Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

strikemag.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 357 posts

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#31

Post by thyrsus »

mixmax wrote: post #12
Filligree wrote: post #3

Some of what people want is positive-sum: Books, aquariums, theater showings, even cars. As we get more productive, the amount of time you need to work for these decreases. A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance. This is, I believe…

This is a good observation. I've put some effort into circumventing the zero-sum things, though I haven't thought about it this way before. I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own. My living expenses come down to harbour rent, electricity and heating in the winter. Over a year that's an average of $300 a month. I live in the smack middle of Copenhagen. On top of this comes living expenses, clothes, et…

That sounds wonderful, but the line I'd always heard was "A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into" - that is, they are expensive to maintain. How do you avoid that?

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#32

Post by RyanZAG »

impendia wrote: post #22
RyanZAG wrote: post #20

I was with him all the way until "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger ". The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. The 'ruling class' really doesn't care if anybody is or isn't working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody…

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?

That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required.

Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#33

Post by RyanZAG »

vanderZwan wrote: post #29
RyanZAG wrote: post #20

I was with him all the way until "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger ". The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. The 'ruling class' really doesn't care if anybody is or isn't working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody…

> The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. I think the implication is that that is largely a form of Stockholm syndrome. > They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value. How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?

"How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?"

I was not arguing against the idea of bullshit jobs. It's not even possible to argue against that! I was arguing against the reason for having bullshit jobs. He attributes this to some plan by 'the man' to put people in these jobs. I'm arguing it is people putting themselves in these jobs by themselves.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#34

Post by fab13n »

Patient0 wrote: post #24
fab13n wrote: post #17

(wanted to post this on the website, but the comments system is off) I've found this article both entertaining and insightful; there's one big hypothesis in it which I find unnecessary, though: the conspiracy theory, making it a fight between dominant classes and actual wealth producers. If we call "bureaucracies" the collectives which consume a lot of human workforce and produce little human-enjoyable wealth out of…

Exactly. You don't need a conspiracy to describe a stable but sub-optimal outcome: you just need it to be a Nash equilibrium.

It's stronger than a Nash equilibrium. It's not even an equilibrium actually, because we keep improving humans' productivity, and bureaucracies keep eating the freed workforce.

It's really easier to make sense out of it from an ecologist's PoV than from an economist's or a game theoretician's, because the two competing agents (humans and bureaucracies) are hard to formally separate.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#35

Post by olefoo »

impendia wrote: post #22
RyanZAG wrote: post #20

I was with him all the way until "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger ". The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. The 'ruling class' really doesn't care if anybody is or isn't working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody…

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?

Derrida.

And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#36

Post by msh »

Filligree wrote: post #3

Some of what people want is positive-sum: Books, aquariums, theater showings, even cars. As we get more productive, the amount of time you need to work for these decreases. A lot of what people want is zero-sum: Location, status symbols, and so forth. If you want to live in the centre of town you need to work more than anyone else who so wants, not just as much as it takes to cover the maintenance. This is, I believe…

I think this depends on where you are, in my experience north Americans tend to work far more hours than people from northen europe.

The normal working hours where I come from is around 37 hours. I have a 36 hours work week with all overtime must be taken as time off at some other time. (of cause there are also people who work more).

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#37

Post by olefoo »

Jach wrote: post #27
asfasfafwF wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really up on what the standard of living was like in the 30's, but is it really possible working 10 hours per week? That would barely pay rent in most places.

The trick is getting into a government subsidized housing program, making use of food stamps, and taking as many other handouts as you can get. A former friend does this and works about 10 hours a week as a dishwasher (sometimes more if they have a busy week) spending the rest of his time playing video games or reading Objectivist literature.

" reading Objectivist literature " while on food stamps?

Clearly he is doing so from curiosity and not conviction.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#38

Post by mathattack »

It's hard for me to believe in grand conspiracies of a ruling class that is in competition with itself. I'm more inclined to believe that bullshit jobs exist because there is bullshit work to be done, and more of it piles on when there isn't a market incentive pushing the bullshit out.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#39

Post by impendia »

RyanZAG wrote: post #32
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?

That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required. Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews…

I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason.

Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork:

http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs

and are trying to change the library system:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%).

But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others).

I can't speak for other disciplines.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#40

Post by mixmax »

thyrsus wrote: post #31
mixmax wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good observation. I've put some effort into circumventing the zero-sum things, though I haven't thought about it this way before. I live on a boat that I've paid with cash, and thus own. My living expenses come down to harbour rent, electricity and heating in the winter. Over a year that's an average of $300 a month. I live in the smack middle of Copenhagen. On top of this comes living expenses, clothes, et…

That sounds wonderful, but the line I'd always heard was "A boat is a hole in the water you throw money into" - that is, they are expensive to maintain. How do you avoid that?

If you are a little handy and know how to work an angle grinder and a circular saw it's really not that expensive. Plus you have something to do in the weekends :-)
Post reply on HN