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Bullshit Jobs

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Re: Bullshit Jobs

#191

Post by that_jojo »

annabellish wrote: post #175
skate22 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "A rational society at our current stage of development would be celebrating job destruction, not creation." Destruction of jobs in our current society would mean bad things for many people. I understand what you were going for, but society is not at that point yet imo

Our current society is definitely not rational, which I inferred as the point. Our economic system is a good 80% complete nonsense, where we're essentially playing a very complicated and meaningless game with ourselves, except one with meaningful consequences for real people.

You're making me so happy, because the most frustrating thing for me is that, with how tied up in personal and cultural identity and self-worth it all is, few people are willing to admit or recognize this.

Economy, at its core, is a network of transaction predicated on value.

Value, at its core, is nothing more than a perception.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#192

Post by eeZah7Ux »

feverfew wrote: post #100
mumin-abu-jamal wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"we have never had as much free time as now where we dont need to worry about food" We actually have less free time compared to hunter-gatherers. http://rewild.info/in-depth/leisure.html

But what was there to do with this free time?

The idea that free time should be filled with entertainment rather than intellectual activities and social engagement is surprisingly modern.

Even only 50 years ago, in many cultures, people were spending more time reading, writing songs and playing instruments, engaging in politics, doing home DiY, gardening, improvisational theater.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#193

Post by eeZah7Ux »

ekianjo wrote: post #187
Broken_Hippo wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rest. Socialize. Make babies. Goof off, make others laugh. I'm gonna guess that some folks had games, and children likely invented them.

You forgot die in pain because your food was contaminated or your water has bacteria. Can we stop with the happy savages myth for a second?

This is a false dichotomy.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#194

Post by everydaypanos »

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…

I still have a hint that the larger and super-human scales that you refer to also lack a meaningful architecture in them. They don’t have something in them that would make a thinking sentient being like us(or me) find joy in participating.

That bettering of efficiency in super-human collections of stuff seems just like any other organization-it just strives for survival aka efficiency in a boring meaningless way.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#195

Post by kamaal »

Gys wrote: post #80

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.…

>>So only engineering and production are 'real jobs' ?

To some extent yes.

But that covers start-to-end aspects of such jobs. For example, Courier is a highly productive work in the process of delivering iPhone to your door step.

Every job demands involvement of some kind of meta-coordination. Think of it like an operating system. The OS needs to manage things, and is a very important piece of software. But if it starts consuming most of the computer resources at some point in time you are doing a lot of things that don't have to be done.

Some jobs are that way.

In the Pizza job context. Something like 'Senior Manager Pizza deliver car inspector' would fit in the definition of a BS job.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#196

Post by lmm »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #167
dantheman wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…

I think you overlook two important things. One, that has been pointed out already, is that companies are not hive minds. Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. Yo…

> Doesn't matter how rich and powerful you are, you have to hire layers of managements to run your organization. These managers get their share of status, power & money by managing more people. The people they manage also want to get into management, so more layers and departments will be created. You are also competing with other companies to keep your employees happy so that they keep making you richer, and for this you have to give them their share.

Sure, but there's competition there. If you can figure out how to achieve the same results with fewer layers of management, or have your management act more efficiently, you'll reap the rewards. So any bullshit managerial position is inherently unstable: as soon as one company figures out they can do without it, it'll vanish from the industry.

> The second thing is that if your plan worked (companies get rid of all bullshit jobs), then society would collapse. .001% of the people would end up with 99.999% of the wealth, everyone else in abject poverty. The more technology evolved, the more extreme this inequality would become.

We're at pretty close to full employment, which suggests there's plenty of genuine work to be done. Remember that eliminating bullshit jobs wouldn't lower productivity (by definition), so redirecting that effort into productive work would massively boost overall productivity and be good for everyone. Even if we were to run out of productive work (which seems a long way off), surely we can find better things for idle people to do than sitting around and obstructing the productive people.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#197

Post by slfnflctd »

collyw wrote: post #169

I did something a few months ago and pulled something in my back. Went to the doctor when the pain hadn't gone after a few days and it was exactly as described. He made me do a few movements until i triggered it, then told me i had lumbago, take some painkillers. I got home and googled lumbago, which basically told me I had back pain. (As a side note I had some kratom, which worked wonderfully for this, better than t…

My understanding of the kratom situation is that the worst danger is how it's all too easy for it to become habitual. I absolutely do not think it ought to be banned (nor any psychoactive plant for that matter), but interested parties should be forewarned.

Many advocates may only use it occasionally and/or in consistently low doses, but there are plenty of accounts out there of users ramping up dosage and then having a really hard time getting off it. Withdrawals from heavy use read a lot like similar accounts of kicking a Vicodin habit.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#199

Post by rout39574 »

jbrun wrote: post #174
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…

There are no bullshit jobs. I like David Graeber very much, but he is wrong on this. If you believe that we operate in a market economy, then by definition bullshit jobs would be removed. Government or public institutions may be less subject to the market, but even they are subject to it. Procedures and rules are critical. Most tech people make the fundamental mistake of thinking that because their companies are smal…

I think you're letting your desire, your "belief" in a market economy, dictate your interpretations. Belief is a key term here: if it were observation, we wouldn't need to believe; we would point out how the theory functions in _this_ case just like we can demonstrate the function of an internal combustion engine. Nobody talks about "believing" in PV=NRT. :)

I have a suggestion: Every time you start talking, to yourself or others, about what a market economy does by definition, add to your statement the concept of perfect information. That's a cornerstone of market theory. So if we just stipulate the theoretical function of a market economy is everything you believe, we are left with concrete implementations which will vary from that perfection by the degree to which information is imperfect.

How do you measure that imperfection? That's a doozy. But if someone managing a $1T company has information imperfect by a percent... wouldn't that leave room for $10B of bullshit? Even if every actor in the company was operating in good faith?

How completely do you think your nearest C-level executive understands the function of their organization? 99%? 80%?

So... I think "By definition bullshit jobs would be removed" is treating economics with a precision that would make physics blush, and is usually only attempted by philosophers.

Re: Bullshit Jobs

#200

Post by TeMPOraL »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #188
adamjc wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a side-effect rather than intentional.

History proves otherwise. In many cultures, including ancient Greece, China and the roman empire, scholars described that artificially creating employment to prevent social unrest was not uncommon.

Maybe in the past, but these days, it would require unprecedented (in western democracies) levels of direct influence.

On the other hand, the market is itself extremely good at keeping people occupied, chasing ever diminishing salaries.

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