This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I haven't worked at very many firms but it has not been my experience that any of the office jobs in my department are perfunctory. Around 200 of us move billions of dollars in investments, originating and underwriting new construction investments, managing those investments over their lifecycle, inspecting them and eventually exiting them. As one of the tech guys that builds and maintains the tools used by the teams doing these various tasks I have a decent idea of what each group does and I just don't really think it's the case that any of the job categories are bullshit. How big each group is does have some politics to it, maybe originations could be run leaner and our tech team could run at either a lower headcount and need to focus on keeping things working or a higher headcount and build more tools in our backlog but ultimately that isn't arbitrary and the marginal employee will add more value even if it's not clear if the marginal value exceeds the marginal cost.
Some of our employees are very much doing email jobs, they interface with outside syndicators who hunt for deals for us to evaluate and then enter the deal information into our system. We even build tooling and imports to make this process smoother but someone actually does need to be the person to ask the syndicators what's going on when things aren't perfectly normal and build up the case for or against an individual investment.
I'm not sure what exactly people are imagining when they think about bullshit jobs, it's always some vagueness or pointing out that a lot of time is spent waiting around rather than hammering nails for the whole shift or whatever. But it actually is genuinely important that when the email comes in you have someone to evaluate what it's saying and pull the right levers in response. The act of coordinating these people is also itself a pretty complicated job and I can attest that automating these tasks is tricky and full of difficult process questions.
There are bullshit jobs, but only in fat companies.
E.g. I know of a bank that has a whole dozen person 'enterprise architecture ' department that's supposed to manage their IT architecture.
They manage, instead, an erroneous, mostly fictional model of the actual IT architecture.
"Bullshit jobs" strikes me as a massive motte and bailey.
There definitely are bullshit jobs. But a very common case of a "bullshit" job is one where the employee does work that's actually essential to a company or to societyy, but doesn't directly produce tangible things, so it feels like his job is useless.
"To a company" does a lot of legwork here. Jobs that are essential to companies but only for the companies to compete for the market and squeeze each other out, with nearly zero sum for society, are the classic example of a bullshit job.
Doesn't squeezing each other out mean that they are becoming leaner and more efficient so giving the same products/services at lower cost to society? Can you give me some examples of the sort of jobs you are talking about? I am not sure I understand.
I specified advertizing because advertizing is explicitly not about leaning down the production to make the products cheaper, but rather at capturing more buyers. For a buyer, it does not matter whether they buy product A or product B if the products are identical but one captures 90% of attentionspace. For companies, it means an order of magnitude in revenue.
Advertising helps the people learn about what kinds of products and services are available. Outright lying is banned, so it may be a net good.
That's only the motte of advertising's value. I am not under the impression that if there was 10, or hell even 100 times less advertising in our world, people would struggle to find information about new products and services.
I agree. It shouldn't be too hard with today's technology to build good product/service comparison sites or recommendation systems for what you will like. The issue is that most people are not going to be spending a lot of time or effort on this, and will miss out on products/services they would have liked. Isn't it better that companies spend time and effort to bring their offerings to you and curate the advertisements you receive?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link