This is the Anne Frank Test:
If I were a Jew in Nazi-occupied Europe, or a political dissident, or if my eye color became cause of persecution overnight, could I trust this person to protect me? Or would this person rat me out? What would this person have to be offered in order to rat me out?
This thought experiment is an important lens into the topics of systemic fragility, individual ethical fortitude, and political lability. Many people, if not most, fail it. A large number of people are cravens who’ll side with authority every time, just to make their own lives less “complicated”. Worse yet, the higher you go in society or politics, the more common it is to find people who fail this test: people who’ll kick you when you’re down, even if there’s nothing to gain. It’s sad to realize this about individuals, but it’s also the cause of the fickleness and the brittleness of so many human systems.
I’d guess that 10 to 15 percent of the people whom I’ve encountered pass the Anne Frank Test. In intimate life, test-failers should be discarded. They’re redundant human beings who’ll give out on you when you need them. They won’t fight for you if you’re in a tough spot. They will throw their muscle behind decisions made by others. Since they’re morally useless, it might be appealing to just say “fuck them”, but there’s a problem with that. In the real world, we need to be able to work with test-failers. We need them to do things for us, such as make introductions to people actually worth caring about, sign approvals to get us jobs and resources, say good things about us to bolster our all-important reputations, and the like. I’d love give advice like, “fuck all those people; just be yourself”, but it would be bad advice. Most of us are politicians. We have to sell ourselves, be liked, and win votes. A less compromising stance, unfortunately, is for billionaires and hermits.
When it comes to close friendship and deep emotional investment, you can afford to be selective. You don’t need to have a hundred friends; just a few good ones. What about business? Is it possible to do business only with those who pass the Anne Frank Test? Do we actually need the moral cowards for anything? It should seem that one only needs a few decent people, as investors and managers and employees, to do alright. Being too good of a person (which is different from moral extremism, which is always negative) is infamously disadvantageous in the corporate world, but might it be spun into a positive. I think that it’s possible, but we’d need a different culture. We don’t have a culture that values virtue; we have one that values power. Could we create a culture in which virtue was valued to a degree that the benefits of being good outweighed the costs? It’s possible, but I don’t see it happening soon.
Good and evil are unpopular notions in many circles, especially nihilistic ones like private-sector technology. Some people take the existence of good and evil to be spiritual claims (I don’t agree) and some hold that any spiritual belief is deviant (I also don’t agree). For now, just let me say that I believe that good and evil exist. Not all is relative.
Now, to be visibly evil is repulsive to almost everyone. Even if we can’t all agree on what evil is or that it exists, behaviors that are evil are often disliked, when exposed. The moral cowards in the middle, and even some of the truly evil, do not believe that they are evil. Even evil itself does not typically respect other evil. Good respects virtue, neutrality respects efficiency, and evil respects power. Evil will attack weak evil. It is certainly disadvantageous to be caught in evil.
To be good is disadvantageous as well. The good are constantly having their motives and character questioned.
- Is he really doing this for the right reasons?
- Why is she demanding so much, and why now?
- Do we really have to deal with this today?
- I heard that he made a racist remark in 1997; that makes him a hypocrite for opposing racism now.
- She has an “interesting” reputation.
- Why is he bringing me this drama?
- I might agree with her, but her tone is off-putting.
Why is it like this? I think that the moral cowardice of most people is related to an intellectual laziness. It’s a general aversion to cognition. Sometimes, it’s an aversion to complexity, although many moral issues aren’t actually complex. At any rate, the good people compel us to think, to strive to be better, and to fight vice whether it is external or internal. Most people don’t like to think. They certainly don’t like moral dilemmas. That makes the 10-15 percent who are truly good— to most people and in times when the moral stakes aren’t high and the Anne Frank Test is purely a thought experiment– annoying.
The cost to being good is that, not only must you think, but you must drive others to think. It’s the latter that often produces the social non-success of the good. There’s more to it, though: being too good makes you less promotable. Something that I’ve learned about cliques and in-crowds (including management in many corporations) is that their primary criterion for member selection is non-stickiness. That is, they want the person who says, “You get just me”, not one who is likely to bring his friends along. People are generally not made managers unless their superiors believe that they, once advanced, will abandon ties of affinity to those now beneath them. (This is why corporate managers rarely fight for their people.) What is non-stickiness, though? Ultimately, it’s the “virtue” of being one who fails the Anne Frank Test.
Sadly, most of our culture is not literate in this concept. We focus on superficial reliability while ignoring the ethical reliability that actually matters. We allow the good to be painted as annoying troublemakers. We don’t talk about virtue anymore. We talk about “reputation”, and we’ve conflated the two. If someone has “a good reputation”, then people want to work with or help that person. If that person has “a bad reputation”, people tend to avoid or harm her.
What is reputation? Why does it matter? And what does it have to do with morality? Or with the Anne Frank test? Reputation is a fun concept to hash out, because so many people say variations of “I don’t care what people think”. Yet almost no one says “I don’t care about my reputation”, which is definitionally equivalent, because that would be a ridiculous thing to say. Unless you’re a hermit or a billionaire, you’re insane if you don’t care about your reputation. It can literally make the difference between life and death. Even I, as one who has significantly damaged his reputation in order to do the right thing, care about my reputation. How could I, as a rational person, not care what is being said about me?
Reputation is what other people think of a person, and usually those “other people” are those with shallow knowledge. Why does reputation matter? Because reputation is what people think, when they don’t think. Most people are lazy, stupid, and cowardly, and will take the easiest path. Even when they’re making important decisions that affect your life, they don’t want to think. What does it have to do with morality? Two things. First, reputation’s major components are three in number: the first 10% is moral character, the second 10% is efficacy or competence, and the last 80% is sociopolitical strength (which is often a negative correlate of the first).
Reputation is powerful because it offers something for everyone. Without too much of a digression, I tend to find the “alignment” system of role-playing games useful. 10 percent each of the population is good and evil, and 80 percent is neutral. (There’s also a law vs. chaos dimension, which I won’t cover here, allowing combinations like “chaotic good” and “lawful neutral”.) Good people value virtue and justice the highest, neutral people value efficiency and competence, and evil people value power and force. What makes reputation so universally powerful is that it’s a quasi-linear combination of all three valued things. The reputation credits that come from being virtuous, competent, or powerful all blend together, as to the debits that come from being the opposite.
Of course, good people end up with reputation problems (see: whistleblowers, dissidents, the persecuted, and the just plain unlucky) and that’s when one starts to think seriously about the Anne Frank Test.
Reputations change quickly (and usually for the worse). Most people, having never faced a reputation problem, think that they can overcome it with substance. (“If they just get to know the real me…”) That’s incorrect. It’s a foolish hope. Reputation is what the people who don’t think think, and most people don’t think, and it’s impossible to succeed in (say) the business world without getting easy passage from those who don’t think, and who never will think for themselves, but who can block one’s way. We tend to view those whose votes are cheap (those over whom reputation has the most power) with contempt, noting their individual powerlessness in addition to their lack of virtue or conviction, but in doing so we miss the immense power accruing to the bundlers, packagers, and merchants of cheap votes. Reputation is artificial. It is manufactured far more often than it emerges organically, and that’s because reputation is far too powerful to be left alone. It will be manipulated, and it will be dominated by manipulators, and if there’s something that can be done about this in human organizations, I’ve love to hear it.
So how do we fix this? I don’t know, but I think that the first step is to become aware. Most people are borderline-adequate critics of information from advertisements and consumer trends, but fail when it comes to the judgment of people, which is far more important.
I used to believe, “no publicity is bad publicity.” That’s false. As I get older, I think that most publicity is bad publicity. “A good reputation” is a liability that must be maintained, and that often requires moral compromise, “a bad reputation” is embarrassing, isolating, and dangerous, and a complex reputation like my own just mixes the dangers of the two. I’ve done good things by exposing Silicon Valley’s lack of ethics, but I’m coming to wish that I had done so under another name. These days, most of the truly important work that I do on that front, unless I fuck up, will never be attributed to me.
Of course, I can’t take on the topic of reputation without getting into some of the hits that I’ve taken.
In 2011, I was mistakenly flagged as a union activist within Google. Ironically, this experience has made me far more interested in that issue (unionization of software engineers). Most people think that unions are just about job protections and strikes, but they can also help considerably on the reputation management front, by protecting vulnerable individuals. Reputation (not job security) is the reason why employers have us, as individuals, by the balls. Yet it’s nearly impossible to “bring heat” to protect your own reputation without, in fact, making it worse. Companies know this, and it allows them to be exploitative in a way that wouldn’t happen if it were a fair fight.
At any rate, once I was on this “union risk” list, I got slammed on a mailing list for some (admittedly) aggressive things that I’d said– and, later on, by my manager. By the time the mistake was corrected, the damage had already been done (and I’d said a few unwise things, myself). It wasn’t a fun experience, and I won’t defend everything I did while under fire.
I left Google on my own accord, but there were efforts (probably not by anyone important at Google) to make these problems continue after I left. When I demanded that Google investigate, so I could pursue certain malefactors individually in court, they refused. In exchange, I “leaked” its use of personnel stack ranking to the press. (This is unambiguously legal. How a company treats its employees is publishable information, as it should be.) Since they wouldn’t help me clean up my reputation, I took matters into my own hands (which, perhaps, I shouldn’t have done quite as aggressively as I did). Google has since (2013) apologized, and I consider this chapter to be over. I really don’t have anything against Google, which has some very talented people and good teams, and isn’t really worse than any other big company.
At that point, I believed that my tech-drama experiences were over, and I could go back to making stuff. I’d made one mistake (slamming an ex-employer, no matter how deserving, in public) and been punished enough that I’ll probably never do it again. As much as I hate our culture of professional omerta, I’m in no hurry to run afoul of it again. Some vipers aren’t worth waking.
In August 2015, Dan Gackle banned me from Y Combinator’s Hacker News, because I suggested that software engineers might be better suited by collective action. To me, that is a moderate position, but I recognize that not all people agree. Quora (in which YC is an investor) banned me in September 2015.
Website bans themselves are no big deal. I might be inclined to thank these people for the growth in free time that I experienced. Unfortunately, these people tried to damage my reputation. Marc Bodnick (Quora moderator) claimed that I ran a voting ring, which is not simply untrue but ridiculous. Just to illustrate the absurdity of the claim, consider that I had over 8,000 followers and that my posts got hundreds of upvotes from real-name, legitimate users. Not only would running a voting ring be a lot of work for unclear gain, but it would completely useless. Quora, in doing this, proved that it valued its own political expediency (annoyed investor) over its community or product.
Often, the Anne Frank Test is applied to individuals: would this person protect me if circumstances went the wrong way? More relevant, here, is what I think of as the group Anne Frank Test: can I trust this group? If I’m attacked or if my reputation comes under fire, are there more good people in it, who will fight for and with me, than bad ones?
For a group to pass the Anne Frank Test, you don’t need every individual to pass. The moral quality of the individuals and that of the leadership certainly matter, but you typically only need for the good to outweigh the bad. One might hope that the odds favor it, either believing that good people outnumber evil ones (although both sets, I would argue, are outnumbered by the craven middle) or that good people might do better than evil ones on the strengths of their reputations. If it’s not clear, I’m not convinced that this is inevitable, or even common. I think that organizations and societies have systemic faults that lead them to populate their top ranks with the worst humans, and that it’s going to take considerable effort to overcome this.
