Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am not glossing over things. Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago or even way before in time. We are just acting as spoiled brats.
> Nobody would want to live in the world like 100 years ago I for one would definitely want it. That's my favourite period of time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belle_%C3%89poque and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann%C3%A9es_folles Very active, very interesting times: lots of scientific breakthrough, development of recent theories, lots of experimentations, while a great part of science is still, and for the last ti…
Bullshit Jobs
561–570 of 576 posts
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#562Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office. For 4 months now. Let that sink in. What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means tha…
I just would like to add a bit of a warning to anybody reading parent's comment and thinking it's the life-it really isn't what it's cracked up to be. After like a year of doing nothing, like around the 9th month mark, it starts to take a toll. Since my manager was constantly telling me there's not much I need to do other than explain lines of code and what they do in business terms. Often I would prepare something b…
- I think it depends on how people are wired (if you have something personal you deeply want to do, you can avoid the useless negative factor into a "i have free funding for my project"). I used to be like that.
- I really wonder how much work = having the satisfaction to feel needed and help someone by your skills/knowledge/care.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#563It looks like psychiatry, especially psychotherapy, is bullshit to a far greater extent than what was discussed in this blog post: --- For real patients, there is no evidence that the benefits of psychotherapy are greater than those of placebo treatment. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/behavioral-and-brain... (Prioleau 1983) Meta-analysis shows antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy. No signi…
AFAICT none of the links you give offer any support for the claim that "psychiatry is bullshit". Several, if anything, support the exact opposite (e.g "antidepressants to be more effective than psychotherapy" -- 'psychiatrist' is not a synonym of 'psychotherapist', a psychiatrist is a medical doctor specialising in mental illness, so is licensed to prescribe antidepressants). Most of the others are just not relevant…
https://pocketmags.com/au/skeptical-inquirer-magazine/may-ju...
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#564Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's break it down to something simple: I have $3, you have $1. Is it fair that I give you $1 so we both have $2? Is that rational? Now let's say that you work 3 hours a day and I work 1 hour. Now what's fair? You're working three times longer than me, but I had three times as much money to start with. Would fair actually be if I gave you $2 instead? That way our cash is on par with our hourly work. Does that seem r…
What about actually putting tax money to good use by offering free health care and education like Scandinavian countries? Would be a good start. From there the concept could easily be expanded. Reward those who work hard at specific things but let the rest of the population enjoy the benefits as well. Give them (free or cheap) access to your widgets. And ensure that you don't end up owning a monopoly taking most of e…
Why is that fair? Why is that a good start?
If something is good and fair, sure let's do it, but we've skipped some essential work here. You've declared certain things as good and fair, you haven't actually proven these things are either.
What are the benefits that we should give those who work hard? What are the rewards? It's all fine and good to say "we will reward them". But if that reward is nothing but a sense of pride and accomplishment, I'm going to feel hoodwinked.
And you talk about "taking most of everyone's money and giving nothing back" but aren't you really talking about double dipping here? I'm giving you the widget. The thing you've given me money for. That's the exchange. You're basically saying the person who makes widgets needs to work for something else. But you don't say why. Or what that something else is.
That's what I'm talking about. We need that groundwork in order to actually start a conversation about redistribution. We are talking about literally taking stuff from people. Stuff they're under the impression that they've earned. There are two ways to do that. By convincing them to just give it up. Or by using force. Now, of course, there are those out there who have accumulated fortunes through rather nefarious practices. And it is a perfectly reasonable argument to say that those who have used fraud, deception, and various forms of coercion to build their wealth should have that wealth taken from them by force. It's not theirs. It needs to be returned to those who it does belong to. But we have to establish what are legitimate means of accumulating wealth and what aren't legitimate means. There are obvious cases, but there are also very contentious cases.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#565I am fairly convinced that bullshit jobs (and entire bullshit industries) exist as a consequence of the following things: 1) There is less and less actual work to be done due to technological progress; 2) There are economic incentives to create larger and larger organizations; 3) Society hasn't found a rational way to redistribute wealth yet. This is tragic. Entire human lives are being wasted on this dystopia of bor…
It's not that these jobs are bullshit jobs, it's that commonly they are wrapped up in bullshit procedures . These procedures typically appear when there's an initiative to reduce costs. The easiest and cheapest way to employ an unskilled person to do a skilled job is to hand them a book of 'procedures' on their first day and say "Everything you need to do and know is in this Book". No time consuming cross-training re…
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#566Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've heard similar opinions to this before, and I don't think it makes sense. It's so hard for businesses to stay in business that if they could shed the bullshit jobs they would. I think technological progress is slow process and these jobs exist because they provide some competitive advantage or provide surge capacity. If they're truly bullshit and in the private sector they will eventually disappear. It can take a…
Your comment is valid if you assume that a business works like one homogeneous organism, in the language of biology, you have one organism on which natural selection (in this case, the market) acts. I think, especially with larger companies, you have to treat the whole organism as a bunch of sub-organisms that works together (most of the time) towards a common goal. In that case you can have several different forces…
It’s held together by the myth of money and/or organizational purpose, which is actually less immediately “real” than any one of those sub unit in-group people.
It’s not that explicit, but it is certainly innate: large orgs all suffer the same way.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#567Okay, I wasn't going to comment, but I thought this would be extremely relevant : I've been getting paid for free for the past four months. I've been turning up to work, reading novels all fucking day, eating at the company cafeteria, and leaving. I generally spend 4-6 hours at the office. For 4 months now. Let that sink in. What happened is that I transferred from a 'public' team to a 'private' team, which means tha…
Reminds of something I read here not too long ago. From what I understand, it makes the rounds every now and then. https://sites.google.com/site/forgottenemployee/
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#568Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm reminded of procedures in the [US] defense industry. A "good step" in a given procedure would be absolutely clear in mind-numbing detail. "Pretend you're writing for a sailor" may be half a joke but it is also very real; sometimes word does get back to you about how something was unclear and a piece of equipment got buggered [or whatever], you look at the section in question, and all you can think is "How can you…
Not necessarily it being insulting, with Navy sailors, there is a very real chance that when they are needing to read that manual, they are under attack, and thus don't have the time or ability to think through what the step is actually trying to say. Making it extremely clear means that even when being fired on, the correct thing can be done.
If I may be fair to myself, the incident in question was during peacetime in the middle of nowhere and was completely routine. Yes that monotony and similar can be a Great Evil, but still... all of my wow.
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#569Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I come out the same whether or not I sell polish, why should I sell polish? Rationally, I shouldn't. Because you like polished widgets, I'd imagine? Or maybe a fascist government forces you to make widget polish, I don't know. I do know you can't have it both ways, if your hypothetical economy is not consistent then it is a useless example.
You're investing way more into the hypothetical than exists. I wasn't asking what imagined scenarios would force me to sell polish. If you want that, then aliens for all I care. The entire point is to ask what happens when the results of my actions are nil. Rationally, if two courses of action have the same result, I should take the course that costs me the least. I mean, here I am describing a situation and you're s…
Re: Bullshit Jobs
#570Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that a strictly rationalist or at least secular morality should be applied given the sheer religious or spiritual diversity of the global population. And regarding your latter point,it is as you say simplistic - much like the proverbial bacterium on an agar plate, our growth imperative will destroy our future if we overrun the bounds of our environment. I think we will see the issue become more importan…
How do you arrive at an acceptable secular morality, especially since science claims that it cannot speak to morality?
But science also teaches us that humans have a set of common, shared values, and while they may be arbitrary in general, they're not arbitrary to us. And they're shared, because humans are not isolated minds, each coming to existence ex nihilo, but in fact are connected through the process of reproduction. All of us have brain architecture we've inherited from a common ancestor.
This is how science can point us where to look for some practical morality.