Reading people
The Annals of Lu Buwei
Judging men
The Annals of Lu Buwei (China · c. 239 BCE) — Judging men.
What actually happened?
When Lu Buwei became chancellor of Qin, the age was collecting retainers. Wei had the Lord of Xinling, Chu the Lord of Chunshen, Zhao the Lord of Pingyuan, Qi the Lord of Mengchang, and each took pride in the size of his household. Qin was the strongest state and he thought it shameful to be outdone at this, so he gathered three thousand retainers and kept them well. Persuaders were writing books and circulating them, so he had each man set down what he knew, and the pieces were collected into the surveys, discourses and almanacs, some two hundred thousand words, said to contain all matters of heaven, earth and antiquity. Then he hung it at the market gate of Xianyang with a thousand gold pieces on top, for any travelling scholar who could add or remove a single word.
The material is mixed; the questions are not
Three thousand men each wrote what they knew, which is why the book is filed under the miscellaneous school. But the selection was somebody's. The volume keeps coming back to judging: a man, a report, a rule that has outlived its reason.
Given a pile of advice that contradicts itself, ask what each piece answers.
Eight observations and six tests
'Judging Men' gives not a knack but a list of positions: prosperous, watch whom he honours; rich, whom he keeps; poor, what he refuses; low, what he will not do. Then six feelings - delight, pleasure, anger, fear, grief, hardship - each used as a test.
You have only met him in favourable weather, so you hold one sample.
Passed along, white turns black
In 'Examining What Is Transmitted' there is not a liar in the examples. A Song household saying they got the use of one man from a new well becomes a man found down the well; a line about three pigs crossing a river turns out to be a date, misread by one graph.
By the time a message reaches you it has passed through four people.
Wading by the old markers
In 'Examining the Present', Jing marks the fords of the Yong by day, the river rises, and at night the army crosses by those markers and loses more than a thousand drowned. The failure is not missing homework. It is homework that expired while standing perfectly still.
The customer research you ran last year is still what you are quoting.
Times shift, so laws should
Without law a state falls into disorder, and keeping the law unchanged falls into perversity. Like a good doctor: the illness changes ten thousand times, so the medicine changes ten thousand times. Do not copy the law of former kings; ask why it was made.
A rule written for one emergency outlives the emergency by years.
What part do we leave out?
We leave out the monthly ordinances and the calamities attached to them, which open each of the twelve Almanacs. 'If in the first month of spring the ordinances of summer are carried out, wind and rain come out of season, plants wither, and the state falls into fear' is a late Warring States cosmology. It neither supports nor is supported by the chapters on how to read a person, how to check something you were told, and how to notice that your own information has expired. Those are what we take.
How do I use it today?
If you misread somebody recently, do not start by tightening your standards. Run the subtraction instead: how many different kinds of occasion does your impression of him come from? If they are all one kind, that is not five pieces of evidence, it is one sample repeated five times. The two cheapest entries on the list are what he refuses when short of money and what he will not do from a low seat; neither waits for him to rise and neither costs you anything. Then take whatever report is on your desk: count the hands it passed through, and past two, stop asking who is hiding something and go get the original wording, then reason it against the nature of the thing and the nature of people. Then take the survey you are deciding on: find out when it was gathered and whether anything since would have moved it. Incomplete and out of date are different holes, and the out-of-date one is the one that makes you comfortable.
Deep read
Read alongside
Further
Lines to keep
A sentence needs no liar to arrive false, only hands.