On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs • Hacker News Board

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#321

Post by 3825 » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 3:27 AM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #316

3825 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Someone sitting on prime farmland and not actually farming it is a net negative to society unless they're getting more value out of that land than a farmer would. To play the devil's advocate: Why stop at land? What about people who have gold under their mattress? Or perhaps (stick with me here) someone who owns the patents for a machine that he refuses to sell anything himself and forbids anyone else from selling a…

I don't really see a problem with either of your "devil's advocate" positions. Especially the patent one. Given where you're posting, I have no idea why you'd think that would be a "devil's advocate" idea. A wealth tax is an interesting idea. I have to wonder why it's so uncommon. I'd guess it's some combination of being hard to enforce and easy to move money around. Such a tax would trigger a flight of capital, some…

I was under the assumption that confiscation of private property was more widely condemned no matter what domain. Apparently not.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#322

Post by ahomescu1 » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 4:39 AM UTC

ap22213 wrote: post #89

Part of the problem is that it's really hard to quantify the social value of failure. So, a lot of people opt to take the easy path and do more busy work. At least, then they may show that their busy work had some productivity and output. I see this all too often in software development. Instead of people chasing wildly challenging ideas, they choose to re-write things over and over. How many programming languages do…

> How many programming languages do we really need?

Considering how bad some of the current ones are, more. For example, a lot of current software is written in C++, which is a bloated mess. IMHO, we need a new systems language like Go or Rust.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#323

Post by davidgerard » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 7:42 AM UTC

einhverfr wrote: post #158

I really enjoyed this piece. Very thought provoking. I only have one issue and that is the question of what causes pointless jobs. Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition. To some extent there is some support for that. One of Hilaire Belloc's complaints about the early welfare state was that it would effectively chain peo…

"Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition."

He explicitly states this is not what he thinks. The reading comprehension in this thread is very selective.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#324

Post by est » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 7:47 AM UTC

Quote from steve jobs:

> So the people who make the company more successful are the sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the ‘product people’ get run out of the decision-making forums. The companies forget how to make great products. The product sensibility and product genius that brought them to this monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies who have no conception of a good product vs. a bad product. They have no conception of the craftsmanship that’s required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts about wanting to help the costumers.”

> .... companies get confused. When they start getting bigger, they want to replicate their initial success. And a lot of them think, ‘Well, somehow, there’s some magic in the process of how that success was created.’ So they start to institutionalize process across the company. And before very long, people start to get confused that the process is the content. And that’s ultimately the downfall of IBM.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#325

Post by einhverfr » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 8:22 AM UTC

davidgerard wrote: post #323

einhverfr wrote: post #158

I really enjoyed this piece. Very thought provoking. I only have one issue and that is the question of what causes pointless jobs. Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition. To some extent there is some support for that. One of Hilaire Belloc's complaints about the early welfare state was that it would effectively chain peo…

"Graeber suggests this was a decision by the ruling class, collectively, to push us to work harder and keep us from being the competition." He explicitly states this is not what he thinks. The reading comprehension in this thread is very selective.

I reread, and I can't see where he explicitly says this is not what he thinks. He claims that this is a fairly accurate picture of he moral state of our economy. I would be interested in what you are seeing that I am not.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#326

Post by FatalBaboon » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 9:32 AM UTC

ricardoz17 wrote: post #133

FatalBaboon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exceptions don't make rules, it's the other way around

Except when its an "Exception that proves the rule" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exception_that_proves_the_rule

What I meant is you don't turn an exception into a generally applicable rule, but rules can infer exceptions.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#327

Post by ZeroGravitas » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 9:56 AM UTC

impendia wrote: post #280

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Twenty terrible reasons for lecturing

http://www.brookes.ac.uk/services/ocsld/resources/20reasons....

"The overwhelming outcome of all this work is that there is no significant difference between lecturing and a host of other methods in their ability to enable students to learn factual material. Lectures are as effective as many other methods, but not more so. There are indications that lecturing is less effective, even for imparting information, than certain methods, notably unsupervised reading. (In fact unsupervised reading may have the edge over all face-to-face teaching methods for factual mastery)." (In case this sounds overly positive about lecturing, note that the author considers factual transfer to be lecturing's strongest feature)

It's only a broad review of what was considered fairly obvious research conclusions, he specifically says that he's not writing to present new evidence just to note that despite the evidence no change in behaviour has occurred, and as I say, it was written 30 years ago, but I'm not aware of anything more recent overturning these results.

It's not clear but I believe his source for this particular claim is the Bligh book which is cited explicitly elsewhere in the text, which summarizes hundreds of studies comparing the effectiveness of lecturing with other techniques in his book "What's the use of lectures".

(Amusing aside: The review snippet of Bligh's book on Google books is as follows: "A large portion of this book is dedicated to presenting research on why and how lectures fail. You really have to wade through a lot of material to get to any help in putting a lecture together". I think that neatly encapsulates the mental resistance to abandoning lectures by people who give them)

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#328

Post by singingfish » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 10:35 AM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #188

singingfish wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.

Don't publish just to publish, only publish what you believe are great papers and don't bother playing the system.

So I left academia to become a discordian agent for precisely this reason.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#329

Post by AimHere » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 12:24 PM UTC

polymatter wrote: post #164

baseraid wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are negative sum jobs as well. Pharma people, promoting harmful drugs, soldiers or criminals.

soldiers do not belong in that group. they generally do significant good just as a sitting deterrent. much more than yet another mediocre web developer. how their political masters choose to use them however ...

>they generally do significant good just as a sitting deterrent.

... to other soldiers. And the same logic dictates that everyone involved in the whole dismal advertising industry does significant necessary good works by offering their clients a means to neutralise the benefits that their rivals get from THEIR advertisers. I'd contend that bullshit jobs that are necessary to counteract the effects of other bullshit jobs are still bullshit!

How it's possible to make both sets of bullshit jobs obsolete is left as an exercise for the social engineer, of course...

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#330

Post by mikeash » Tue, Aug 20, 2013, 1:26 PM UTC

3825 wrote: post #321

mikeash wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really see a problem with either of your "devil's advocate" positions. Especially the patent one. Given where you're posting, I have no idea why you'd think that would be a "devil's advocate" idea. A wealth tax is an interesting idea. I have to wonder why it's so uncommon. I'd guess it's some combination of being hard to enforce and easy to move money around. Such a tax would trigger a flight of capital, some…

I was under the assumption that confiscation of private property was more widely condemned no matter what domain. Apparently not.

Patents aren't private property. They're a government-granted temporary monopoly. In the absence of government, there's still some notion of property, but no notion whatsoever of patents.