Mastermind (Theo Cray and Jessica Blackwood #1)

by Andrew Mayne

And I totally didn’t have the bullshit factor it takes to be a boss and convince a room full of people that you’re less clueless than they are.

“Being the first to file, make requisitions, and tell the chain of command what you’re doing is basically the Hogwarts magic of the FBI. If I say that I brought a person of interest in to interview and I ask a supervisor what questions they want answered, it basically commits them to approving the whole endeavor. Anyway, I can give you plenty more tips later. I learned from a master at sailing the seas of bureaucracy: bullshit reports are the wind in your sails.”

If you were to ask me what’s broken in this world, I’d say it’s the amount of talent found in the places we ignore.

“Think of a squid,” I explain. “It uses its ink as a means to escape predators, right? Well, it turns out that ink isn’t only a defensive weapon like we thought. We’ve observed Japanese pygmy squid using ink to confuse and distract shrimp. A feeding strategy. Which makes sense. So whenever we find a useful tool with only one application, I assume that we haven’t been watching the animal that uses it closely enough.”

“Hard to imagine how someone could do that to another person,” I reply. “No, it’s not. You just make a person not a person. You start with a label. Maybe it’s a different political party or religion from your own. Then you make them that label and everything you hate about it. I watched military commanders do that with young children, getting them to hate people in a different village.”

We even tell ourselves convincing little fictions that it’s okay to hate those other people because they’re the ones who are really filled with hate. We make ourselves judges.”

“It’s not just what you do, but how you go about doing it. If you study the strategy of terrorists, you’ll notice that they went from focusing on initial damage to creating follow-up attacks that killed first responders. One bomb to hurt the civilians, a second to kill all the people who rushed in to help. This has affected the way we do crisis management and made the first attack even more deadly. We don’t rush in to help the wounded as quickly because we need to make sure it’s safe to do so. Now, accelerate that line of reasoning and you can figure out how to do maximum damage.”

The only thing intelligent people hate almost as much as making mistakes is being wrong. When I was teaching, sometimes I’d deliberately mess up my students’ experiments and see how many of them reported the errors in their results.”

“Patterns are hard because we can only know what we see. Great white sharks were a complete mystery to us because they’d show up in one region, then vanish for a year before returning. Where did they go? In retrospect it was obvious, but at the time it was a big nature mystery. The simple answer is that when an animal goes someplace else, it’s either to eat, breed, or give birth.

This looks like bullshit meant to fool investors. This is how Theranos happened,” referencing the crooked health start-up that promised to detect hundreds of diseases from one drop of blood.