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.
