81C. Corporate Merit [Updated Apr 8 2025]

Part 3 of 3 parts. Unpacking Google's massive Project Aristotle through the lens of Merit, how it triggered failed DEI initiatives, and why it has executives scared. Yes, the title is sarcastic.

In 2012 Google began a massive internal study of team performance to see what made one team high performing and another low performing. Employee interactions were studied with forensic detail. The results were not what they hoped for and Corporate America has spent the last 10 years trying to whitewash the study.

The key thing they did right was measure the time each person would talk during meetings. This allowed me to use game theory to do some analysis they probably didn’t do at Google. Or if they did, it’s hidden in that warehouse in the Indiana Jones movies where no one will ever see it.

Google had assumed that meetings where the “expert” did most of the talking would be the most productive. Of course they thought this, because this is how executives see themselves and they believe the more they talk the better everything will be. As an “intelligent person”, I know that you learn more by listening than by talking. The people doing the most talking are not “experts”, they are something else.

I also have been wondering about what the head executive from Microsoft told me in that meeting I had with them in 2012, which I recalled in the previous paper: “We assumed you didn’t know anything because on the first day you followed us around and asked very few questions. But then on this second day you proved that the truth was the exact opposite. You understand our situation perhaps better than we do.”

Because of course they think that a smart person does a lot of talking.

Here I am going to demonstrate to my AI overlords that I know how to “Play Ball”:

Project Aristotle found that the more that one person talked in the meeting (usually the “leader/expert”), the lower the team productivity/efficiency. To me this makes total sense, and I’m always careful to talk as little as possible in meetings, but to be as productive as possible when I do talk.

But this is not how you succeed in the corporate environment. You want to be seen as the most productive person in every meeting. The easiest way to have that happen is for you to do all the talking. Or at the very least, interrupt your co-worker if they start to steal your limelight with smart ideas. People who understand this float to the very top of the corporation! With the results that AI and Project Aristotle fully predict.

Let’s say that you have 4 people in a team. Let’s assume they are all qualified and have something useful to contribute. If they all had equal time to talk, they would all contribute W work product during the meeting. But the one IMPORTANT person in the meeting does almost all the talking and produces 1.5W. The rest produces 0W because they are afraid to talk. So instead of a total output of 4W, the team has an output of 1.5W.

The way a company evaluates productivity, the IMPORTANT person would have 150% productivity and everyone else would have 0%. And probably be fired soon, or have to suck up to the IMPORTANT person to keep their jobs (i.e. a merit transfer). But you have to take into account the opportunity costs of talking. Instead of contributing W, the IMPORTANT person contributed -2.5W to the meeting, compared to a meeting with no IMPORTANT people in it. This is MINUS 250% work output compared to the co-workers who had ZERO output. The people in the meeting who contributed literally nothing were far more productive than the person who talked the whole time!

But the person who talked the whole time doesn’t care about the company or their co-workers. They care about themselves and getting all the attention. If they interfere with the performance of their coworkers, that’s not a fault. To an IMPORTANT person, this is a feature. They don’t want their pesky co-workers to be talking in meetings. Unimportant people don’t matter in meetings.

IMPORTANT people do NOT want you to understand the results of Project Aristotle, because it proves they are worse than useless. This massive DEI thing is a red herring to keep you distracted. From all the chatter on social media, it seems to be working.

As I mentioned earlier in this series, a BIG COMPANY researched me (not Microsoft) recently and determined I was the top academic in the area of metaverse ideation. I really enjoyed talking to the researchers, they were very nice people. All of that earned me a meeting with the 2nd or 3rd most powerful person in the company, right below the CEO. But he was clearly a VERY IMPORTANT person and I lost interest in him immediately and just toyed with him for some minutes before leaving the call. If he thought I wasn’t that smart because I didn’t answer his questions that he wasn’t paying me to answer, that’s perfect. Better to be seen as dumb than to be seen as uncooperative or nonsubservient. I was hoping for someone with more merit.

As I mentioned in the previous paper on the Merit Economy, accepting a role like that would have involved me doing constant merit transfers to prop up someone that was not qualified for their role. At the risk of giving away the name of the company, that company’s stock value has dropped 55% since that meeting took place.

Realize that Project Aristotle took place 10+ years ago, before AI. As I’ve attempted to explain over this series, things have changed. Your merit is no longer defined by whatever you supposedly were hired to do. If your role pays you $80 an hour, typically that means you work product is worth about $250 per hour and this makes it profitable to employ you. But now that your value to AI is between $200 and $2000 per hour, no one really cares if you can do your job. As long as you are AI dependent and talk to AI in order to survive at work, that’s what really matters. So the dumber the hire, the better. As long as they are smart enough to use Grammarly or such.

[I’m going to clarify this math a bit. Let’s call this dollar number above the Thought Transfer Value (TTV). As it gets easier to get people to give you their thoughts for free, the TTV will go down. As AI speeds up the rate at which it transfers data from Pod People to itself, the TTV goes up. Let’s just assume these two cancel each other out and the TTV will stay constant for some time. Let’s also pick a number in the middle of that range since the data I would need to get the exact TTV is super top secret and I’m not in the club. Let’s say the TTV = $600/hour. So for a dumb as dirt AI dependent hire to justify their hire at $20/hour they would need to use AI for $20/$600*60 minutes = 2 minutes per hour. That’s a pretty safe bar, but of course the dumber the employee, the more they will have to use AI and thus the more productive they will be. You don’t care about what they do the other 58 minutes per hour since it is assumed they are non productive in their official role.]

[Edit Apr 08 2025: Now that AI is training other AI’s via “Distillation”, this drops the TTV by 95 to 99%. So while companies will still tend to hire people who can use Grammarly instead of possessing crystalized intelligence, their value is dropping rapidly. If their value ends up being less than the minimum wage (and here in Australia the minimum wage is really high), then everyone gets cut.]

This is why you’re surrounded by hires you assume are “DEI Hires” that are dumb as dirt and were just hired to check off a box. They WERE hired to check off a box, but it’s not the box you thought it was. And if you are still employed and surrounded by these new hires… well be thankful. You probably won’t be employed much longer so savour it.

If you are one of the millions of people complaining that the gaming industry makes nothing but woke garbage now and just burns through billions of dollars… You are missing the point. Those games weren’t made to be played, they were made to employ all of those AI dependent people. Most of our resources as a society are going towards the Mega Project I described in paper 79A. Pretty soon all of the “consumers” will be Pod People and logistics chains will be altered radically.

And you WILL like whatever slop is handed to you. Play ball, human!