (source). At least within some reasonable bounds (say 6 to 9 hours).

Walker, true to scientific heritage, took the time to respond to his critics. He reviews a host of studies that point to 6 hours really being too little: it's bad for your reaction time, your risk of diabetes, certain cancers, cardiovascular disease, your all-cause mortality, etc. Sleep is important. Still, his book has enough sloppy mistakes that we should somewhat discount the bolder claims.

Ultimately, we don't know what the ideal amount of sleep is per individual. And that's really where the fundamental challenge with health science lies. Individuals vary. A lot. What works for me need not work for you. And when the scientific method requires us to study large groups, we work with averages that may not be representative of any one individual.²

The solution is to treat yourself as test-subject. Try a bunch of different things and see what works. Space your experiments across time to recover a semblance of the scientific cornerstone of repeatability. It will never be as rigorous as the experiments in a particle accelerator or gravitational wave detector, but we don't need the same 5-sigma significance for our investigations to yield a positive effect.

The promise of the rather hype-y fields of "behavioral health" and "personalized medicine" is to make this tinkering more accessible. To make it easier to track important metrics and automate the analysis so that everyone can become the experts of themselves. If we can deliver on that promise, well, then good health need not remain the sole dominion of the elite and wealthy.

Don't mindlessly chase all the latest health trends. But also don't let the variability of health science become an excuse not to listen to new findings. Let scientific literature, old and new, serve as a starting point for your own investigations into yourself. Find what works for you, and keep on experimenting.

At the end of it all, I've learned to be less of an 8-hours-a-night zealot. And to explore a wider range of times to see what works. For now, that's enough of a lesson.

Footnotes