All of jtcbrule's Comments + Replies
Patrick McKenzie AMA
You seem talented at making statements that are both deniable and very clear to your target audience. Was this a skill that you deliberately practiced, were you naturally good at it, or did you pick it up some other way?
For example, while running VaccinateCA, I could easily intuit your opinion on public Health as a field, but I don't recall you every saying anything explicitly negative during that time. I also vaguely remember some comment you made about a "certain monopsonistic firm in Nagoya" that you didn't name because, because... it would be imp... (read more)
72yI was a Japanese salaryman during my formative years. This is the way salarymen
talk, and sometimes it is diagnosed by people who do not understand it as e.g.
duplicity or unwillingness to say what we mean, when it is more often just a
culturally-inflected execution on saying something which is absolutely
unambiguous to its target audience but not socially ruinous.
No Japanese salaryman needs you to spell out the identity of a large automobile
manufacturer near Nagoya; literal children know what that must mean. But
salarymen understand, and are frequently not merely participants in but active
proponents of, a values system in which one must not make trouble for firms with
which one was previously affiliated.
Do I engage salaryman mode intentionally sometimes for tactical reasons?
Absolutely. For example:
Yes, you recall correctly. I would be negatively surprised if there was a single
public statement I made anywhere between Day 0 and Day 200 which could be quoted
in a news article as a criticism of e.g. the government. Being quoted in the
news article as being critical of the government was, I perceived, likely to
cost lives at the margin. I bent my professional energies and skill to not
accidentally letting that quote slip, and other people were helping achieve the
same (from us as an organization and from me specifically).
In the not-to-distant past, I would have reflexively dismissed this sort of speech as "political BS", yes. :sweat_smile: I suspect I was far from alone, among engineer-types, though.
I'm somewhat reminded of how would-be technical founders are cautioned that, while it is indeed bad to let the sales team run the company, sales is a very real skill that that deserves respect.
Thank you for your response and, of course, for the work you did running VaccinateCA.