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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23597 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 6, 2025

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You, @sarker and @TitaniumButterfly have all made that point and I will admit it's persuasive. So I will amend my statement: it is possible for one person to produce infinitely more value than another, but only in the degenerate case where one of the people is doing nothing or is a net negative to productivity. I don't think it's possible for that to occur in a normal case (where both people are actually producing value), however.

It seems strange to believe that someone can have zero or negative marginal product, but not arbitrarily small positive marginal product.

In order for it to be possible, all you need is zero, you don't have to have arbitrarily small, because it is certainly possible to produce 1000 times zero.

But it's still nonsense either way because people here are depressingly literal. "Produces 1000 times as much as another employee" implicitly compares an employee to another employee whose production is acceptable. The fact that the words "... whose production is acceptable" are not literally there doesn't change this.

There's some places where people whose output is zero or near zero are quickly rooted out and fired (assembly lines?) but in many fields ZMP workers learn to camouflage themselves and fly under the radar from management's perspective.

Or, if you like, NMP and ZMP workers can have de facto "acceptable production".

They can also just be headcount inflators to make the manager seem more important.

People aren't being overly literal. Including that comparison without making it explicit isn't a reasonable thing to do, because it brings it in without leaving it open for challenge.

Including that comparison without making it explicit isn't a reasonable thing to do

Communication doesn't work that way. Unless something legal is involved, being too literal is a bad thing and ignores what is actually being communicated.

Communication absolutely works that way. What you're missing is it's quite possible that ChickenOverlord and sarker realized the implicit comparison was being made, felt it was wrong, but couldn't challenge it without it being made explicit -- and the best way to make it explicit was to treat it as if it hadn't been made.

In this case, it's even less reasonable because erwgv3g34 in fact DID make explicit the comparison -- he said one person could produce 1000x the value of a "regular man". Then SubstantialFrivolity denied that it was possible for one person to produce 1000x the value of another, leaving out the "regular man", which is denying the specific (that someone could make 1000x the value of a "regular man") by claiming a general rule (that no one can make 1000x the value of anyone else). Basically your interpretation privileges the "this phenomenon does not exist" side.

"arbitrarily small" is really just the hypothesized "this person accomplishes nothing" with different wording. That sort of mathematical language makes sense if you're doing a proof, but we aren't.

Nature abhors a discontinuity. You already agreed that an employee can accomplish nothing. How can it be that producing zero is possible, producing X is possible, but it's impossible to produce x/1000?

Effort, productivity, hours worked, talent - all these things are continuous variables. It's trivially obvious that someone who has little talent, low productivity, and slacks off on the clock can produce arbitrarily less than someone with talent, drive, and focus.

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