9 ms·

I was with him all the way until "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger". The

by RyanZAG 13y ago

I was with him all the way until "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger". The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. The 'ruling class' really doesn't care if anybody is or isn't working pointless jobs. Society as a whole is forcing people into pointless jobs by viewing anybody who is unemployed as some kind of failure. When a child gets out of school they need to find work or they have failed. If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide. This has nothing to do with someone forcing people to work and everything to do with the human brain's need for purpose forcing working - even if that work is pointless. For example, you often hear someone say with pride how they have worked so much they don't have time to eat or sleep even when the work they are doing is something like filling out pointless bureaucratic paperwork. "How can one even begin to speak of dignity in labour when one secretly feels one’s job should not exist?" Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value.

impendia 13y ago
I was with you until the end. Can you provide an example of an academic sabotaging useful production in order to prove his or her value?
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required. Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.
  - impendia 13y ago
    I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason. Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork: http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs and are trying to change the library system: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%). But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others). I can't speak for other disciplines.
    - bennyg 13y ago
      Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e). That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day. He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.
      - ramchip 13y ago
        I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.
      - 13y ago
- olefoo 13y ago
  Derrida. And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.
  - impendia 13y ago
    Ah, but this trend was fought by another academic. Alan Sokal, NYU physicist, famously completely bullshitted an essay and got it published by Social Text, a leading postmodern sociology journal. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ Scroll down to "Transgressing the Boundaries".
- singingfish 13y ago
  One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.
  - seanmcdirmid 13y ago
    Don't publish just to publish, only publish what you believe are great papers and don't bother playing the system.
    - singingfish 13y ago
      So I left academia to become a discordian agent for precisely this reason.
- ronaldx 13y ago
  I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Even if an academic is not explicitly sabotaging work, it's clear from the amount of time spent on grant applications and general bureaucracy that their useful production is being sabotaged. To meet bureaucratic standards, researchers are often required to teach and educators are often required to publish... it's not effective production.
  - lsh 13y ago
    > I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Thats why you have the reviewers declare no conflict of interest, have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. I agree with your last two points.
    - ronaldx 13y ago
      > have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. QED.
- ZeroGravitas 13y ago
  The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time? An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.
  - keithpeter 13y ago
    Depends on level. I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder. Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
    - nbouscal 13y ago
      1215? What's wrong with Euclid?
      - keithpeter 13y ago
        Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...
        nbouscal 13y ago
        It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
        13y ago
vanderZwan 13y ago
> The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. I think the implication is that that is largely a form of Stockholm syndrome. > They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value. How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?
- RyanZAG 13y ago
  "How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?" I was not arguing against the idea of bullshit jobs. It's not even possible to argue against that! I was arguing against the reason for having bullshit jobs. He attributes this to some plan by 'the man' to put people in these jobs. I'm arguing it is people putting themselves in these jobs by themselves.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - singingfish 13y ago
    Thus "the man" influences the people to act against their own best interest. Happens all the time.
  - JonnieCache 13y ago
    >He attributes this to some plan by 'the man' to put people in these jobs. I'm arguing it is people putting themselves in these jobs by themselves. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. See the last line of the article: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error." People in power make little daily nudges, those under the yoke follow the path of least resistance, and society wanders towards an equilibrium.
    - RyanZAG 13y ago
      Alright, I understand the argument now, thank you. I still disagree that anybody is trying to make this occur through nudges, a plan or any sort of action - considered or not. I believe it is the result of human kind's base urge to find meaning in themselves and their lives. I'd say that even if people in power were to try and push people into jobs, the people being pushed out of jobs would seek to find any job they could do regardless of how useless it may be. Simply to be doing a job and satisfying themselves. I fully accept it's a plausible argument that people in control are pushing us, though.
cabalamat 13y ago
> Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Really? Or do they secretly worry that it isn't? > Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. "No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true." -- PG, http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html
- kybernetikos 13y ago
  While a pithy thing to say with some truth in it, I have experienced people asserting things of the order of 2 + 2 = 5, and given the right situation it can have the potential to make people pretty mad.
  - solistice 13y ago
    Which is why they revoked your math license, we know the story. No, when you say 2 + 2 = 5, you can put it off as "He can't be serious", and then it's off your mind. But if the person keeps asserting it till you can't brush it off anymore, that's when heads tend to roll. It goes against what you believe, and subconsciously, that goes against you as a person.
    - CamperBob2 13y ago
      To paraphrase a famous xkcd strip, "2+2 = 5" isn't funny anymore when it's being stated by a US Congressman.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  I've certainly caught myself doing this. Of course, that means nothing other than that I'm dumb sometimes, which was a known fact.
shin_lao 13y ago
If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide. I agree with this, but I think the real reason is more profound. I think working is a "need" and then became a social value, not the other way around. Creating tools and weapons is what gave us an edge as a species, so it wouldn't be that surprising that the need to work is not just a response to social stimuli (although it probably is aswell).
beat 13y ago
The concept that everyone must have a "job" (that is, work for someone else for a wage) is deep in the psyche of both the ruling class and the majority, so both reinforce it through culture and propaganda. It's no different from how previous societies believed that Jews controlled the banks, or children got sick and died because they were suffocated in their sleep by witches. It's rank idiocy, but it's rank idiocy that almost everyone believes. Ever read The Emperor's New Clothes?
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  Regarding those theories about the Jews... what do you mean, previous societies? Lots of people today actually, really believe that the faults of capitalism come from Jewish finance.

by RyanZAG 13y ago

impendia 13y ago

I was with you until the end. Can you provide an example of an academic sabotaging useful production in order to prove his or her value?

RyanZAG 13y ago
That happens less in academics - I was thinking more of administrative areas in corporations. For example, there are no shortages of stories of administrators in procurement adding in additional required paperwork when more efficient computerized systems make their stamp on documents less required. Actually, this has happened in academics in a way too - consider the requirement of ever lengthening literature reviews in PHD theses. These have come about because of the ease of access to academic documents through digitized journals making libraries and supervisors less valuable. The answer is to increase their value by increasing the amount of work required so that they will still be necessary to wade through it. I'm not sure how much this is sabotage and not just the result of electronic journals making this easier though, which is why the example in the paragraph above is far more relevant.
- impendia 13y ago
  I am a math professor. This phenomenon of lengthening literature reviews doesn't exist in math, nor indeed have I ever seen mathematicians assign pointless busywork to sabotage others, or to inflate our own importance, or for any other reason. Indeed, we hate extraneous paperwork: http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs http://www.mathjobs.org/jobs and are trying to change the library system: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/ Now the intrinsic value of research math as a whole may be debated, especially that of the bottom 90% of researchers (and I would not say I'm in the top 10%). But I have really not observed math professors to be guilty of what you claim. Quite frankly, math itself is hard enough; there's no point in setting additional hoops for students to jump through. It would just make us look foolish, and waste our own time (in addition to that of others). I can't speak for other disciplines.
  - bennyg 13y ago
    Well, pointless busywork was a staple of my high school and under days of math. Once I got to college, I had a professor for Calculus I that said our grade was the four tests + the final or just the final - whichever grade was higher. Having taken Cal in high school, I just showed up for the final and got a B+ (I reversed the damn derivatives of ln/e). That was the best math class I never took. To be fair, my discipline wasn't anything scientific so needing math wasn't in my college curriculum (switched from business to psychology then to art and advertising). I took another class, Discrete Math, from the same teacher my senior year as an elective and absolutely loved it. I never skipped a day. He was a great teacher, and the way his class was set up for grading and not really giving a shit about homework was perfect. If I were to ever teach math later, his format would be how I would do it.
    - ramchip 13y ago
      I think you're interpreting "math professor" as "school teacher", while others are talking about the tenured kind of professors. "Students" here are researchers, who do work potentially ostensibly for society, not just homework for their own education.
    - 13y ago
olefoo 13y ago
Derrida. And I'm only sort of being facetious. Sometime in the 1980's the humanities seemed to collectively decide that 'theory' was more important than the ability to think and communicate clearly. To my mind this has always been the point at which Academia as a class abdicated it's responsibilities to society at large in favor of internal power games and obscurantism.
- impendia 13y ago
  Ah, but this trend was fought by another academic. Alan Sokal, NYU physicist, famously completely bullshitted an essay and got it published by Social Text, a leading postmodern sociology journal. http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/ Scroll down to "Transgressing the Boundaries".
singingfish 13y ago
One peer reviewed paper a year. Regardless of quality. Wittgenstein - a philosopher with a major influence on modern life after he died published two short works in a lifetime.
- seanmcdirmid 13y ago
  Don't publish just to publish, only publish what you believe are great papers and don't bother playing the system.
  - singingfish 13y ago
    So I left academia to become a discordian agent for precisely this reason.
ronaldx 13y ago
I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Even if an academic is not explicitly sabotaging work, it's clear from the amount of time spent on grant applications and general bureaucracy that their useful production is being sabotaged. To meet bureaucratic standards, researchers are often required to teach and educators are often required to publish... it's not effective production.
- lsh 13y ago
  > I assume you are an academic - therefore, I imagine you have heard of cases where a peer reviewer killed an article just because it contradicted the reviewer's own work? Thats why you have the reviewers declare no conflict of interest, have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. I agree with your last two points.
  - ronaldx 13y ago
    > have more than one peer reviewer and an editor who makes the final decision and assigns further peer reviewers if necessary. QED.
ZeroGravitas 13y ago
The continued existence of lecturing, 4 decades or more after it's been shown to be a poor use of time? An article I recently read (written only 30 years ago) attributed a lot of this to the academic's ego enjoying the feel of being an expert, when a printed sheet of paper, written by someone else would have a bigger impact on the students attending the lecture.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  Depends on level. I teach basic maths to adults and teenagers (the latter tend to be the ones at the back of the class in compulsory education). One of my big projects in the first part of the year (before the exams loom over the horizon) is to encourage students to read the textbook themselves. In the rare classes where this becomes accepted, I can use the lessons more like seminars and get the students moved up the problem solving ladder. Given that we have had reliable maths textbooks since around 1215, and printed ones since roughly 1580, the difficulty of achieving this always surprises me.
  - nbouscal 13y ago
    1215? What's wrong with Euclid?
    - keithpeter 13y ago
      Well, ok, I was thinking of arithmetic and algorithmic methods in number. I'll let you have Euclid, although it would be heavy going now to use that as a textbook...
      - nbouscal 13y ago
        It's only been about a century since it was fair to assume that every educated person had read it. I think the fact that we wouldn't be able to use it as a textbook in schools today is a really bad sign.
        13y ago

vanderZwan 13y ago

> The author does make the point that it might also be the people themselves pushing for it, at least. I think the implication is that that is largely a form of Stockholm syndrome. > They'll probably go as far as to sabotage genuine useful production in an effort to prove their value. How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?

RyanZAG 13y ago
"How is this not an extra argument in favour of his claim that there are lots of bullshit jobs out there?" I was not arguing against the idea of bullshit jobs. It's not even possible to argue against that! I was arguing against the reason for having bullshit jobs. He attributes this to some plan by 'the man' to put people in these jobs. I'm arguing it is people putting themselves in these jobs by themselves.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- singingfish 13y ago
  Thus "the man" influences the people to act against their own best interest. Happens all the time.
- JonnieCache 13y ago
  >He attributes this to some plan by 'the man' to put people in these jobs. I'm arguing it is people putting themselves in these jobs by themselves. Those two things are not mutually exclusive. See the last line of the article: "Clearly, the system was never consciously designed. It emerged from almost a century of trial and error." People in power make little daily nudges, those under the yoke follow the path of least resistance, and society wanders towards an equilibrium.
  - RyanZAG 13y ago
    Alright, I understand the argument now, thank you. I still disagree that anybody is trying to make this occur through nudges, a plan or any sort of action - considered or not. I believe it is the result of human kind's base urge to find meaning in themselves and their lives. I'd say that even if people in power were to try and push people into jobs, the people being pushed out of jobs would seek to find any job they could do regardless of how useless it may be. Simply to be doing a job and satisfying themselves. I fully accept it's a plausible argument that people in control are pushing us, though.

cabalamat 13y ago

> Most people in these kind of jobs actually believe that the job is necessary. Really? Or do they secretly worry that it isn't? > Especially in academic and administrative disciplines the very thought of their work not being useful will have most people very defensive and angry. "No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true." -- PG, http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html

kybernetikos 13y ago
While a pithy thing to say with some truth in it, I have experienced people asserting things of the order of 2 + 2 = 5, and given the right situation it can have the potential to make people pretty mad.
- solistice 13y ago
  Which is why they revoked your math license, we know the story. No, when you say 2 + 2 = 5, you can put it off as "He can't be serious", and then it's off your mind. But if the person keeps asserting it till you can't brush it off anymore, that's when heads tend to roll. It goes against what you believe, and subconsciously, that goes against you as a person.
  - CamperBob2 13y ago
    To paraphrase a famous xkcd strip, "2+2 = 5" isn't funny anymore when it's being stated by a US Congressman.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
I've certainly caught myself doing this. Of course, that means nothing other than that I'm dumb sometimes, which was a known fact.

shin_lao 13y ago

If someone has no job their perceived lack of purpose ultimately pushes them into mental illness, drug abuses or even suicide. I agree with this, but I think the real reason is more profound. I think working is a "need" and then became a social value, not the other way around. Creating tools and weapons is what gave us an edge as a species, so it wouldn't be that surprising that the need to work is not just a response to social stimuli (although it probably is aswell).

beat 13y ago

The concept that everyone must have a "job" (that is, work for someone else for a wage) is deep in the psyche of both the ruling class and the majority, so both reinforce it through culture and propaganda. It's no different from how previous societies believed that Jews controlled the banks, or children got sick and died because they were suffocated in their sleep by witches. It's rank idiocy, but it's rank idiocy that almost everyone believes. Ever read The Emperor's New Clothes?

eli_gottlieb 13y ago
Regarding those theories about the Jews... what do you mean, previous societies? Lots of people today actually, really believe that the faults of capitalism come from Jewish finance.