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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#71

Post by nnq »

...imho this is a small-scale view of the fact that we live in a bullshit society: our social systems can't properly handle "people with too much free time who don't know themselves what to do with that free time". For a variety of reason: from increased social unrest and fact that people would actually have time to care about who/how governs, to the productivity lowering effect of having the productivity of the people that actually choose (and are able to!) to be productive being lowered by being surrounded by slackers etc..

Our current social order needs "rituals" to stabilize people's behaviors, and you can't just let people pick any random set of rituals from the space of posibilities and expect the consequences not to be horrible! You might end up with warring clans that choose to wage war in lack of a better occupation, or with weird cults that bounce between self-destructive and other-destructive behaviors. If you've had the chance to see the darker sides of human nature it's not hard to imagine swarms of people with nothing to do forming sado-massochistic pain-pleasure cults that wage wars amongst themselves "for fun" or to kidnap eachother's children to torture during massive orgies or whatever... People's minds cane easily become fertile grounds for very dark tendencies.

"Work rituals" are at least stable, stabilizing, and not-very-harmful.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#72

Post by jcbrand »

citation_please wrote: post #37

Ah, when bullshit jobs come up, sometimes the measure is "if this person disappeared, how long would it take for the world to notice?". This article is interesting to me because it applies a slight modification, "if this task was eliminated, would systems be more efficient?". In some ways this is a good question to ask, but much like a statement in legacy code, it's sometimes unclear why a rule exists until after you…

> If only there were unit tests for real-life bureaucracy...

Or for legacy code.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#73

Post by sophistication »

It looks like psychiatry, especially psychotherapy, is bullshit to a far greater extent than what was discussed in this blog post:

---

For real patients, there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain... (Prioleau 1983)

Meta-analysis shows antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy. No significant difference between the studies with and those without a placebo condition.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26169475 (Cuijpers 2015)

Negative results in phase III trials of complex interventions

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/the-british-journal-... (Crawford 2016)

Therapy experience in naturalistic observational studies is associated with negative changes in personality

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S009265661... (Philip 2016)

Does psychotherapy work? An umbrella review of meta‐analyses of randomized controlled trials finds only 7% of studies provided convincing evidence that psychotherapy is effective. These pertained to cognitive behavioural therapy (n = 6), meditation therapy (n = 1), cognitive remediation (n = 1), counselling (n = 1) and mixed types of psychotherapies (n = 7).

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/acps.12713?c...

More experience and training do not improve outcome of psychotherapy.

http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-46640-006 (Erekson 2017)

Trauma and victimhood have also been way overstated, overlooking that most people recover from traumatic experiences; that duration and and frequency of trauma are uncorrelated with subsequent disorder.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581... (Küenzlen 2016)

Young children emerge from single potentially traumatic events psychologically unharmed

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17405629.2016.11... (Galatzer-Levy 2018)

People with moderate life adversity have the fewest stress symptoms, are the most satisfied with life and the least affected by recent traumata.

https://econtent.hogrefe.com/doi/abs/10.1027/2512-8442/a0000... (Höltge 2018)

How to spot hype in the field of psychotherapy: A 19-item checklist

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1RXZ75sEnpTpqExb_KP0buaL6V2y...

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#74

Post by majewsky »

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

> Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet.

There is no purely rational way to redistribute wealth (or, really, no rational way to actually do anything). Rationality is a tool that allows you to choose the path of action that best fits your goals/values. It does not prescribe any values. What we (as a society) do right now to redistribute wealth may very well be "the rational way" relative to some set of values.

So what you're actually saying is: Society hasn't found a way to redistribute wealth that fits your value system.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#75

Post by gepi79 »

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

It is not just social status but also real financial constraints for survival that lead to wage slavery.

IMO poverty and austerity and military and wars imposed or tolerated because of greed and lack of empathy and foolish voters are the main reasons for needless misery.

The kind words for John McCain were shocking and disgusting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bO4wXQesThA&t=356s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CIGuscbG60

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_--joNde92k

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#76

Post by repolfx »

taway_1212 wrote: post #33
wjnc wrote: post #22

The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. What drives the happiness of the bullshitters themselves. Coming from business I understand it's partially senior management does not care Enough. They've…

> The thing I find really hard to understand from a business perspective is that bullshit jobs are the low hanging fruit from a cost saving perspective. Why do they persist? What drives managers, teams, companies and cultures to accept bullshit in their environment. Typically, at least in large organizations, the manager is interested in increasing, not decreasing, his budget. Since everything that happens in modern…

It's not really impossible but it's not always worth the costs.

It's common for really large companies to use internal billing. So the IT department for example might charge other departments for their services and have to show it's a profit center. The problem with this of course is that it's also a monopoly, so this hardly incentivises better behaviour. In a situation where other departments can go outside the firm to get what they need, this is almost like outsourcing or divesting that department and it can act as a check on really bad cost:benefit ratios internally.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#77

Post by mmsimanga »

vfc1 wrote: post #23

The creation of bullshit jobs probably comes from a combination of 3 things: - the primal psychological need to show that we are busy to the tribe, to prove that we are useful and carry our weight in the group. Those who didn't in early times where expelled from the tribe, ridiculed, etc. - the quest of certain individuals for status and power over other individuals, meaning a middle manager will want to be a manager…

Agreed. On automation, another to look at it is corporate companies literally print money without doing anything. Once upon a time when the company was starting out everyone had a real job. The retail chain with over 3000 shops only cares if the POS is up and stock is in the store. It doesn't matter how ineffient other business units are.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#78

Post by Radim »

IanSanders wrote: post #59
Radim wrote: post #16

People fall into rituals and procedures for reasons that are not necessarily obvious to them. Why should we expect to be able to determine what is and isn't "bullshit"? Wouldn't you need to know where the whole endeavour ends up, before you can pass such definitive judgement? I'm not questioning any individuals feelings (your job may certainly feel like bullshit to you ), but whether something is sustainable and make…

>Ultimately patterns (atoms, cells, people, societies, whatever) organize by efficiency, by how well they reduce energy gradients across time, not by what the individual actors wishes or feels. I disagree. Look up game theory and tragedy of the commons. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons >term used in social science to describe a situation in a shared-resour…

I am familiar with both; what's the connection in particular?

That patterns organize along least-energy principles and propagate by extracting resources from surrounding energy gradients is almost a tautology. I'm genuinely curious what you're disagreeing with.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#79

Post by ekianjo »

normalhuman wrote: post #65

I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…

You have a bleak perspective on things. As human beings we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food, and we ha e never had as much disposable income as now to be able to enjoy more things out of work.

And your view can be easily reverted. We have never had as many interesting jobs as now. And centuries before us you had to do what your parents did and you had a miserable life anyway. Lets stop with the Lost Eden false nostalgia.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#80

Post by Gys »

I am struggling to find a definition. The article refers to another article that comes with 'the ballooning of not even so much of the ‘service’ sector as of the administrative sector, up to and including the creation of whole new industries like financial services or telemarketing, or the unprecedented expansion of sectors like corporate law, academic and health administration, human resources, and public relations.'

Not a very clear one I think. So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ? Only people that create something physical ? He also calls late night delivery pizza a bullshit service. Is that only about the delivery, or does that include the pizza (only baked because some bullshitter ordered it). Even so, a late night pizza might also be appreciated by 'the world's population to pursue their own projects, pleasures, visions, and ideas'. So when they order that same pizza at night its not a bullshot service anymore ?

We need a better definition before spending more time analyzing and ranting.

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