4 ms·

> lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators You just summarized the decline of Western civilization in one phrase. This has happened almost

by api 5y ago

> lost their professional agency to do-nothing administrators You just summarized the decline of Western civilization in one phrase. This has happened almost everywhere and efforts to push back have proven extremely difficult. I personally place a lot of the blame on the educational system for overproducing administrative skill sets and underproducing practical skill sets. There is some role for those things of course but we have far too many people for the administrative roles we really need and far too few for many other professions. This combined with the tendency of people to recruit people like themselves has oversaturated the market with administrators looking for reasons to exist. The rot is to the point that we have the spectacle of Elon Musk looking like superman. Why does he look like superman? Because he actually does things instead of having meetings to discuss the meeting schedule. He's just a reasonably competent engineer and business founder with huge resources who... does things... and this makes him look superhuman by comparison to the hordes of administrators that only discuss doing things and commission studies about hypothetically doing things.

hedora 5y ago
See also: California’s plan to eliminate algebra 2 and calculus from the highschool curriculum. It is being spearheaded by someone without a math degree, in the name of improving marketability of the kids for data science positions, or something. See also (2): Monty Python’s bicycle repairman sketch.
- api 5y ago
  Yeah that proposal is insane. For a while now it feels like the left and the right are attempting to one-down each other on how stupid they can get. That proposal seems like an example of the left trying to out-stupid Trump and the alt-right. Don't worry I'm sure the right is working on things even dumber than this, and then those will have to be topped, and so on. In 2024 we will have Dr. Oz and Marjorie Taylor Greene running against Oprah Winfrey and Kamala Harris. I'm not sure how this downward spiral ties into the administrative position over saturation problem, but I have the intuition that it does somehow. Maybe what we have are a whole ton of people who don't really know how to do things who vote. Voting is ultimately a hiring decision, so what we get is a voting process that hires a whole bunch of either administrators who themselves don't know how to do things or crackpots because people without practical knowledge can't spot a crackpot.
  - hedora 5y ago
    I think the root problem is that administators without practical skills are running everything. Since they got by without any practical skills, they don't value such things. Now, they want to eliminate them entirely from the educational system. The managers are at war with the individual contributors, and they don't understand that someone has to actually do work, or the system will collapse.
    - base698 5y ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Revolution-What-Happening-World-ebook/dp/B07MMDWBQN https://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Revolution-What-Happening-... > Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers. In 1941.
  - selimthegrim 5y ago
    Oprah would actually not be the worst candidate - certainly better than Michelle Obama.
    - api 5y ago
      https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/oprah-winfrey-helped-create-our-irrational-pseudoscientific-american-fantasyland.html https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/oprah-winfrey-h...
      - selimthegrim 5y ago
        My counters are a) Forsyth County, GA in 1987 b) Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton
- tick_tock_tick 5y ago
  > in the name of improving marketability of the kids for data science positions, or something. They have been very clear and upfront about the goal. They want to "solve" racial discrepancies in graduation rates so they've taken the classes often failed and are removing them.
tristor 5y ago
Pretty much. Unfortunately, we've also created a massive underclass in the West who have effectively no applicable skills. They can neither administrate, or do things, and so they are effectively dead weight on society. Ironically, considering that administrators are driving us over the cliff, the underclass is less problematic than the administrators. At some point we'll hit a critical mass and there will be so few people left that know how to do things that we literally will be unable to maintain the basic infrastructure of civilization. The cracks are already starting to show. The sad thing is that this is so very obvious, and yet such an intractable problem to solve. The entrenched systems at every level of society will fight you at every turn when you try to improve things.
- stripline 5y ago
  I recently saw a good talk about this point. Preventing the Collapse of Civilization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko
RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
That is an interesting observation. I wonder how much of the advent of "talking over doing" is related to the development of mass/social media. Influence can propagate so easily through mass media, meaning that it is now possible to generate enough business interest just through "hyping" (it's difficult to achieve this when messages have limited reach) --- combined with the fact that it is often cheaper and less risky to "talk" than to actually "do", we end up with a culture where hyping is preferred whenever possible.
trasz 5y ago
It's not about Western civilisation, it's about economic neoliberalism, replacing every existing metric with a single one: shareholders' profits. Those do-nothing administrators _do_ have a marketable skill: they make money for the company. Or at least appear to, according to (obviously flawed) criteria that are being used to evaluate ones' work.

by api 5y ago

hedora 5y ago

See also: California’s plan to eliminate algebra 2 and calculus from the highschool curriculum. It is being spearheaded by someone without a math degree, in the name of improving marketability of the kids for data science positions, or something. See also (2): Monty Python’s bicycle repairman sketch.

api 5y ago
Yeah that proposal is insane. For a while now it feels like the left and the right are attempting to one-down each other on how stupid they can get. That proposal seems like an example of the left trying to out-stupid Trump and the alt-right. Don't worry I'm sure the right is working on things even dumber than this, and then those will have to be topped, and so on. In 2024 we will have Dr. Oz and Marjorie Taylor Greene running against Oprah Winfrey and Kamala Harris. I'm not sure how this downward spiral ties into the administrative position over saturation problem, but I have the intuition that it does somehow. Maybe what we have are a whole ton of people who don't really know how to do things who vote. Voting is ultimately a hiring decision, so what we get is a voting process that hires a whole bunch of either administrators who themselves don't know how to do things or crackpots because people without practical knowledge can't spot a crackpot.
- hedora 5y ago
  I think the root problem is that administators without practical skills are running everything. Since they got by without any practical skills, they don't value such things. Now, they want to eliminate them entirely from the educational system. The managers are at war with the individual contributors, and they don't understand that someone has to actually do work, or the system will collapse.
  - base698 5y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Revolution-What-Happening-World-ebook/dp/B07MMDWBQN https://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Revolution-What-Happening-... > Burnham’s claim was that capitalism was dead, but that it was being replaced not by socialism, but a new economic system he called “managerialism”; rule by managers. In 1941.
- selimthegrim 5y ago
  Oprah would actually not be the worst candidate - certainly better than Michelle Obama.
  - api 5y ago
    https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/oprah-winfrey-helped-create-our-irrational-pseudoscientific-american-fantasyland.html https://slate.com/health-and-science/2018/01/oprah-winfrey-h...
    - selimthegrim 5y ago
      My counters are a) Forsyth County, GA in 1987 b) Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton
tick_tock_tick 5y ago
> in the name of improving marketability of the kids for data science positions, or something. They have been very clear and upfront about the goal. They want to "solve" racial discrepancies in graduation rates so they've taken the classes often failed and are removing them.

tristor 5y ago

Pretty much. Unfortunately, we've also created a massive underclass in the West who have effectively no applicable skills. They can neither administrate, or do things, and so they are effectively dead weight on society. Ironically, considering that administrators are driving us over the cliff, the underclass is less problematic than the administrators. At some point we'll hit a critical mass and there will be so few people left that know how to do things that we literally will be unable to maintain the basic infrastructure of civilization. The cracks are already starting to show. The sad thing is that this is so very obvious, and yet such an intractable problem to solve. The entrenched systems at every level of society will fight you at every turn when you try to improve things.

stripline 5y ago
I recently saw a good talk about this point. Preventing the Collapse of Civilization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago

That is an interesting observation. I wonder how much of the advent of "talking over doing" is related to the development of mass/social media. Influence can propagate so easily through mass media, meaning that it is now possible to generate enough business interest just through "hyping" (it's difficult to achieve this when messages have limited reach) --- combined with the fact that it is often cheaper and less risky to "talk" than to actually "do", we end up with a culture where hyping is preferred whenever possible.

trasz 5y ago

It's not about Western civilisation, it's about economic neoliberalism, replacing every existing metric with a single one: shareholders' profits. Those do-nothing administrators _do_ have a marketable skill: they make money for the company. Or at least appear to, according to (obviously flawed) criteria that are being used to evaluate ones' work.