Shamelessness as a strategy (2019)

I'm not so sure Hilton's strategy is shamelessness. It seems more like "owning" it. For example, the leak of the sex tape is the first I'd ever heard of her. I expected her to be mortified and sue and hide. But nope. She owned it, turning it into an opportunity for fame and fortune.

For an example of the opposite, remember the Star Wars Kid? The video of him twirling the light sabre was leaked online, and he was humiliated and sued. Another path he could have taken would be to "own" it, say "yep, that's me". I bet he could have made a lot of money off of that, and perhaps even gotten a cameo on a SW movie out of it.

I have a friend who underwent some major abdominal surgery for cancer. She didn't want to wear a swimsuit because she was embarrassed and ashamed of the large scars. I suggested that her scars were battle scars of her triumph over cancer, and she should be proud of them and show them off. She owned it, and told me later that it transformed her to turn those scars into a positive.

Similar things happen to bald men. The ones who try to hide it with wigs and comb-overs come across rather poorly. The ones who own it and flaunt it fare far better.

Shamelessness doesn't have to only be used for nefarious purposes. I know engineers on my team suffer from imposter syndrome. I do not because I just always assume I know nothing :) I have no problem in a meeting or architecture review saying "Can you explain that a bit simpler for me" or something to that effect. Having the team understand the tasks at hand is way more important to me than what people think about me.

This is a good post but I wasn’t sure at first where it was going.

I have a … colleague (not actually in my organization) who is “shameless” as described. Not a Paris Hilton, but moves the Overton window in a (morally) good and useful way. He does say things I disagree with and indeed sometimes that I think are quite wrong. He’ll strike ip a conversation with anyone he thinks can help his cause. He pisses people off, and I have had uncomfortable conversations where people have said they don’t want to work with people who put up with him. But I won’t disavow him.

Actually this describes rms as well, and he’s a good example of someone who’s been willing to go to extremes to get things done, and has been quite influential. I would never disavow him either.

For both people (hmm, both males, both from the MIT “community”, and with other characteristics in common as well) I’ve admired them while simultaneously not wanting to be them. And remained friends.

Shamelessness, if used correctly is a superpower that I will place it in the same pedastal as concentration, curiosity and tenacity. A lot of people including me seem to lose out because a sense of shame holds us back, not renegotiating our compensation multiple times, or to job hop as often as possible or to shamlessly promote and market ourselves and I can go on and on.

"They’d look silly if they were to admit [shameless people] had found a better way of doing things."

This isn't true. When someone cuts in line no one thinks 'oh, they found a better way - wish I thought of that'.

And better for who? It's not better for anyone, including the cheater, when society ultimately becomes less functional. And it is cheating, just applied against social convention. As more and more people employ shamelessness the returns will diminish. If one football player cheats they score some points for a while and make a name. When all players cheat the game is over and fans stop watching.

Shamelessness [1] [2] worked very, very tragically [3] for John MacAfee, for example.

Please think three times before you follow these ideas as advice for your life choices.

Analyzing implemented shamelessness strategies can easily lead to some biases. You don't see, for example, many winning strategies that are the opposite: based on discretion.

In today's world, being discreet about everything has the best "cost-effectiveness". Shamelessness is too risky.

[1] https://mobile.twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/10809531369...

[2] https://www.foxnews.com/us/john-mcafee-trashes-irs-in-series...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/software-entrepreneur-j...

Anecdotally, this also seems like a good strategy for dating. Being up-front and clear about your intentions rather than beating around the bush, frequent shameless flirting, and complete honesty about who you are make for a good recipe. If the person suits you it accelerates things, and if you're not compatible you can move on quickly.

I haven't seen it having a "flare" effect like the article mentions, but could see it working that way in the right circumstances.

It reminds me of my favorite personal rpg game: One can find himself surrounded by superior minds which is quite humbling but what if this is not at all the case? You are to play the shining beacon of intellect in the room? Not much fun at all. Thus in stead one asks carefully crafted dumb questions until everyone is 100% convinced yours is the worse disposition. You still have to solve all the puzzels on the quest of live or whatever the mission your party of heroes gathered for but to avoid being discovered a nerd you quickly insert a dumb question. Is there alcohol in this beer? What day is it? etc Let them win with chess. Think deeply if you want sugar in your coffee.

People make the funniest faces. After a few reasonably dumb questions you can get away with slightly more stupid and work your way towards outlandish!

I suggested one time to take turns looking at google earth to see if someone walked out of a building.

I worked with someone who obviously put little effort into understanding things, and shamelessly and "tirelessly" asked others to help him do things, help him make decisions, etc. no matter how incompetent or illiterate it made him look.

The coin he paid for unending assistance was charm, humor and a posture of humbleness and appreciation.

This strategy was such a constant, that the people around this person ended up self-selected to be people who genuinely liked to help others, and who had a deficit of positive recognition of their value that they appreciated being filled.

Counterintuitively to me, this occasionally involved some good things coalescing around this person - as there are a lot of talented under appreciated people and bringing them together can spark serendipity.

There were also some major downsides at times.

Part of growing up, is the epiphany people can't actually make you feel or care, as this is purely an internal choice one makes for themselves. Accordingly, one can choose to get angry about something irritating, but it is often futile in a business context.

When one meets thousands of people in a year, a very different perspective evolves on what individual behavior even means... After awhile the antics you observe people repeatably engage in become all too predictable, and wholly tiresome.

Nietzsche was a nutjob, but observed people that felt shame about "who they were supposed to be" often masqueraded with a deceptive persona. Thus, never really able to escape the cycle of misery they inflict, and or "playing the victim" to exploit the naive.

Have a gloriously wonderful day. =)

Shameless seems like a strange way of putting it. As a cursory read of my comment history shows I struggle with keeping my lips zippered when someone is aggressively “wrong on the Internet”, which is immature and I work on it.

With that said, I’m one of those heretics who believes that openly aggressive is dramatically less bad than passive aggression.

It’s better to just not be an asshole ever, but if you’re going to slip up, own it. I post under my real name precisely because I know I lack sufficient discipline to be world-class polite and diplomatic, and if there were no consequences, I’d try way less hard to improve.

Our community/society is beginning to develop “plausible” deniability around snark and condescension and sucking up to powerful people to an art form.

The shamelessness of asking whatever you need or need to know, is quite powerful. I have a friend, that has the strategy to always ask for help. Whatever he needs to do, he just asks friends, coworkers, strangers, and whoever is around for help.

Of course he is blown off most of the time, and that’s fine for him, he doesn’t hold any grudges if you refuse to help him. He just keeps asking, until he finds someone.

I don’t want to be a leach like him, who just lives on other peoples good faith. But it’s really impressive how well this strategy works. And what kind of things he got out of it already.

I am more curious to find out what is the basis of the article’s assertion that Paris Hilton’s “dumb blond heiress” was a brilliant high level strategy and not exactly what it appeared to be?

If I were a fortunate wealthy narcissist of middling intelligence I too would rather prefer for the masses to interpret my frequent displays of abject stupidity as a high-wire ploy of a stable genius.

Sorry, but spare me. Yes, it's quite obvious, in this day and age, that "shamelessness" works. But one of the reason I think it works is that most people have some sense of dignity, so if you're willing to forgo that dignity, more power to you I guess, but let's not try to pretend it's some sort of brilliant "strategy". You're just willing to scrape the bottom of the barrel that other people aren't.

Simple examples:

1. Leaking sex tapes certainly worked to get Kim Kardashian and Paris Hilton more exposure. Congrats!

2. I remember seeing a couple minute clip where Lance Bass was talking to Kris Jenner about his recent (like the day before) wedding to his husband, which was of course televised. The only thing Kris Jenner was focused on was "what the ratings were". So, again, congrats, if you want to take your most intimate, important moments and hock them to the highest bidder, knock yourself out.

3. Trump definitely saw the discontent that was boiling just below the surface in the US that the political elite ignored. But taking advantage of discontent by playing to people's worst fears, their xenophobia and racism, making it OK to always play the victim and how those bad guys on the other side are out to "replace" you - let's not pretend this is some sort of genius.

So yes, I think shameless people can be quite "successful". I'll prefer to keep my soul.

This article has the right facts, but the wrong conclusion.

Shamelessness by itself won't take you anywhere.

Take the Paris Hilton story for example. It was never about Paris, but always about the public. A certain perception of her made the news, so she just played along and amplified.

Same for the Merlin-as-Percival tactic. Don't try it with a bunch of kids.

Since people here like to start companies: it's never about you, your idea or product. It's always about the others, their feelings, their perceptions, and how you are able to play along an amplify.

> Zuckerberg’s strategy makes him increasingly unlikeable and untrustworthy

It's not his strategy that makes him unlikeable, but his personality and his actions. Especially that quip of his in the last all-hands where he basically said staff attrition through overwork was OK.

I think Peter Thiel is masterful at this. It reminds me of my favorite poem by Rumi:

  Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
  there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
  
  When the soul lies down in that grass,
  the world is too full to talk about.
  Ideas, language, even the phrase ‘each other’
  doesn’t make any sense.

I always thought that surrendering to the notion of categorizing right and wrong led to stoicism, but this article got me thinking: in order to be effective at shamelessness, deep inside you need to be a stoic of that shame -- without that you're just a poor player strutting and fretting.

That's the crappy thing about internal comms is it's permanent (me looking like an idiot). But I'll get stuck on something/spin in circles and I'm just like "f it I'll ask" and I tell myself don't be poor/ready to be fired. I'm not a stellar dev that's a fact.

Let's not confuse shamelessness with confidence. Modesty and humility is the glue of civilization. We are already seeing how things fall apart once people collectively decide that "nothing matters", the rules are not for them, and that shamelessness is a superpower.

If you look at the opposite, shame as a strategy, it's basically 'whatever you're doing must be understood and accepted by your peers or it's worthless'.

That's a kind of heuristic, yes, but it's got problems.

I do an open source project called Airwindows. It's basically coding, but I'm not much of a coder. It's a (long) series of DSP effects put out as MIT open source, and I'm branching out into creative commons sample libraries: been doing this for years.

Sometimes the stuff I do sounds amazing, but it doesn't have visual interfaces or marketing etc to properly productize it, and it raises a lot of eyebrows. The thing is, I'm a designer, not a programmer. I struggle with porting tasks and keeping the coding environments working properly, and don't have the training for many things, but I have intentionality and a direction to go in, so I've made hundreds of plugins for people to use (or indeed re-work into their own things: MIT license). I also save a lot of time and energy not having to make each plugin meet particular standards or look spiffy, and that turns into workflow.

So the shamelessness question becomes, 'should I be so ashamed of my work not acting like other people's developed products, that I should stop doing it?' and the answer is nope: and I've learned a lot of interesting things about that, not least the fact that people will pay for the polish and chrome of a thing way out of proportion to functionality, and will pay for your effort to meet them where THEY are at. To do stuff that is where I am at is sustainable, but it's not a big marketing win. This is an acceptable trade-off when I cannot produce the same kind of results others (in proper companies, with dedicated programmers etc) are able to produce.

I guess shamelessness is genuinely good when there are some aspects of your stuff that are worth having, and you're not capable of following through and making ALL aspects exactly the way society expects them to be. You also get the bonus of eccentricity: when everything's the same, it's boring, but willful difference is often just annoying. When it's authentic, that becomes kind of a nice thing to have around :)

The Jack Dorsey comment in the article was very strange. Fasting and meditating are not "obviously stupid", and I doubt Jack was playing some twisted meta game for social clout. If one finds themselves thinking like this, they should perhaps pause for thought and try to be more open minded and maybe less cynical.

More likely is that Jack was under an enormous amount of stress and pressure given his position, and he found those practices to be actually helpful.

Observed this tactic in more mundane circumstances - our kids school has punishing traffic access, leading to gridlock and frustration when dropping them off. Certain parents however just drive right up to the access strictly forbidden zone in front of the door and park there, despite all the complaints and stares. For them, drop off is a breeze. I've often thought how much easier life must be if you don't care what others think of you.

This is may be not a productive comment, but I just wanted to chime in that Avalon is my favorite game, and it's a delight to see its strategies discussed here.

Had me until almost the end:

> The shameless person is simply a host for a set of ideas, which, like any virus,

I think equating ideas we don't like with a "virus" is very, very counter-productive, at the limit even dangerous when it comes to societal bounds.

Otherwise an interesting article, I think it has been posted in here before at least once.

"Today, it seems like punishing shamelessness only increases social rewards to the transgressor. What’s changed?"

Welcome to the Aeon of Horus, we've been expecting you; we just weren't sure when. In the vocabulary of the Native American Hopi's the signs of the times point toward the fourth world.

> One explanation might be that it’s an expected effect of the blurring of social boundaries today. In the past, if the size of your community was finitely bounded (like a village, or an aristocratic social class), people didn’t enter or exit these communities as frequently. Under these conditions, sanctions are probably still effective, because members of the community want to be liked and accepted.

This is the center thesis of the article, we haven't evolved beyond our evolutionary physical bounds. We look at likes of Kardashians/Paris Hilton/Kanye and react with knee jerk reactions rooted deep in our biology. But it doesn't matter. Tribes exist in ways we can't see or touch, and the "shameless" understands how to harness that power.

Shamelessness is in fact the reason that our civilization is in freefall. The fear of shame in one's community used to keep people's behaviors in line. Now that nobody cares what anyone thinks they will do anything they fucking feel like.

I'm surprised this article had no mention of Elon Musk, because he's a great example. Perhaps if this article was written today, it would.

Elon's antics, if nothing else, raise brand awareness of his companies.

Shame is the worst self-censor there is. I often talk to myself to ignore a sense of shame while imploring for a due payment etc. Things do work that way, but I admit, it's not a happy process.

This is kind of a romantic view of shamelessness, but really the way the examples provided seem to play out is more like a carnival barker whipping up a mob for short term ends or for a grift. I am sure we can all think of various examples like that.

Where a low level of shame is actually helpful in my own experience is when it is used along with transparency, as a way to get honest feedback early. “I’ve been working on this, and I’m not sure about it, but what do you think?” It works for creative as well as practical ends.

It started with reality shows in the 90s, then on to digital reality shows (facebook) and now it's normalized. Old moral codes are being abandoned, as technology allows people to be more individualistic, more free to act. This was inevitable as technologal change is monotonic, and has been subject of books like brave new world. The idea of "community" as a moralizing entity is nice but also very limiting and newer generations will have a very ambivalent relationship with it.

I think there's more to it than meets the eyes. Shamelessness is interpretative. Today's celebrity culture is rampant with it. Art is not celebrated for its symbolism but more like a PR strategy. For example, Ranveer Singh the Indian actor went ahead and published his nude pics for a magazine. He calls it 'baring it all' but is it a strategic move to showcase himself and create controversy. In fact, controversy is the other name of shamelessness. So yes, it is strategic.

This is one of the more interesting reads I have done lately. The idea isn't really all that earth shattering or novel, but I liked how Nadia articulated the whole idea. While Trump isn't mentioned I cannot help but think of him.

He also seems to get away with one crime after the other by doing them brazenly in the open. It is almost as if the voters or his followers don't think it can be that bad because after all he is admitting it openly on camera.

There's some debate in the comments about the validity of the strategy and whether so and so was using the strategy in earnest. I think what's more interesting is the recent and current relevance of such strategies in a world of increased media, decreased privacy etc.

The term 'based' is currently used by de youths to refer to a person who employs this strategy.

"Never Forget What You Are. Wear It Like Armor, And It Can Never Be Used To Hurt You." - Tyrion Lannister

I call it outrage marketing. I twerk, talk about my pp and spent about $20M on luxury stuff just for flex value. I bought the world's largest diamond, $10M of watches and $3M of cars. People hate it and keep watching. I wish that people cared at all about the $27M I raised for charity. They do not.

I think what the discussion around "narcissism" and "shamelessness" in recent years (apparently occasioned by the rise of Trump) consistently misses is that narcissism as understood by psychologists isn't characterized by lack of, or imperviousness to, shame; rather, the narcissist's acute and formative experience of shame is thought to be at the very core of the disorder, with the subject's pathological behaviors all aimed at suppressing or hiding that emotion.

This article needs a liberal sprinkling of phrases like "my opinion is", "it is possible that", "one could speculate that" etc to counter all the shameless assertio-- oh, I see what she's done there.