Bullshit Jobs

Both of these classes of (so I claim) drones think they're doing good work: health care drones are trying to navigate the regulations and get care for their patients. Insurance drones are trying to navigate regulations and keep costs down.

But if you zoom out a bit, so your domain of analysis is "The Health Care System", you find that these so-called competing bureaucracies are a large organ whose function is to make it difficult to accurately assign costs to services. As long as those prices are hard to know, they are impossible to optimize, and so the prices stay exorbitant.

A manager foresaw a problem. Right or wrong, that manager didn't have the time or inclination to do a grad-level research project on back pain diagnosis and foolproof verification systems. Instead, they delegate to people who are trained in medicine and make a process by which someone else receives and stores the doctor's note.

This solves the perceived "cowboy" chair problem where everyone brings a custom chair and ends up tearing up the carpet or whatever. Pretty much nobody wants to risk their job by outright forging a note. So few people risk the higher levels of cheating-- like the psychiatrist example-- that the manager can just assume those people have back pain. And, in the event that one of these assumptions are broken by a bad faith actor, someone can go back and read some or all of the doctors' notes.

I would think the bar for "bullshit job" is the 2nd and 3rd boss Peter has in Office Space who parrot the criticism that the first boss gave him. Unless you invoke magic those jobs have no value whatsoever.

In other words, bullshit jobs should be the ones that add no value but cannot be removed because the structure of the organization suppresses the tools necessary to officially measure the employee as ineffective. It's like the king's idiot son-- everyone just has to pretend he isn't an idiot.

Edit: clarification

There are no people in black suits patting themselves on the back. They have bullshit jobs by The Book too. It's The Book all the way to the CEO, who just performs procedures from Another Book to appease the anonymous crowd of stakeholders.

And your favourite *coin will make it even easier for there to be even more ruthless anonymous crowd of stakeholders, yay, progress. I don't even care what's your company named or of it hurts their employees or makes weapons, my blockchain AI owns a stake and I demand the next quarter profits to raise.

No malice. Just ignorance and inability to escape incentives everywhere.

Medical care quality has vastly improved. The problem is that there is infinite demand for medical care. People think disease and dying are massive failures of medicine now. In the recent to ancient past, surviving and being healthy was a miracle.

K-12 education cost per capita has tripled in the past 50 years. Sounds bad? GDP per capita has grown to 6X. If education costs as a fraction of income is shrinking by half is a disease, I don't want the cure.

You'd probably like the Selfish Gene by Dawkins. He makes a strong case that societies evolve very differently from cells/species.

Edit: Thought I'd provide an example. Suppose there is a herd of animals hunted by a predator. Imagine it was possible for a single member of the herd (maybe the oldest/weakest) to sacrifice itself and save the rest of the herd from taking additional casualties. From the perspective of the herd, it's the best option for longterm survival, "reducing energy gradients", as you say. However, that would not happen. You generally don't see animals purposely sacrificing themselves for the good of the larger group. There are some exceptions (e.g. bees) but Dawkins very convincingly argues it's not for the good of the group.