Book Review: The Gervais Principle

Astral Codex Ten Podcast

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle

I.

The Gervais Principle, by postrationalist heresiarch Venkatesh Rao, claims to be a business book.

It claims a lot of things, actually. According to its introduction:

By my estimate, the material in this book has already triggered . . . hazardous reflection for thousands of people over the past four years. It has triggered significant (and not always positive) career moves for dozens of people that I know of.

And:

There is a cost to getting organizationally literate. This ability, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired. Just as learning a foreign language makes you deaf to the raw, unintelligible sound of that language you could once experience, learning to read organizations means you can never see them the way you used to, before. Achieving organizational literacy or even fluency does not mean you will do great things or avoid doing stupid things. But it does mean that you will find it much harder to lie to yourself about what you are doing and why. It forces you to own the decisions you make and accept the consequences of your actions…So to seek organizational literacy is to also accept a sort of responsibility for your own life that many instinctively reject.

This power can have very unpredictable effects. You may find yourself wishing, if you choose to acquire it, that you hadn’t. So acquiring organizational literacy is what some like to call a memetic hazard: dangerous knowledge that may harm you. A case of “where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” […]

But I believe, unlike Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, that almost everyone is capable of “handling the truth”. Sure, some of you may end up depressed, or make bad decisions as a result of this book, but I believe that is a risk associated with all writing of any substance.