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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 grounde

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. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grounded_theory

mjburgess 5y ago
He wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs", the rhetorical trick is to pretend to disown the role his own opinion is playing. It's essentially the same type of technique socrates used: "of course, well all know nothing, but let me tell you what we all don't know..."
- contrast 5y ago
  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?
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    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.
    - pydry 5y ago
      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".
    - d3nj4l 5y ago
      > 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 ???
      - mjburgess 5y ago
        Have you read his claim? > 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.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- rjknight 5y ago
  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.
  - mjburgess 5y ago
    Neither. Perhaps I should have quoted. My issue is with the line, > Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else.
    - svat 5y ago
      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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)" when quoting Graeber's comment.)
  - simonh 5y ago
    >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.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

mjburgess 5y ago

He wrote a book called "Bullshit Jobs", the rhetorical trick is to pretend to disown the role his own opinion is playing. It's essentially the same type of technique socrates used: "of course, well all know nothing, but let me tell you what we all don't know..."

contrast 5y ago
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?
- mjburgess 5y ago
  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.
  - pydry 5y ago
    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".
  - d3nj4l 5y ago
    > 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 ???
    - mjburgess 5y ago
      Have you read his claim? > 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.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
rjknight 5y ago
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.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Neither. Perhaps I should have quoted. My issue is with the line, > Anthropologists are not qualified to decide whose job is bullshit and neither is anyone else.
  - svat 5y ago
    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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22030745)" when quoting Graeber's comment.)
- simonh 5y ago
  >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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]