81–90 of 172 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This. The OP is effectively a re-wording of the Gervais principal - same idea with slightly less words in blog form. It's a bit ingenious to claim a whole new theory.
Did you mean ingenious or ingenuous?
Meh.... This has a real "I'm 14 and this is deep" vibe. Like a teenager who thinks their dad is a loser, and that the real men are the guys at the bottom in tough blue collar jobs, or at the top in power suits being Wolves of Wall Street. Insights like this can be fun, but they're for the third beer with your buddies, not for writing down.
It's very odd that 'baby talk' is professional. I don't think society was always this way. I also respect anyone who questions why this is the case. Assuming it's an efficiency, we should be able to justify this behavior.
The non software people climbed the hierarchy not because they are competent at their jobs, in fact a highly competent person will often be passed over for promotion because they are useful where they are - but because of how they negotiated very complex social networks.
A senior manager, my manager at the time felt that with very little skill to separate the people working at the company, ascendancy was about positioning yourself in bullying networks, and he described this this kind of 'baby talk' as a subservience signal in which you were surrendering to and accepting a manager as your patron and any further advancement you made was by their grace.
If you chose to do the 'honest talk' with someone senior to you, it came with a risk and a potential reward, you had to do it well enough to convince them you were a worthy formidable peer and an ally. If you did it unconvincingly you would be struck down.
This seemed to be a widely held worldview and therefore more or less the social reality in the non software parts of the business. I was free to do 'honest talk' because as a software person, I was clearly to the side of the game, it wasn't really possible for me to fall or climb too far.
However, Scott’s technique is both suboptimal and childish, his grasp of the sticks conforming to how children are taught to use chopsticks and offering less precision than techniques which adults use. [0] Furthermore, Scott’s not actually very skilled at using chopsticks. He’s a step above stabbing food with them or using them with one in each hand, but his mastery of the kids’ way of using chopsticks is barely better than rudimentary.
Often while lifting food from his from his plate and into his mouth, Scott will clumsily drop the morsel back onto the plate and chomp at empty air. Watching Michael Scott eat with chopsticks is to be embarrassed for him, while he himself remains oblivious and proud.
Michael Scott will replace his chopsticks with a spoon for the last 25% of his meal.
Lastly, the linked article is a marvelous troll guaranteed to rile even the most self-assured (and they are nothing if not self-assured) member of the Whytian Clueless.
[0] In my corner of South Korean culture, the kids’ way of holding chopsticks involves the thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers. The adult way omits the ring finger.
Meh.... This has a real "I'm 14 and this is deep" vibe. Like a teenager who thinks their dad is a loser, and that the real men are the guys at the bottom in tough blue collar jobs, or at the top in power suits being Wolves of Wall Street. Insights like this can be fun, but they're for the third beer with your buddies, not for writing down.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The metaphor definitely breaks in the middle ladder. Why not just do labor, middle management, owners like in the first part of the piece? I get that everyone hates NYT opinion writers but that’s like 20 people - not a social class. Also do software engineers fall into upper middle class or high skilled labor? I think they’re in both. Or maybe I just don’t have any interactions with the middle ladder in real life and…
It doesn't mean "Just NYT opinion writers". It means all the people who think they're leading culture around on a leash by pushing their articles in The New Yorker , The Atlantic , Mother Jones etc. and so forth. And that very much is a social class, or more accurately, its a specific subset of a social class. Another subset of the same social class are book editors at the major publishing houses. Look around on Link…
In reading this I have but a single question: How does one become a barbarian?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree, this bit in particular seems wrong to me: > Posturetalk is everything said by Michael, Dwight and Andy, to anyone: the staff, the execs, or each other. Everything they say is some form or another of meaningless, performative babbling. I only really remember the first four seasons of The Office , but I remember Michael as being a very skilled salesman and a very unskilled manager. But Michael's skill as a sal…
You just wrote it yourself - he has an enormous desire to be praised, so much so that he completely fails to notice just how much he lacks a connection with literally anyone or anything (Michael is of course a comically over-emphasized example). This is the key to understanding the "clueless" or the "educated gentry" ladder, they are unhappy with being in "labor" but lack the balls/intelligence/true desire/luck/whate…
But the idea that the blue collar workers and elites "get it" while the bourgeoisie are fooling themselves comes across as ... self loathing, perhaps?
You could just as easily make the argument that the aspirations of the blue collar are shallow and meaningless. And or the elites are sociopathic because, hey, we all turn to dust in the end.
This is a really well-written article. I am not sure if this spin on the cited references is novel but it is the first I am seeing any of it. I am jarred how well it describes the "middle" of society, including how many of my own behaviors/beliefs are captured. One thing I am having trouble with is the connection between Michael and the "educated" ladder, even though a big portion of the article is dedicated to that.…
The metaphor definitely breaks in the middle ladder. Why not just do labor, middle management, owners like in the first part of the piece? I get that everyone hates NYT opinion writers but that’s like 20 people - not a social class. Also do software engineers fall into upper middle class or high skilled labor? I think they’re in both. Or maybe I just don’t have any interactions with the middle ladder in real life and…
The same ladder that telephone users fall on.