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On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

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Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#271

Post by craigyk »

rarw wrote: post #213

(1) As a lawyer I love how to non-lawyers the legal industry (usually BigLaw) is always the go to example for things that cost a lot but do nothing. (2) All these lofty ideas and conspiracy theories are great but bullshit jobs exist for one reason - most people suck at their job and are perfectly O.K. with it. It's nice to think of labor as a machine. A system where everyone tries to be efficient and strive to do the…

The legal industry is mostly "bullshit" work. To think otherwise you'd have to believe both: (1) the system is perfect at making good laws which have the precise consequences desired. (2) the average number of laws decreases, rather than increases over time (barring major overthrows, revolutions)

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#272

Post by api »

0xdeadbeefbabe wrote: post #258
api wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true. I've been in meaningless make-work jobs before, jobs where I could literally goof off 90% of the time. I left. A lot of people might think "wow! awesome!" It's not. It's soul-crushing and unbelievably depressing . It doesn't leave you more energy for other things; it saps your energy and makes you feel like shit.

Couldn't you goof off 20% instead?

My point was that the job was demonstrably unnecessary. I have seen, from an outside vantage point, entire departments that are wholly unnecessary doing nothing but creating work for other wholly unnecessary departments.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#273

Post by vasilipupkin »

baseraid wrote: post #56

The author has a very interesting point. Still he oversimplifies and so I didn't find the article very insightful. For example lawyers are there for good reason. Modern society needs a way to officially settle conflicts. But our law system creates arms races and draws more and more resources this way. I think few jobs are as zero sum as SEO from their beginning. The problem is that when we start arms races and pour m…

the arms races are essentially competition - and competition often creates positive externalities which are not immediately obvious to a naked eye, such as new technologies, etc. Perfect example is Jane Street Capital pouring resources into O'Caml libraries because they feel it gives them an edge in the high frequency trading arms race

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#274

Post by keithpeter »

nbouscal wrote: post #262
keithpeter wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on level. I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves . In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up th…

1215? What's wrong with Euclid?

Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#275

Post by eli_gottlieb »

eliasmacpherson wrote: post #203
zeteo wrote: post #75

I disagree that the answer is moral and political and that the "ruling class" sat down to decide most people should work bullshit jobs. The phenomenon is more elegantly explained by pure economics: as less time is expended extracting resources and producing things, more energy is absorbed by the zero-sum, gimmicky game of selling and marketing them. To give credit where it's due, I first saw this credible argument on…

I thought that the redundancy in all the engineers working on competing identical products was bad but this is worse. No wonder we're not exploring space. My understanding of free market theory is that the "competition" supposedly drives down price, but I don't think free markets exist.

I wish Graeber had reiterated his "1% market" idea another time in full, but the basics are as he implied here. A market reflects the preferences of the people who have the money. If you have a market economy with deeply built-in and extreme inequalities, then you can get a "free market" that, yes, reflects the preferences of about 1% of the population.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#276

Post by sbmassey »

twoodfin wrote: post #77
AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are my hero. I keep telling people (friends and parents) that a life like yours is possible. Not necessarily a boat, but something outside the box. But here in Flanders (Belgium), that's unthinkable. Every Fleming should have a house and very Fleming has a massive debt because of it. We love building so much, that there's almost no space left!

To be fair: You do build lovely, functional houses in one of the most beautiful parts of Europe.

Some disagree:

http://uglybelgianhouses.tumblr.com/

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#277

Post by DividesByZero »

Buckminster Fuller had it right back in the 70's -

"We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living."

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#278

Post by nbouscal »

keithpeter wrote: post #274
nbouscal wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1215? What's wrong with Euclid?

Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...

It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#280

Post by impendia »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #118
impendia wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was with you until the end. Can you provide an example of an academic sabotaging useful production in order to prove his or her value?

The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time? An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.

> a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.

Citation needed.

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