Bullshit Jobs
I have read parts of his book all the way through ... Let's look at two examples I remember - Dog walkers (washers?) and corporate lawyers. As I understand it Bullshit jobs are those that exist to serve the elite who otherwise "should" do the work themselves (dog washers), or jobs that have no labour-force power and so cannot improve their lot through collective action (which can range from air traffic control to uber drivers and ... dog washers). Finally there is some kind of self-aware bullshit job that is the corporate lawyer. There are two issues at play here - a moral judgement and a…
What I mean by that is that you have even more power to start your own company or use LLMs to reduce the friction of doing something yourself instead of hiring someone else to do it for you. Just as the internet was a democratization of information, llms are a democratization of output. That may be in terms of production or art. There is clearly a lower barrier for achieving both now compared to pre-llm. If you can't see this then you don't just have your head stuck in the sand, you have it severed and blasted into another reality. The reason why you reacted in such a way is again, a lack…
Alienation from the act of production- In the capitalist mode of production, the generation of products (goods and services) is accomplished with an endless sequence of discrete, repetitive motions that offer the worker little psychological satisfaction for "a job well done." By means of commodification, the labor power of the worker is reduced to wages (an exchange value); the psychological estrangement (Entfremdung) of the worker results from the unmediated relation between his productive labor and the wages paid to him for the labor. The worker is alienated from the means of production…
The thesis of 'Bullshit Jobs' was also dubious at best. https://www.economist.com/business/2021/06/05/why-the-bullsh... "In his book, Mr Graeber relied heavily on surveys of British and Dutch workers that asked participants whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world. This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. By contrast, the academics used the European Working Conditions Surveys, which by 2015 had talked to 44,000 workers across 35 countries. They focused on those respondents who thought that the…
>Hmm I've worked in a startup that had around 80 people when I joined and they claimed to have no HR. Guess what? They totally had HR. It was just one person whose job wasn't officially HR Still refutes kristianc's/Cowen's case, about a company absolutely needing HR so much that "one which does not have an adequately staffed HR department, or perhaps does not have an HR department at all" is in serious trouble. Apparently the company can servive not just with an understaffed HR deparment, but even with no HR department at all. Even with just a person (as in your example) unofficially doing…
I recently read this book because I saw it recommended in Hackernews threads and my disappointment was immense. It is, without hyperbole, among the worst books I've ever read. It's a shame too because it has a seemingly interesting premise. Hey about 15% of people say that their jobs don't need to exist. Now roughly the same percentage believe in lizard people, bigfoot, etc. so we should maybe take self-reporting with a grain of salt but it does seem to ring true to us right? It feels like we've all seen people in jobs that don't need to exist. And by the way that's exactly what modern…
> and uses the premise to set up a rant about anti-capitalism (without making a cogent argument for an alternative) It shouldn't be surprising that David graeber, one of the most famous modern anarchist philosophers, is an anti capitalist lol. I also find it strange that this burden of designing a perfect society falls on anyone that dares criticize the current one. Like when abolitionists criticized slavery, they were expected to come up with a solution for all the money cotton plantations would lose if slavery was abolished. So odd. By the way, he did propose two possibilities to…
I've noticed that Graeber's books seem to draw critics who complain that the book does exactly what it says it will up-front, with exactly the amount of rigor it says it will have, up-front. That he's not writing the Principia Mathematica of [topic of book] with each one seems to be a sticking point, even when the book never claims to be attempting that. I see similar complaints about works like Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (nb I wrote that Principia reference before thinking to include this part). "There's too much of his opinion in it!" framed not as a caution against treating…
> « the results of this report do not validate the idea that pension spendings are growing uncontrolled » It's an organisation which contains unions, and it's not their place to discuss the public budget. > That's funny because the report is really not as pessimistic as you say Which is asinine. Their "pessimistic" vision is for 2% year on year growth, which is wildly optimistic in my view; their "it's not too bad, only 15% of GDP" is among the worst in the OECD (along other countries with budget issues like Spain and Italy); their "for pensioners to have 75% of the median quality of life…
You have missed the point. It has nothing to do with coding but everything to do with adding tangible value towards achieving an Objective Goal (Business/Technology/whatever). Hence the Problem Domain and technologies used in the Solution Domain are what matter and everything else is ancillary. The Processes/Methodologies used are only useful in as much as they help us understand the problem domain better and map it to a specific solution. Thus the application of the former is informed by knowledge of the latter and cannot exist by itself. Hence the reason we have so many types/variations of…