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

81–90 of 357 posts

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#81

Post by maratd »

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…

> The sales and marketing economy is zero sum.

This is false. I'll let those more gifted than myself to make the argument:

http://www.ted.com/talks/rory_sutherland_life_lessons_from_a...

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#82

Post by zanny »

vanderZwan wrote: post #48
guard-of-terra wrote: post #23

I wonder how much people we really need to replicate, sustain and exceed present levels of technology and culture (on another planet perhaps)? Given that we allow every person to develop their talents of contributing to the productivity of the society. Not just being a wage drone or an unemployed drone. My guess is: as few as a few million people today, hundred thousands when we figure out robotics.

I recall a reading very fascinating comment on Reddit a few years ago on this subject: if you want to maximise for maximum biological diversity at the lowest cost, the best option would be to have a small all-female crew, and as much diverse frozen sperm as possible (which is the most compact form of proto-human we got). Then upon reaching the intended planet, fertilise every female with a unique cell. Repeat every g…

By the threshold of technology you mention (intersteller travel to habitable planets) you would certainly have the technology to grow and maintain an artificial womb. So you just stock the ship with self-replicating printing machines that can deploy artificial wombs, and have millions of frozen egg / sperm to populate them.

Really though, at that point, you might as well send the learning AI robots instead. Fleshy emotional meat bags with difficult to replicate reproduction are a liability.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#83

Post by Filligree »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #58
vanderZwan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a reading very fascinating comment on Reddit a few years ago on this subject: if you want to maximise for maximum biological diversity at the lowest cost, the best option would be to have a small all-female crew, and as much diverse frozen sperm as possible (which is the most compact form of proto-human we got). Then upon reaching the intended planet, fertilise every female with a unique cell. Repeat every g…

I wasn't talking about diversity, rather about how much people are needed to sustain and industrial civilization. Perhaps this number is much greater than number of people you need for diversity (several hundred people populated the whole pre-Columbian americas and they didn't have terrible problems with diversity)

At the moment? Large enough that it realistically can't be done. Millions and millions. Millions of tons of equipment, too.

Emerging technologies (nanotech...) may be able to reduce this, but for the moment it's perfectly realistic to consider scenarios where new colonies usually regress to 18th/19th century technology for a few generations. This, of course, makes colonizing uninhabitable planets such as Mars... hard.

Mars we could probably do, it'd just be costly. An interstellar variant? Not likely.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#84

Post by hedgew »

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…

>I'm out of the status race, and people envy me for the freedom

They probably envy your newfound status.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#85

Post by guard-of-terra »

zanny wrote: post #82
vanderZwan wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recall a reading very fascinating comment on Reddit a few years ago on this subject: if you want to maximise for maximum biological diversity at the lowest cost, the best option would be to have a small all-female crew, and as much diverse frozen sperm as possible (which is the most compact form of proto-human we got). Then upon reaching the intended planet, fertilise every female with a unique cell. Repeat every g…

By the threshold of technology you mention (intersteller travel to habitable planets) you would certainly have the technology to grow and maintain an artificial womb. So you just stock the ship with self-replicating printing machines that can deploy artificial wombs, and have millions of frozen egg / sperm to populate them. Really though, at that point, you might as well send the learning AI robots instead. Fleshy em…

The whole idea is to get a functioning human civilization in another untainted place.

AI robots surely can't do that. It's not about research, it's colonization.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#86

Post by netcan »

"The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger"

I don't know what to call this fallacy, but it needs a name. In a way it's similar to saying "nature abhors a vacuum," "this evolutionary strategy aims to", "the market will.." etc. Those are all personifying emergent phenomenons. They are non person things that behave amusingly as if they have a personality. The "ruling class" is different though because it is made of of people. I don't think the author is trying to suggest thousands (or millions) or people conspired to make "the masses" waste 30 hours per week on motivational seminars, but using that language makes it sound like he is, sort of, without committing to it too much.

Worse, it absolves one from exploring the most interesting part of this argument. If There is a literal conspiracy, who? how? details, please. If it's a metaphor for some sort of emergent phenomenon, explore that. What are the forces at work that make this happen. Is it the proliferation of zero (or small) sum games like litigation or advertising? Is it about opaque performance in modern snowflake jobs? This is the most interesting part of the discussion and "The ruling class has" just absolves the writer of addressing it.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#87

Post by bennyg »

impendia wrote: post #39
RyanZAG wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 resea…

Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e).

That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day.

He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#88

Post by twoodfin »

JulianMorrison wrote: post #53

The core cause of bullshit jobs is not conspiracy, it's political economy. We currently choose (IMO a terrible choice) to have a money based society where "don't work" == "don't eat". And so work must be found. This is what it means when politicians talk of "creating jobs".

Just how do you propose eating without working? Someone has to work so she or others can eat.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#89

Post by ap22213 »

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 we really need? How many ORMs and MVC frameworks? How many template engines? Do we really need to port all of those libraries to yet another platform?

It seems its socially more acceptable to chase the incremental improvements (or illusory improvements) than to chase those things that have high risk of failure.

Let's say you're a musician. Would you rather spend your life working on a entirely new genre of music that ends up never catching on? Or, would you rather pursue the path of getting signed to a major label by churning out rehashes of previous hits? At least the second path gives some opportunity to pay the bills while still doing something that resembles what you love.

As a society we need a better way of 'paying' people to explore, experiment and invent. We need better ways to capture the multitudes of failures and re-incorporate them. I think this used to be the realm of the academic, but it seems that the academic institution has now become just a hand of the corporate machine.

Re: On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs

#90

Post by baggachipz »

dccoolgai wrote: post #68

I live and work in Washington DC. If you ever want to visit a living museum of bullshit jobs, come visit this city. One of my favorite anecdotes is when my friend worked for a defense contractor who hired a "requirements manager". On her first day of work, she popped into my buddy's office and whispered: "what are requirements?".

I remember being contracted out for IT support to a government agency whose sole purpose was representing workers in government agencies. The entirety of its existence astonished me, and as you can imagine, absolutely nothing was accomplished in the 3 weeks I was around. One employee spent most of her time procuring special furniture and equipment for a self-perceived disability (she was perfectly capable), others whiled the day away in "meetings" and water cooler discussions. They could not, however, be bothered to observe that the reason their office server was not functioning was due to its power cord not being plugged in. I wish I was making this up.
Post reply on HN