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Previous societies never required that 80% of the working population be scribes. Being a scribe is hard. It was an unusual ability to such an extent that it re

Previous societies never required that 80% of the working population be scribes. Being a scribe is hard. It was an unusual ability to such an extent that it reinforced the medieval notion of a "vocation" (a calling or duty to do this work). Now we require every worker who wants to rise above the level of retail sales to be capable of spending hours a day going down columns of detailed textual data in Excel or Airtables, or managing a queue of e-mails, or smoothly transitioning between inventory and maintenance. It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction. We're being forced by the labor market to pretend that we aren't chimpanzees.

Nevermark 4y ago
> It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction. Clearly both? Processing dry material on a screen, that also offers endlessly seductive doom scrolling opportunities? Sandwiched productivity & entertaining unproductively closer than its ever been! It would be like a scribe trying to copy an endless and far too familiar religious text, while avoiding the pull of the odd pages, which all depict explicit colorful animated scenes of delicious sin.
- bibanez 4y ago
  That is a great analogy! Technology is this wonderful book, so is it reasonable to expect that we won't read half of it?
  - Nevermark 4y ago
    Exactly! It's like the garden of Eden, but every other tree is the kind you're not supposed to eat from. And they have nicer fruit! I think were are characterizing this problem well. Now how do we monetize this? Let people outsource discipline, which we provide, but in a gamified, low customer effort way? I see enterprise potential.
- birdyrooster 4y ago
  I don’t think ”clearly both” makes sense when comparing two things. Perhaps you are making a straw man of the parent comment?
  - chordalkeyboard 4y ago
    I think it is reasonable to assert both that distraction has been a problem for hundreds of years and that it is considerably worse now than it had been.
- StrictDabbler 4y ago
  It's funny, I deliberately used "less that X, more that Y" to underline that both factors contribute instead of saying "it's not that X, it is that Y." I'm sympathetic to your response but I don't think that very many people are ignoring their work for fancy, high-impact content because high-impact content remains taboo. Distracted people are mostly not watching TikTok, which is an obviously fireable offense. They are mostly, as always, staring at the wood-grain on their desk for the two seconds it takes to forget which part of the TPS form they were entering. As Spongebob said "I can't write with all these eraser shavings all over my paper! Now they're floating in my thinking space!"
paganel 4y ago
Thing is, me personally I used to be a better “scribe”. Meaning I did know how to be a good enough “scribe”, but lately I feel like I’m doing a poorer and poorer job when it comes to getting it done. And most of it is related to the ability of focusing on the job at hand, or, to be more exact, to the decreasing ability of doing it. It could be that I’m getting older (I’m in my early 40s), could be related to post-Covid effects (as pretty much all of us have have Covid at least once), could be that with “experience” (i.e. with getting older) I’ve begun to realize that it is not worth it to do certain things the way I did them before, I can’t really tell which is which, but the difference with before is there.

Nevermark 4y ago

> It is less that we are more distracted or distractable now and more that our current tasks are significantly affected by distraction. Clearly both? Processing dry material on a screen, that also offers endlessly seductive doom scrolling opportunities? Sandwiched productivity & entertaining unproductively closer than its ever been! It would be like a scribe trying to copy an endless and far too familiar religious text, while avoiding the pull of the odd pages, which all depict explicit colorful animated scenes of delicious sin.

bibanez 4y ago
That is a great analogy! Technology is this wonderful book, so is it reasonable to expect that we won't read half of it?
- Nevermark 4y ago
  Exactly! It's like the garden of Eden, but every other tree is the kind you're not supposed to eat from. And they have nicer fruit! I think were are characterizing this problem well. Now how do we monetize this? Let people outsource discipline, which we provide, but in a gamified, low customer effort way? I see enterprise potential.
birdyrooster 4y ago
I don’t think ”clearly both” makes sense when comparing two things. Perhaps you are making a straw man of the parent comment?
- chordalkeyboard 4y ago
  I think it is reasonable to assert both that distraction has been a problem for hundreds of years and that it is considerably worse now than it had been.
StrictDabbler 4y ago
It's funny, I deliberately used "less that X, more that Y" to underline that both factors contribute instead of saying "it's not that X, it is that Y." I'm sympathetic to your response but I don't think that very many people are ignoring their work for fancy, high-impact content because high-impact content remains taboo. Distracted people are mostly not watching TikTok, which is an obviously fireable offense. They are mostly, as always, staring at the wood-grain on their desk for the two seconds it takes to forget which part of the TPS form they were entering. As Spongebob said "I can't write with all these eraser shavings all over my paper! Now they're floating in my thinking space!"

paganel 4y ago

Thing is, me personally I used to be a better “scribe”. Meaning I did know how to be a good enough “scribe”, but lately I feel like I’m doing a poorer and poorer job when it comes to getting it done. And most of it is related to the ability of focusing on the job at hand, or, to be more exact, to the decreasing ability of doing it. It could be that I’m getting older (I’m in my early 40s), could be related to post-Covid effects (as pretty much all of us have have Covid at least once), could be that with “experience” (i.e. with getting older) I’ve begun to realize that it is not worth it to do certain things the way I did them before, I can’t really tell which is which, but the difference with before is there.