> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.
This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though.
>They focused on those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”.
In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" is vague aspirational follow your dreams guff. Who actually makes a world scale impact? You don't have to be Greta Thurnberg to be doing useful work that's valuable to those around you. The implication is if you're not changing the world, you're wasting your life. It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
> the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work”
> In contrast the question Gerber used about a "meaningful contribution to the world" [...] It's a very heavily loaded way to put the question.
You're right that Graeber's question is vague (it could do with improvement/narrowing) but the first question quoted above isn't so much worse but just completely irrelevant. They've asked an entirely different question unrelated to what Graeber was trying to get at.
If I don't "have the feeling of doing useful work", does that mean my job is not useful, or my job is potentially useful but carried out inefficiently. Am I attempting useful work but blocked from doing so by some administrative or practical barrier? Do I consider myself insufficiently talented or qualified at my job to carry it out in a useful manner.
Graeber's question, while in need of improvement, is at least asking about the right things: the jobs themselves. This new question is asking about the people's individual relationships to their jobs, not the actual purpose of the role.
The economist is trying to redefine "bullshit jobs" to mean simply "jobs which hold no value to anybody". This excludes zero sum jobs - they are useful to someone.
Graeber defined "bullshit jobs" as jobs which hold no value to society at large. This includes zero sum jobs.
It's an argument over definition followed by an ad hominem - "So what is really going on? Part of the problem, surely, is the prejudice felt by academics like Mr Graeber towards those who work in finance".
It reminds me of this quote:
"It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
>The economist is trying to redefine "bullshit jobs" to mean simply "jobs which hold no value to anybody"
That is not the case. They don't talk about who the jobs do or don't have value to at all anywhere in the article, they only address the evidence Graeber used as the basis of his book - how employees think and feel about their own employment.
I don't know about the research they are citing, perhaps that does what you say.
Is a zero-sum job defined as one where the only person benefitting is the employee? If so, it seems like the only ethical way to eliminate those jobs from the economy would be some kind of guaranteed minimum income.
One of the examples of the distinction was a guy who worked at a post production company that:
A) Made cool explosions and aliens for movies, etc. which he loved and thought counted as socially useful coz audiences did too.
B) Made hair shinier and teeth whiter and other visual trickery to give false impressions of branded products. These things served only to take market share from other similar companies that made products that weren't markedly different to theirs.
B made up the majority of what he did, hence "mainly bullshit".
Graeber's claim is that this class of job (dubbed "goons"), according to those ppolled/interviewed only exist because other people employ them too. I.e. if there were an armistice on toothpaste ads that showed white teeth nothing would really change for consumers but if one company stopped the mindshare arms race they would lose market share.
You see this argument in discussions of the finance industry a lot. What percentage of financial trading is useful allocation of capital, and how much is just shifting ownership of the things other people make?
Yep - this was also the theme of the movie Margin Call (a point rammed home by the final scene).
It's usually really hard to draw the line in finance, though - unless you're deep in the weeds.
This is partly why Graeber's attempt to look at this issue through the lens of people doing the jobs themselves was probably the best way to formulate the research.
Here's an extreme example to make the point: we pay soldiers to kill people and destroy property. At the level of our "business" (our country) this may increase "value" (our security), while at the level of "society" (the world) it may be a net loss and an enormous tragedy. The problem is that this whole idea of "the good of society/the world" is extremely fuzzy and not that useful. It presupposes the only worthwhile actions are those that increase the utility function of the entire world, which we undoubtedly lack the knowledge to do. Capitalism is just a best-try approximation at achieving that and seems to have more success than other systems we've tried.
Of course you do. You could define bullshit jobs as any job with a negative externality whose value exceeds its profitability. Many of the arguments in our society are over the existence or not of externalities and the measurement and allocation of liability for them where their existence is an agreed-upon fact.
I suspect this is based on Marx's analysis of the creation of value. That is, for Marx only primary production creates value, all other economic or human activity destroys value. So for example in Marxism making a clock creates value, but transporting that clock from the factory to a shop, giving it shelf space, advertising it and selling it to a customer all destroy value. They are additional services that increase the cost of the product, and Marx actually used the term parasitic for these activities and argued they should all be minimised or preferably eliminated.
This resulted in Marxists creating uniform, identikit societies with standardised products directly distributed wherever possible. No advertising, no consumer choice because the process of accumulating the information necessary, and selecting products on an individual basis instead of collectively is wasteful.
The result was actual productivity in the real economy collapsed because it turns out some of these parasitic activities are kind of important. They ruthlessly stripped out all the bullshit and produced stale, drab societies of bored hungry drones. Thanks guys.
Who actually needs plays, books of fiction, music, nice clothes, holidays to pretty places? Who needs nice haircuts, polished nails, stylish cars, waited service? All of that is bullshit we don't need.
The only slight problem is it eliminates everything that actually makes life worth living. It eliminates all forms of aesthetic and cultural value, recognising only productive economic value, devoted to the activity of production itself. It suborns human value to material value.
There's a big chapter of Graebers book where he discusses potential sociological causes for the phenomenon of bullshit jobs. He criticizes the labor theory of value (initially pushed by economists like Adam Smith before Marx turned it on its head as a way to radicalized workers) as pushing people to socially value 'work' in the abstract, rather than the result of work, which contributed to the phenomenon of bullshit jobs in the first place.
Graeber feels we should be concentrating less on purely economic theories of value than theories of values which involve more social interests, which seems like the more 'primary' value. In particular, he questions whether the CGI artist's job was creating value for society as a whole. The artist himself didn't seem to think he was, hence why the CGI artist felt his job was bullshit. Maybe the artist's internal system of social value included some aspect of labour value, but it's hard to say since our own perspectives on social value are so murky.
I'd love to see a source for this, I've not heard it in his name but the conclusion I came to myself is that economic activity can be divided three ways:
1. Things that create value (in the sense of producing something people want and trading it for money or other things [which can include looking at ads])
2. Things that don't add value but are necessary because markets are imperfect (advertising agencies, marketing consultants, accountants, lawyers, real estate agents, etc.)
3. Things that _exploit_ imperfect markets for profit (hedge funds, investment banks, landlords, speculators, patent trolls, etc.)
2. and 3. seems to be where the money is these days. My feeling is that a society that prioritizes 2. and 3. is not adding much value to itself, and therefore isn't in a healthy place.
> I suspect this is based on Marx's analysis of the creation of value. That is, for Marx only primary production creates value, all other economic or human activity destroys value.
Can I have a source for that please? It seems absurd.
> They are additional services that increase the cost of the product, and Marx actually used the term parasitic for these activities and argued they should all be minimised or preferably eliminated.
Today we use the term "overhead". Are you saying that the cost of distributing products should not be minimized?
> The result was actual productivity in the real economy collapsed because it turns out some of these parasitic activities are kind of important. They ruthlessly stripped out all the bullshit and produced stale, drab societies of bored hungry drones. Thanks guys.
So the Soviet economy failed because... the things it produced were not actually distributed to the people as that would have destroyed value in the eyes of the CPSU? I never heard of that theory before.
> Who actually needs plays, books of fiction, music, [...]?
As a specific example? People who like to criticise them after dinner, like Marx.
you can have your advertising and everything else you want, but if the bread and butter of your advertising strategy is over-exploiting dark patterns and others shady mechanism while keeping the products the same, are you creating value (for the consumer)?
I don't think they have any problem with the original theory of advertising, which is informing the potential consumer of your product, about its existence, its usefulness and the advantages it has over the competition.
a more coherence basis of what is said in the book is simply that a a non negligible part of today economy is about wealth extraction but disguised as wealth creation, and the people that are tasked to do that can tell.
There’s a satirical comic in the UK called Viz. when it shows scenes set in football matches there are advertising slogans on the stands saying things like “Drink Tea”, “Eat Bread”, “Fill Your Bath With Water”.
Who gets to say what is an acceptable advert? We already have regulations prohibiting misleading advertising. I suppose we could beef those up, but this goes far, far further than marginal practices in advertising. It cuts to the heart of huge swathes if service jobs, hospitality, entertainment, culture and even sport. I’m not clear how you think all this should be regulated, how such prohibitions should be enforced, and what kind of society would result.
>That is, for Marx only primary production creates value, all other economic or human activity destroys value. So for example in Marxism making a clock creates value, but transporting that clock from the factory to a shop, giving it shelf space, advertising it and selling it to a customer all destroy value.
This is the most bizarre take on the Marxist labor theory of value I've ever seen.
Do you have a source for this idea that transporting a clock destroys value?
I see - that’s philosophically, but maybe not economically different from what I was thinking of - “make-work” jobs, or jobs that could easily be replaced by automation.
Edit to add: one major difference might be in the level of skill or education the employee has/needs.
I don't really follow you. A questionnaire can only find out what the respondents think about their job. If you want to objectively know whether their jobs are actually useful, independent of their opinions or feelings, a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask.
I think Graeber makes the assumption that the statement "my job makes no (net) contribution to society" is as closest to reality as we can possibly get.
The interviewed person is probably the best to know if the job is valuable. Even if they falsely assume that their job makes no difference, the sentiment is a problem in itself.
I am not agreeing or disagreeing, just giving my interpretation of the intent.
Can you pleas explain where you got that question and phrasing from please, because I don't recognise it from the research under discussion and I don't believe it is supported by any of the evidence.
> a survey just isn't the way to do it, no matter what questions you ask
That's fair but even still, Graeber's question should at least be probing whether people might think their jobs are useful; this new question only probes whether people think their contribution is useful individually.
If the question is rephrased to something like “if your company/product ceased to exist, would the world be better off, worse off, or no different?”
In my case, it would be no different (beyond a handful of job losses which are insignificant in the grand scheme). That, to me, is a bullshit job. Meaningless time consumption.
Is it no different because some other company would fill in the gap? Or because literally no one cares whether or not whatever your company does gets done?
If someone else would step in and do it, it’s not unique but isn’t necessarily bullshit.
This company's customers / clients and suppliers might of course care... But if the suppliers exist only to supply this, and the clients in turn don't produce anything otherwise useful either, maybe none of them really matter. So if someone else would step in and do it, that might just mean that then someone else would be doing an equally bullshit job.
> This new research was based on what people said about their own jobs though.
Right, and apparently:
> those who work in clerical and administrative jobs are far less likely to view their jobs as useless than those who are employed in roles that Mr Graeber regarded as essential, such as refuse collection and cleaning.
Which leads me to believe that people are not a good judge of the usefulness of their work. I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs. Perhaps the people doing them don't find the jobs meaningful, but refuse collection is certainly useful; without it, everyone would have to cart their trash to the dump, or, worse, we'd just have trash everywhere.
So it strikes me that all of this is just kinda pointless. I think we can reasonably make the argument that bullshit jobs do exist, but the number of these jobs is a very subjective take, and people seem to often incorrectly value their own jobs.
>I think most reasonable people would agree that it's incorrect to classify refuse collection and cleaning as useless jobs.
I think they did by and large (as did Graeber). The exceptions I remember listed were 1) "second order bullshit" - necessary jobs for "unnecessary companies".
E.g. cleaners for a debt collections call center - I don't think all reasonable people would believe this is socially useful. If the company doesnt need to exist the cleaners shouldn't either.
2) for example, cleaners who said that they were routinely ordered to clean things that already were clean or to do a small amount of cleaning and look busy the rest of the time. Performative cleaning, in other words.
The economist was specifically trying to misrepresent these examples to undermine the broader point, I think.
Beside the task there are other elements. You can almost turn any act into a pain or the opposite.
Clarity of intent. (Quality of training)
Adequate load sharing.
Interest of the approach (some petty tasks can made fun and challenging).
Then there's the systemic / social side of it. If your work flows with others. There a parallel with kinetic energy and inertia. A job where things flow is probably gonna be appreciated even if it has low value.
You can have a job where you feel useful and valuable without changing the world.
There are also jobs where you are being very useful, but it's arguably not good for society at large. You've got companies like FB that exist to just sell user data and serve ads and in HFT that milk ever penny out of the stock market where the speed of light isn't competitive enough for them, so they have to be as close to the exchanges as possible. Valuable to the company, but not through a bigger picture lens. Even worse, those companies have absorbed some of our best and brightest STEM graduates for years and prevented them from solving more noble pursuits.
Indeed, and the number of "bullshit-jobs" might actually be grossly underestimated, since I've found in general people will often try to justify the status quo and especially their own jobs. Most people would say a three-card monte street hustler has a net negative impact on society, but the hustler can argue that it's a form of entertainment, that people know what they're getting into, that people are paying a relatively small price for an iconic experience, etc.
There's a large amount of the economy that I'd consider a net negative for society - advertising and the industries created to convey it (radio, TV, most websites), credit cards, junk food, sales, etc. There are also a lot of cases where increased input doesn't seem to make people happier off. For instance, a lot of work goes into making special effects better than they were decades ago, but doesn't necessarily mean an audience in 2021 is going to enjoy movies more than an audience in 2000 did.
As a society we should probably spend a lot more time talking about where our economic output is going, and if it's going towards the things we actually want it to.
Im not personally a huge fan of Facebook, I barely use it, but the fact is I know a lot of people who do use it. I’m in several clubs and societies that use it heavily, and derive massive benefits from it. One society I’m in quadrupled in size after establishing a strong social media presence.
The value Facebook gets out of Facebook may well be obtained in questionable ways, but the fact is the service itself creates tons of value and utility for hundreds of millions of people. And yes I’m sure it causes some harm as well, definitely, but it’s not as simple as you make it out.
Before Facebook, these clubs were still on the internet and had a similar presence using junk like geocities I think. Also email threads and so forth.
Perhaps the utility of Facebook isn't zero, but I certainly think the harm (has led to genocide in some countries like Myanmar) far out weighs the benefits.
• When asked "whether their job made a meaningful contribution to the world", 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify. (And this is what Graeber [not Gerber] wrote about.)
• When counting those respondents who thought that the statement “I have the feeling of doing useful work” applied to them “rarely” or “never”, this was only 4.8%. (The newer research.)
It is hardly surprising that fewer people thought their job failed to clear the lower bar represented by the latter question (this is precisely what one would expect); so it's not clear what is being contradicted or refuted.
Even the data that the latter number is decreasing over time, or has a different distribution across kinds of work (than predicted by Graeber for the former question) is not necessarily a contradiction: those working in several "bullshit" jobs (under Graeber's definition) may well more frequently have a feeling of doing useful work, while also being less confident that their job itself serves a purpose and ought to exist. I can imagine this especially for the "goons" and "duct tapers" kinds of jobs (in his classification).
(In fact, if you look up and examine the full results of the YouGov poll at https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume... you'll find that even among the 37% who said their job "is not making a meaningful contribution to the world", only 21% of them said they found it "Not at all fulfilling"!)
The Economist article dismisses the former question with "This seems a high bar to clear; it is unsurprising that 37-40% of respondents thought their job didn’t qualify", and you dismiss it by calling it "vague aspirational follow your dreams guff" and a "very heavily loaded" question that "hopelessly biased his conclusions", but this is all value judgement. It is not at all clear to me whether the "correct" question to ask is the latter one rather than the former one; surely it depends on what one is trying to conclude.
I’m a big fan of Graeber, his book Debt is incredible and his death was a big loss. That said, he was always more of an activist and narrative-driven writer rather than data-driven, and his work should be considered in that context IMO.
Debt, in particular, contains a lot of howlers and conspiracy theories (especially relating to the dollar as a reserve currency and descriptions of monetary systems) that really don't belong there and (in my opinion) don't strengthen the work. It's really mixed bag where there is some rich anthropological work and ambitious subject matter combined with highly politicized and tendentious claims. Definately read him, but just be aware that his concern for accuracy is about the same as Zinn's "A People's History", which has a similar density of howlers due to the political agenda getting in the way of the work. Both of these works would be vastly improved with some rigorous fact checkers cutting material out, and they would still have evidence left to support their thesis.
The fact that the person doing the job thinks so doesn't necessarily make it so. There's plenty of people who don't see any real purpose in safety belts in cars, too.
I agree with your second statement, but your first statement doesn't necessarily follow, it depends on the proportion of jobs that are bullshit....
If a human is 1% likely to think a not-bullshit-job is bullshit, and 10% likely to think a bullshit-job is bullshit, but 99% of jobs are not-bullshit, then for every bullshit job that the worker thinks is bullshit, there are 9.9 not-bullshit jobs that the worker thinks are bullshit.
Your hypothetical would lead to roughly 98% thinking that their jobs are not bullshit when 99% actually were. At that level we wouldn't be having this discussion at all.
The actual numbers are more like 60% non bullshit / 40% bullshit, though.
I bet everyone in tech who has been around for a while has been in enough of _those_ meetings to be able to at least relate to what a bullshit job it.
Most probably have also seen the type of manager that is less concerned with the work people underneath them do (because they don't understand or care) and more with the prestige, making sure people stay there, even if they contribute nothing - either because they can't or wouldn't. Worse, eventually the former turn into the later with enough time to resign to the situation.
There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management.
It's challenging in such organizations to have meaningful cross-functional communication between the people who do the actual work and who need to understand each other. Why? Because these management layers also [try to] mediate all cross-functional interaction in formalized meetings which they run like court proceedings-- they're called by various names: "hand-offs", "gates", etc. The point is they're one-direction process-flow "ceremonies" that don't have real discussion between the parties involved.
What has to happen to workaround this is that the individuals who need to really communicate must seek each other out informally (or "offline" as the PM-derps would say), sometimes this works, sometimes it's a setup for one party getting snubbed by the other because they're beset with too many meetings.
So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
For years, I've made slides to report status on things (as a line manager, not a project manager) and I've tried to figure out ways to automate it. No amount of tags or epics or whatever in Jira seem to do it. It always has to be done by hand because what's actually happening is a lot of editorial curation, contextualization with other things going on at the company or in the industry, etc. (Please, if someone has a better idea, let me know!)
At larger companies, I can imagine this semi-journalism taking lots of people, because you can't just aim a firehouse of information at upper management. In theory, this could all be replaced with some clever dashboards, but the reality always seems messier.
> There's also an insidious pattern where entire layers of management exist strictly to report status to higher layers of management
I think everyone agrees.
> So yeah, there's often of fat layer of middle management that do bullshit jobs in large-enough orgs.
Here we disagree. You are positing that it's possible for there to be a large org without this fat layer, and I think this is unlikely. It's like complaining about entropy or the n^2 communication cost. Something may be terrible yet impossible to avoid. Making big bureaucracies as efficient as small bureaucracies is a really, really, hard problem. It may well be an unsolvable problem that comes with scale, sort of the flipside of how many things are more efficiently produced in large quantities, and it could be that the "optimal" size of a business is where these two trade-offs balance out -- e.g. where the scaling costs of the bureaucracy meets the efficiency gains of scale production.
It’s not so much a rhetorical trick as it is how anthropology works. If you want to investigate something qualitative, you have to employ something like grounded theory[1]. Ie., collect enough qualitative data that patterns start to emerge.
Then you can criticize various aspects of the way it was done of course, but that’s standard scientific method, and doesn’t necessarily reduce it to just rhetorics.
The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large. _Why_ they believe that is a matter of speculation, and will vary from person to person. The political question - what does this fact say about how our society is organized? - is also necessarily speculative, and this is what makes up the polemical part of the book. Graeber has a theory about why work is unfulfilling, and he argues for it.
I can't see much that is wrong with this. You might disagree with his conclusions, in which case you can critique them or offer alternatives. This is very different from disagreeing with the claim that there are people who think that their jobs are meaningless. I can't tell which you are disagreeing with.
>The stated fact is that there are people doing jobs that they personally do not believe are necessary or useful to society at large.
Except that the article shows that this just isn't the case, depending what you mean by 'society at large'. Gerber's question was about a 'meaningful contribution to the world', but if you ask people if they are doing useful work you get completely different statistics.
It looks like slipping in the phrase 'the world' in the question sets a completely unrealistic and for most people unattainable standard, but jobs don't have to be world changing to be worthwhile.
How about going backwards from Graeber's line of thought. His conclusion in the book is to introduce a universal basic income to get rid of bullshit jobs.
If we turn that around the question becomes: How many jobs (and what kind of jobs) would still be there if people had UBI and wouldn't need to work for a living?
You're assuming the premise implicitly, that there are a large number of bulshit jobs, but Gerber did not show this and his evidence for it is thoroughly discredited. If there are in fact very few bulshit jobs, the 'problem' of how to deal with them is moot.
I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls.
If you can actually show that many current occupations are in reality not productive, then of course that's something we need to address. However that has not been shown and even if it is true, it's not clear why so many people and companies are willingly funding these roles with their own money.
So if you are claiming is that vast numbers of people in the economy are 'wrong' about their spending and hiring habits, you've got a fair bit of work to do to establish that (let's be clear, it has not been established) and come up with a credible plan as to what to do about it, and who gets to decide what the 'right' thing to do is.
> I know the popular image of UBI is a paradise where nobody needs to work anymore, but that's not actually the basis of actual UBI policy proposals. It's really just a different model for structuring social welfare. The problem is that all the studies have shown that in practice it discourages work and reduces overall productivity. People work fewer hours, students study less, take up of retraining opportunities falls.
Yes. That's exactly the goal of the UBI. That nobody NEEDS to work anymore. How many burger flipper are there that work as burger flipper because they like burger flipping?
Your implicit assumption is that only paid work is real work. But if you remove money as the main motivator for work, people will look for more meaningful occupations and that's where we circle back to Graeber's bullshit jobs which don't qualify as meaningful work.
Child care, elder care. Cleaning the house, cooking the meals, getting the groceries, checking the homework, packing the lunches, scheduling the playdates, planning the parties, booking the doctor’s appointments, getting everyone where they need to be, paying the bills, making the calls, preparing activities.
As for taxes, we’ve chosen to allow income inequality to reach ridiculous levels. There are other choices.
Oh I agree completely about income inequality, it's a serious problem. I don't think taxation is the solution though, at least not straightforwardly. The problem isn't so much not enough taxing people, it's taxing the wrong things and giving ta breaks to encourage rent seeking behaviour. So we should seriously look at land value taxes for example, but that doesn't necessarily mean increasing overall taxation. The tick is getting the balance right so you're not distorting your economy.
>So we’re just going to close all the restaurants, eat at home and take sandwiches with us everywhere because nobody will want to work in service jobs?
This is a strawman. Nobody is claiming that we'll close all restaurants. People who want extra money (or just want something to do) will work in service jobs, and if the supply of workers is too low then that will heavily incentivise automation and investing in productivity improvents.
> People who want extra money (or just want something to do) will work in service jobs, and if the supply of workers is too low then that will heavily incentivise automation and investing in productivity improvents.
As well as, possibly (and hopefully), rising pay in hitherto underpaid jobs.
The people who work do so because they PREFER to, and that's because giving up some of their time, in order to be able consume, is seen as a good trade-off.
Redistributing what the highly productive produce to the less productive just leads to a less optimal allocation of resources for productivity, that results in a lower level of production and thus consumption than what people would prefer.
I think it would be more accurate to say that you thoroughly reject his argument. You've left 18 comments on this thread but many seem to be predicated on the assumption that your outlook is wholly objective and rest upon premises whose validity is questionable.
I'm not sure whether you clicked on the link, but note that the line you quote was in response to a comment asking "David Graeber is an anthropologist […] What qualifies him to talk about the economy and the function of various jobs?". You're calling it a rhetorical trick etc: that may make sense if he had employed it in the book, but as a response to the specific comment he was replying to, it seems reasonable. (That's why I included "(in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)" when quoting Graeber's comment.)
I’m trying to figure out the point you’re trying to make. I’ve never heard of the Socratic approach as being incorrect or pointless, I just think if it as a completely standard rhetorical technique. Does using it render the argument invalid? Is it wrong to have an opinion on a subject after researching it? What’s your challenge to the substance of what he has found?
It's not incorrect or pointless, but it's disingenuous. It's a trick. You claim both that you do not know and others can not know before you make a large variety of knowledge claims.
It is to make your project seem less dogmatic, and yourself more humble.
Here,
> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else
This is performatively false: he wrote a book on it.
He wrote a book on what people thought about their own jobs.
The economist's rebuttal was to claim that making a meaningful contribution to the world was, in the opinion of the author, "a high bar to clear" for job doers and try to supplant that only with "I have the feeling of being useful" as sufficient for a job to be not bullshit.
It's not trying to undermine the concept of defining jobs by what the job doers say about them.
Thus by simply redefining "non-bullshit jobs" as jobs which are useful to someone rather than useful to society at large, the economist makes no actual comment on the "zero sum jobs" component of "bullshit jobs".
> This is performatively false: he wrote a book on it.
This is such bizarre reasoning it stunned me. The point of the book as to describe a trend of people feeling that their jobs were pointless, "Bullshit", so to speak. But going from there to assuming that the book asserts a universal criteria for what job is Bullshit, without even reading the book, is ???
> Anthropologists are not qualified to... Anthropologists however are trained to... ... a bullshit job is defined as ...
I am not qualified to do X. However I am qualified to do Y. Ah! Y enables me to do X. So let me do X.
The first sentence there is a lie to massage the impact of the later ones. He literally defined what a "Bullshit Job" is, he wrote a book about it. The conceptual scheme of the entire book is his. He wrote the surveys; he defined the topic.
The idea that he is just a passive receiver of a coherent theory of jobs is false; and this is just a rhetorical gambit to disguise the fact that, no, he is the major architect of this idea and of the whole project.
And this becomes more blindingly obvious when other people attempt to repeat a survey asking whether their job is "bullshit" and find only 5% of people saying so.
I don't know, if a lot of people believe that their own job shouldn't exist, isn't that an interesting and worthwhile finding in and of itself? Perhaps we question the validity of that belief, but few of us have a large enough circle to even get an inkling of how common this point of view might be.
The surveys didn't ask people if their jobs shouldn't exist. That's Gerber's thesis, but it's not the actual questions or opinions being canvased, and it increasingly looks like it's just not a supportable conclusion. Please read the article, it lays out the issues very clearly.
Well-designed survey results are objective and reproducible. There are margins of error as with all measurements, and maybe these margins are wider than in some fields and narrower than in others, but asking people for their opinions isn't necessarily bad science just because it happens to involve opinions.
Right which is where attempts to confirm the thesis come in, and as the article shows it looks like Gerber's conclusions were based on a heavily loaded question that severely biased the answers.
Because people are involved in measuring or even defining a thing does not make that thing non-objective, though it can make it stupidly hard to study.
For example, when people are shown a round blobby image and an angular spiky image and asked to determine which one of them depicts a “buba” and which one a “kiki”, most people will apparently say that the blobby one is the “buba”, whatever culture they come from (Köhler, 1929, Spanish speakers on Tenerife; Ramachandran, Hubbard, 2001, English speakers in the US and Tamil speakers in India). More generally, people with synæsthesia agree to some extent on the correspondence between the sensations: if sounds have color to you, then high sounds are almost certain to be brighter than low ones.
A space alien would be entirely incapable of observing this phenomenon; when the human race is dead and gone, it will have ceased to exist; until an underlying mechanism is discovered, it is impossible to tell whether it extends to non-sapient species. It is nevertheless objective in every practical sense.
Similarly, if most people that do J themselves believe that J is bullshit, then it’s reasonable to think that something is up with J. It might be that it’s not a property of J in isolation, and reliably getting at what people actually believe (as opposed to what they tell their employer they believe, what they tell you they believe, or what they tell themselves they believe) can be stupendously difficult, but the question itself is not meaningless or unscientific.
> Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else. That's the whole premise of the book. Anthropologists however are trained to listen to what people say about their own lives and understandings of it and that's what I did - a bullshit job is defined as one which the person doing the job believes doesn't have to, or shouldn't, exist.
(in reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)