For those looking for a "successor theory" to the Dilbert Principle, I highly suggest Venkatesh Rao's Gervais Principle [0].

To use Dilbert terms: Adams would say that PHB is dumb and he is promoted into management as that's where he can do the least damage.

Rao would say that PHB is actually put there by upper management to be a combination of:

- fall guy/lightning rod to take blame for failed projects

- dumb subordinates are less likely to try to take your job (dumb doesn't mean unintelligent. Rather, Rao uses the term "clueless" to highlight smart people who are not political)

0 - https://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/

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bananaflag an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Scott Alexander reviewed it:

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-pri...

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jrjeksjd8d 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The Gervais Principle is much more accurate in my experience. One of the important reasons middle management has to be "clueless" to drink the kool-aid and take on more responsibility for minimal extra compensation. The checked out employees of the world know their work is meaningless, but the clueless ascribe to it some greater meaning which makes them trustworthy.

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dpark 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The PHB is not middle management. Middle management is at least one level above the PHB.

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zahlman an hour ago | parent [-]

That depends on the company size, surely?

	▲	dpark an hour ago \| parent [-]
		No. A first level manager cannot be middle management. A small company might not have middle management but the first level manager is bottom management.

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api 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Look at the contrast.

We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.

Then look at our leadership class. Look at the leaders of the most powerful countries. Look at the most powerful leaders in finance and business.

Look at that contrast. It’s very clear where the actually smart people are.

But those actually smart people keep putting leaders like that in power. It’s not a conspiracy. We do it. We need them for some reason.

I have two hypotheses.

One is familiar: they are sacrificial lightning rods. Sacrifice the king when things don’t go well.

The other is what I call the dopamine donor hypothesis. Compared to the speed and complexity of the modern world, most human beings are essentially catatonic. Our dopamine systems are not calibrated for this. So we sit there and do nothing by default, or we play and invent but lack the intrinsic motivation to do the hardest parts.

So we find these freaks: narcissists, delusional manic prophets, psychopaths. They’re deeply dysfunctional people but we use them. We use the fact that they have tireless non stop motivation. Dopamine always on. Go go go.

We place them in positions of authority and let them drive us, even to the point of abuse, as a hack to get around the fact that our central nervous systems don’t natively do this.

Then of course if things go wrong, it’s back to their other purpose: sacrificial scapegoats.

So in a sense we are both victims of these people and exploiters of them. It’s a dysfunctional relationship.

If we could find ways to tweak our systems like amphetamine but without the side effects, we could perhaps replace this system with a pill.

It would be more compassionate for the freaks too. They’re not happy people. If we stopped using them this way they might get help and be happier.

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botacode 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The order is wrong here:

Governance creates markets -> markets create innovation. These things have feedback loops into governance, but the tail ultimately does not wag the dog.

Engineers-- especially in the Bay where discussion of such is written off as mental illness-- often dismiss politics and governance as nonsense subjects that lack rules and are run by the mob/emotions. The reality however, is that these societal constructs have their own "physics" and operate like a (very complex and challenging to study) system just like everything else in the natural world.

The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.

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jnovek 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The attitude itself is of course something has been designed and implemented into engineering culture by precisely the leaders you contend are scape goats to society. POSIWID.

I don’t know if this particular statement is true or not, but the number of smart people I know who thinks they’re not affected by propaganda is wild. We’re all affected by propaganda.

	▲	CamperBob2 10 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If for no other reason, that's true because we live in a democratic republic. If you're affected by propaganda, then I am, too.

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inglor_cz 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

"Governance creates markets"

I am not sure this is necessarily the case, at least historically. We have good evidence of long distance trade from the Stone Age, and even some Neanderthal sites contain stones whose origin can be traced to distant regions (over 100 km, IIRC, which is far away in a primordial roadless countryside).

I would agree that markets cannot grow beyond a certain size without a government, though.

	▲	retrac a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		Presence of trade is not necessarily a market in the modern sense.

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tsunamifury 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Those games operate far more probablistically and high dimensionally than programming and I suspect engineers would rather dismiss them as “dumb” than accept they are simply inferior players in those games.

Primary multi agent multi dimension probabilistic resolution problems model human and crowd interaction better than “code do this every time”.

I’ve spent a long time in the valley and I’ve come to the personal conclusion that engineers are often the dumbest (and most narrowly useful) in the room not the smartest. And the rest of them let them think they are very smart (tm) so they do what we say.

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ThrowawayR2 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How very Dilbertian. If one were to compress the above post into a comic, it would star Dilbert wondering why people with towering intellects like Dilbert weren't running the world in the first panel and then humorously demonstrating in subsequent panels Dilbert's disastrous and irreparable lack of understanding of messy human interrelationships and motivations that have to be navigated to not implode as a leader.

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tsunamifury 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Well observed. And seen in tragic relief as the piles of dead in Russia and China during their most technocratic periods run by engineers.

Which wasn’t just about refusal to interact with humanity but to acknowledge that complex multi factor problems can’t be solved as top down heuristics.

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terminalshort an hour ago | parent [-]

The piles of bodies in China came from Mao and his cultural revolution, and he can hardly be called an engineer. The recent success of China has come when it was run by engineers. And when was Russia ever run by engineers? So I think you have it backwards here.

	▲	tsunamifury an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"Russia was never run by engineers?" That's a massive oversight of 20th-century history. The Soviet Union was the world’s first and most committed technocracy. The GOSPLAN (State Planning Committee) was a literal attempt to run a continent-sized economy as a deterministic engineering problem. By the 70s, the Soviet leadership was more densely packed with engineers than any administration in US history. They failed because they tried to 'refactor' nature. Stalin’s 'Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature' and Mao’s 'Great Leap Forward' (which applied industrial throughput logic to biology/close-planting) are the ultimate warnings of what happens when you treat complex, probabilistic systems (ecology and humanity) like a closed-loop machine. Mao wasn’t an engineer by degree, but he was a High Modernist by practice. He believed society could be 'debugged' and 'optimized' through central planning. The result wasn't a more efficient system; it was a total system crash that cost tens of millions of lives. Current China is a perfect example of 'Success by Engineering'—high-speed rail and ghost cities built on a demographic 'memory leak' (the One Child Policy) that is now crashing the entire stack. This is exactly my point: Engineers optimize for the metric they can see, while ignoring the high-dimensional chaos that actually sustains life.

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jrjeksjd8d 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> We are teaching the sand to think and working on 3d printing organs and peering at the beginning of time with super-telescopes and landing rockets.

There are a lot of smart and skilled people involved in making a cutting edge chip fab. It's not one ubermensch in a basement inventing a new TSMC process by thinking really hard. There's technicians, scientists, researchers in multiple disciplines. All of those people have to be organized.

I don't know where you think the "smart" people are, but maybe meditate on the fact that "smartness" is not a single variable that dictates a person's value or success. Someone who is an expert at researching extreme UV patterning isn't going to necessarily run a great chip manufacturer.

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dtech 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's pretty simple: those people are the absolute experts in their field, similar to those top chemists or whatever. That field is societal power systems.

Of course someone who dedicated his time to climbing and understanding power systems will have more power than someone who doesn't.

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api 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but then my question is why we need them. What service do they provide? That’s what I was speculating about. I don’t buy the conspiracy theory that they’re pure parasites, since hosts without parasites would then be stronger and would ultimately outcompete.

We have all the skills to do all the things without these power systems so what are they for?

I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions. I mean power of the sort that makes large numbers of people do stuff. I mean gurus and aggrandizers, basically. The people who con and goad us into doing hard things.

My hypothesis is that we can’t self generate that due to neurological limitations rooted in our evolutionary history in a much slower world that rarely changed.

Amphetamine could work too but it has ugly side effects. Social pressure is less hazardous and scales better.

	▲	phtrivier 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Managers are here to accommodate the need for cooperation, while compensating for lack of telepathy. Put two people with a lot of expertise in different domain. Require them to come up with a solution to a problem you have. That's three people. You'll get at the very least four opinions about each and every step. Scale the complexity of the problems and the number of people. You end up with full time jobs consisting purely in routing information from brain A to brain Z. Unfortunately, the skills to do this job are never properly taught, but learnt in the job. (MBA don't teach management - they either teach the mechanism of some administration, or ways to get rich consulting.) Problems occur because we conflate management, supervision, decision making, strategy setting, etc... P.H.B. is an antipattern, a caricature, a stereotype like all other : it's funny cause there is truth to it. But we are by no mean condemned to fulfill our stereotypes (should I remind all engineers here about the stigmas attached to nerd in the real world ?)
	▲	zozbot234 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> I don’t mean policing and courts. Those are administrative and managerial functions. Middle management is also an admininstrative and managerial function. Even in a best-case scenario, coördinating work among a huge amount of people within enterprises that are mostly run via command-and-control mechanisms and inside politics (as opposed to any self-regulating "market") obviously takes a whole lot of effort. That's really the natural job description for PHB's.
	▲	dasil003 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		People are not inspired by institutions and committees, you need a personality that can articulate a vision.
	▲	erichocean 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		The WIDGET model of "working geniuses" is one possible answer, it does explain a lot of team dynamics in my experience. Since no one has all six working geniuses, and you're only a genius at two, it takes a collection of people, proportional to the work that needs to be done, of each type.

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pluralmonad 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You got it backwards. We (which we?) don't need them, they need us. They can't play the games they like without massive resource extraction. If someone continually catches the flu, it doesn't mean they need the flu.

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Bendy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We don’t just use these people we create them. Since ancient Egypt the priest class of every society is employed to apply ritual trauma to psychologically prepare princes for their vocation of restless leadership.