Loyalty

Loyalty is an oft-touted "virtue," but is it really a virtue?

Loyalty means the blind following or favoring of an individual or group, irrespective of their actions being right or wrong. Loyalty is related to other vices like nepotism and cronyism, yet unlike these concepts, it is often given a positive connotation - why? The reason is that loyalty is an extremely useful trait to the rulers, who depend on it to exercise unlimited power, and who thus support it.

Loyalty is what enabled the Nazis and others famous for genocide and other atrocities. Loyalty is the fuel that enables lunatics to achieve their horrendous goals - that they could not achieve by themselves. Loyalty is often paired with totalitarianism, which uses fear and punishment to further strengthen loyalty (including weeding out those who ask too many questions or don't follow orders). Education and the media is used to foster group idiocy (slave mind), too, encouraging slave-like loyalty to the masters.

If loyalty is a virtue, we need to be loyal not to fallible individuals or groups, but rather to universal ethics:

• Don't kill
• Don't rape
• Don't steal
• Don't lie

These are of course 4 "red flags" stemming from the "mother" virtue of compassion.

If humankind is loyal to these universal ethics, then they will not be willing pawns to a crazy, sociopathic leader who calls for war or genocide. Leaders are fallible, just like anybody else. As human beings, we have the capability to know right from wrong, and have the responsibility to be loyal to that.

This is the right kind of loyalty that is in fact a virtue, along with faithfulness to one's partner (which is often confused with "loyalty").

KPIs

KPIs, or "key performance indicators," are rarely actually data sets that are good indicators of performance, because such data is most often not easy to identify and/or measure. Instead, KPIs in reality are usually facile data sets chosen solely for their ease of measurement and ideation (copying whatever others use in an industry) - a more accurate name for these would be "facile non-indicators of anything" (FNAs).

They are also a symptom of data disease wherein leaders feel empowered by pretending to be data scientists, pointing to numbers and graphs, but without really grasping what data is and how it should be used. A basic concept in data science is "garbage in, garbage out" - if your original data is worthless or questionable or unrelated, then even the best analyses of said data can only be worthless or questionable or unrelated as well.

Today, KPIs pollute the minds of executives everywhere, and they remain the bane of many employees, but the word "KPI" is not old. According to Google's Ngram Viewer, the words "KPI" and "key performance indicator" only appeared in the late 1990s, starting to gain popularity from the early 2000s. Their older cousin "scientific management," however, was extremely popular from much earlier, peaking in 1913; certainly Frederick Winslow Taylor's popular book, The Principles of Scientific Management published in 1911 influenced this. Taylor mostly considered manufacturing and manual labor (e.g. shoveling), where production was easily quantified, and in these cases, providing bonuses to those who produced more predictably resulted in more production.

But scientific management had roots in another industry - slavery, which many workers compared Taylor's system with in 1911. The very popular Cotton Plantation Record and Account Book published in 1847 or 1848 by Thomas Affleck had detailed instructions for plantation owners to:

• Track cotton production of each slave (per acre, per bale)
• Evaluate the asset value of each slave ("negroes accounting")
• Depreciate values of slaves due to health or age (e.g. at middle age)
• Providing bonuses to productive slaves and dealing punishments to less productive slaves

Today, modern corporations sadly sound quite similar, but repetitive labor like cotton-picking is much easier to measure than the complex and unstructured work that modern corporations today focus on. Irrespective of what is being measured, employees' negative perception of the slave driver's whip and stopwatch has not changed.

More often than not, executives push and shove their KPIs down employees' throats, feeling as they have accomplished something - but what is the result? Certainly not increased performance.

• Moral damage: distrust of leadership, (accurate) fear that the new KPIs will be used to "catch" and punish staff.
• Motivational damage: disconnect between arbitrary KPIs and perceived actual value will foster unhappiness; simplifying people's contributions into mere numbers will also generate the perception of treating people as robots, drones, or slaves.
• Perverse incentives: KPIs very often create perverse ways of attaining "success" in the arbitrary data points chosen to define success - for example, if a writer is paid per word, then of course the writer will naturally write wordy, long-winded documents; however, wordiness is not real value.
• Material damage: increased turnover as staff decide to move elsewhere; few people enjoy being treated like slaves. Effectiveness falls as well, as executives fervently focus on the easily measurable aspects, while discarding valuable aspects that are not easily measurable, despite their importance.

It is important to remember that these methods were originally developed for managing slaves, who had no ability to quit or resist. It is also important to remember that data naturally predisposes people to focus upon it, thus overlooking information not included in the data. The ease of measuring something in no way is related to how important it is.

Patriotism

Patriotism is a delusion and a false virtue that is one of many types of false groupings of people, used to strengthen a group at the expense of others. It is a specific type of loyalty, another false virtue that is however convenient to espouse. Patriotism's mechanism is to create perceived connections and shared identity between people who are by and large complete strangers. The purpose is to heighten cooperation and loyalty within one group; the problem is that naturally it also heightens aggression and antipathy toward those outside of the group.

Patriotism is but one form of groupism, where artificial groupings are defined in many ways. Groupings of people include:

• by family (nepotism)
• by tribe/team (tribalism)
• by town (town rivalry)
• by state/province (state rivalry)
• by country (patriotism)
• by language (linguistic discrimination)
• by race (racism)
• by religion (religious intolerance)
• by species - humans
• by kingdom - animals
• by life - organisms (ahimsa)
• by matter - non-space (animism)

Each grouping has some degree of artifice involved - e.g. "family" can perceived as nuclear or the whole "clan." Languages are usually defined politically and not linguistically (consider Swedish and Norwegian (mutually intelligible) vs. Cantonese and Mandarin (not intelligible)). State boundaries are often historically set by invaders, plopping multiple "nations" together.

Naturally, nations find patriotism most useful, and thus make efforts to instill this in their populace, usually through childhood education and the media, which they control. Often the arguments are inane, such as "our food is the best" or "our language is the best" or "we naturally are the most hard-working" and so forth. Like the more general loyalty, patriotism is about subtle control.

When patriotism becomes stronger, different words are used to name it:

Patriotism, nationalism, ultranationalism, jingoism, fascism.

Some simple questions can be used to test for patriotism.

• Do you feel pride in being a member of your country? (Did you choose to be born in your country?)
• Are you jubilant when a sports team of your country wins against a team of another country? Do you rage when they lose? (Do you even know anybody in those teams?)
• Do you feel insulted when someone criticizes your country? (Did you make your country that way?)

The various ethical systems can be compared qualitatively and quantitatively. The qualitative part is about actions - e.g., "Do not murder, do not steal," etc. are nearly universal. The quantitative part is straightforward - which groups does this ethical rule apply to? An ethical system that teaches to be ethical to just one's nation is thus quantitatively "less" than an ethical system that teaches to be ethical to all living things.

To move forward, humankind should emphasize togetherness, not difference, so that we can all thrive together.

Confidence

Confidence is an oft-considered "virtue" that is unique in that its effect (positive or negative) depends on its direction and magnitude. This contrasts with actual virtues which follow "the more, the better." Specifically, confidence and unconfidence are borne from lack of knowledge - this lack of certainty creates a gap, which is then mentally filled; its direction (bias) is based on temperament. The direction and magnitude create various forms of confidence and unconfidence, which directly influence action or non-action.

Despite confidence being a type of bias (toward self or others), and normally biases are seen negatively, confidence is a strange exception that exhibits cognitive dissonance.

It is also confusing in that there are many kinds of confidence - and so the term causes much confusion when saying things like "confidence is the most important attribute for a leader!" What does that even mean?

Actually, "confidence" is a confusing word, because it is a "word of convenience" that uses one word to encompass many different meanings, both positive and negative.

For example, we can use different names for different kinds of "confidence" by degree, e.g.:

• Self-Doubt (very low)
• Diffidence (low)
• Equanimity (neither low nor high)
• Confidence (high)
• Arrogance (very high)
• Narcissism (pathologically high)
• Hubris (extremely pathologically high)

Certainly we would not want a leader who has self-doubt, but on the other hand would we want a leader with narcissism, either?

We can name different types of confidence by aspect, e.g.:

• Vanity (confidence in one's physical appearance)
• Snobbery (confidence in one's economic class)
• Elitism (confidence in one's social group identity)

We can also name different kinds of confidence by target, e.g.:

• Self confidence (confidence in one's own abilities)
• Self esteem (confidence in one's own integrity)
• Belief in others (confidence in another's abilities)
• Trust in others (confidence in another's integrity)

For example, we may see a leader who appears confident in his own abilities, but looks down on others' abilities. What sort of effects might this have on his team?

We can also name types of confidence by the internal mechanisms, e.g.:

• Belief in self (appearance of confidence reflecting true self-belief, such as due to experience)
• Bluster (appearance of confidence hiding deep self-doubt, such as due to sensitivity to expectations)

Generally, confidence is antagonistic to humility (another term that can have multiple meanings). As a bias, confidence obstructs objectivity. Equanimity, or the lack of confidence and unconfidence, allows one to be free of this bias, and thus listen to new information and to appraise situations objectively. Confidence biases one towards oneself; lack of confidence biases one against oneself. Neither confidence nor lack of confidence aid us; both are hindrances that restrict our objectivity.

The other effect of confidence or lack of confidence is to affect performance or the perception thereof. This is of course what most people are interested in, but we need to keep in mind the potential negatives as well, and adjust to reap the benefits and not the traps.