Hacker News Reader

What always surprises me about articles like this, and the discussions they produce, is how so many engineers and builders-of-things discard the evidence of their years of experience and see the world through the eyes of people who've never built a complex system.

For instance, a couple of years ago I inherited a convoluted, needlessly ornate and grotesque application that could clearly be rewritten and even extended in one-fifth the LOC it currently occupied. When I finally got greenlit to perform the surgery the usual thing happened, which is that I realized, after much painful effort, that the system had become grotesque little by little, in much the same way that good people turn bad: by taking steps that seem appropriate at the time to what the situation demands. My solution, in the end, was somewhat less grotesque than the original, and certainly more capable, and yet it was not the glittering jewel that I had imagined beforehand, and the path to it was littered with bodies. I assume many people on this site have had a similar experience.

So with regard to repugnant systems (giant commerical banks) and jobs (middle management) or jobs and systems that are repugnant due to the types and numbers of people who seem to be filling them (lawyers, politicians) and wrt established habits and customs and traditions -- to all of it I now perceive that these jobs and systems are the survivors of a mighty selection pressure, and the whole creaky affair so vastly outperformed the alternatives that it has taken over the world to the extent that now it seems as if nothing else is possible.

Something else is possible, of course; but the costs of these theoretically more benign and humane alternatives are impossible to envision. And I'm positive that the whole thing could not be redone, elegantly, in one-fifth the code.

And that is when stops being an anarchist: when one is mature enough to realise that there are reasons, if not excuses, for the present situation (no matter how odd it may be), and mature enough to realise that changing the present situation will necessarily involve its own compromises, pains and oddities.

It's the difference between Paine and Burke.

all share an element of arms-race components to them

Sometimes arms races (in the figurative sense) can lead to better performance! This week's New Yorker has a splendid example of this in James Surowiecki's "Better All the Time How the 'performance revolution' came to athletics—and beyond" (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/10/better-time). It's not easy to excerpt, but he points out that athletes used to barely train at all and now they do it all the time; musicians are better; elite students are "better" in many respects; manufacturing has improved. As he writes:

as the sports columnist Mark Montieth wrote after reviewing a host of games from the nineteen-fifties and sixties, “The difference in skills and athleticism between eras is remarkable. Most players, even the stars, couldn’t dribble well with their off-hand. Compared to today’s athletes, they often appear to be enacting a slow-motion replay.”

What we’re seeing is, in part, the mainstreaming of excellent habits. In the late nineteen-fifties, Raymond Berry, the great wide receiver for the Baltimore Colts, was famous for his attention to detail and his obsessive approach to the game: he took copious notes, he ate well, he studied film of his opponents, he simulated entire games by himself, and so on. But, as the journalist Mark Bowden observed, Berry was considered an oddball.

The whole article is wroth reading.

>To me, the tell that he defined "bullshit" as "jobs I don't like or understand" is that he lumped in actuaries with telemarketers -- does he think providing insurance has no value?

Quite a lot of it doesn't, and the less value it creates the more profitable it tends to be. Take PPI for instance.

While some of it has value, it swallows up a LOT more of our GDP than it should (much like the rest of the FIRE sector) and creates a multitude of bullshit jobs.

>Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2].

I bet those corporate lawyers earn more in aggregate.

>Ultimately, it seems like Graeber wants to return to a butcher-and-baker economy, where all our jobs are focused on directly providing services to consumers.

I don't think so. He is just highlighting the fact that the almighty market is not so efficient and has a lot of us doing a lot of pointless bullshit a lot of the time for no reason.

i.e. we're developing the worst excesses of the Soviet Union.

> There are more musicians employed in this country than there are people in biglaw.

Is "number of lawyers employed at the 100 largest law firms" a good proxy for the number of corporate law specialists? I don't know that much about corporate lawyers, but it seems like a lot of them might be employed by corporations or smaller law firms.

Since there are somewhere around 1 million lawyers in the US [3], it seems reasonable to me that at least %17 of them would be corporate law specialists, making the original assertion true.

[3] http://www.law.harvard.edu/programs/plp/pages/statistics.php...

> Most of the jobs he categorizes as "bullshit" all share an element of arms-race components to them. i.e. if my competitor has really good telemarketers/lobbyists/corporate lawyers, I'd better have one too -- _or they'll beat me_. How is it that that reflects some sort of keep-the-masses-down 1% malfeasance?

The way I understand it, these pointless 'arms-race' jobs are jobs tend to also produce little to no value to society. They may produce value for their bosses in the form of making the boss look good to the uber-bosses, or they may provide value to their company as a means of maintaining competitive advantage in the market place.

These is less a direct function of the skills of the workers than a function of the roles in which those workers are placed. Some corporate lawyers clearly do provide non 'arms-race' value, some IT professionals only provide 'arms-race' value.

I don't think the existence of these jobs is a direct effort to "keep-the-masses-down", but it has the effect of mostly wasting worker's time in roles where the main value is how they help maintain the wealth of that 1%.

Of course, this an all or nothing proposition. Many jobs produce some mix of actual value vs 'arms-race' value. Separating these is not necessarily straight forward.

> Similarly he writes: "What does it say about our society that it seems to generate an extremely limited demand for talented poet-musicians, but an apparently infinite demand for specialists in corporate law?" There are more musicians employed in this country [1] than there are people in biglaw [2]

I... don't think those statistics show what you want them to show. Does that number of "musicians" only include those for whom it is their only/main source of income? I also don't see any breakdown in those statistics on lawyers for "area of specialization" but based on where they are employed. I don't know if Graeber's specific claim is true, but there do appear to be 5-10 times more lawyers than musicians in our country.