Thread by @StatesWarring

Ok, I'll have a go at this. First of all, how does W.K. Liao deal with it?

https://twitter.com/StatesWarring/status/1411654565062053888

Well, there's no arguing with that.

How about Oda's commentary?

There's a bunch of references to the Huainanzi and stuff in there, but there are two things that are really interesting from our perspective:

1. 用 is not read as relating to 道, unlike in the W.K. Liao translation. The initial parallelism refers to separate things, it doesn't provide a description of one and then an elaboration upon it. Both work grammatically, but my gut feeling is that Oda is correct here.

This means that 道 is one phenomenon (the Tao) and 用 (to use or employ) is another. So we get "The Tao lies in what cannot be seen; [用] lies in what cannot be known." Which sounds, on the face of it, really fucking stupid. How can you use something if you don't know about it?

But context is also important. This is a chapter about HR management, and one of the meanings of 用 is "employing people". Moreove, if we read it thus, the whole section starts to make a lot more sense.

So let's start from the beginning. What parallels does the Tao's invisibility have in the wonderful world of HR?

Well, the big deal about the Tao is that it's all about the process. You can't describe it, because if you managed to do so successfully, you'd deprive your interlocutor of the experience of searching for it, which is the essence of the whole thing.

You can give someone a driving license without them ever having set foot in a car, but they'll never win any races like that.

Basically, the real Tao is the lessons we learnt along the way, and if it wasn't invisible and there was a clearly defined end-point obvious to all, no one would put any effort into searching for it.

Han Fei's point is that incentivising employees follows a similar principle. If they know your preferences from the start, they'll just put all their effort into reward hacking you - doing something that will appeal to your biases rather than anything very useful.

Thus, the key to getting the best out of your employees is to not let them know your preferences. That way they'll try all sorts of creative things to show that they're capable of achieving good results, and you will get far more out of them.

Moreover, the random assortment of methods this will produce effectively prevents you from judging them based on how closely each approach matches your preferences. The selection will be so eclectic that you can only judge each technique based on the results it achieves.

Oda's comments are kind of mystical, but he highlights the fact that "to use" is an instrumental verb, implying a process. @MarcChapuis in the comments also correctly pointed out that it's about reward-hacking:

https://twitter.com/MarcChapuis/status/1411668679977275393

Related news: based on any objective measurement, I'm doing the whole ancient Chinese gimmick account thing wrong. If I keep doing obscure Taoist interpretation threads like this I'll never sell a single book.

Expect more milfspirations and less philosophy as publishing day approaches, since I cannot argue with the demands of the masses.

Just remembered, I did another thread a while back that touches briefly on the black velvet perfection of the second couplet here - 虛靜無事，以闇見疵. Get it while you still can.

https://twitter.com/StatesWarring/status/1274231918863634432