The most people you have reporting to you the more status you have in the organization. What do you make all those people do? Statistics and power points that you can show in meetings with other important people.
Training an activity will probably reduce the error rate in that particular activity, but it doesn't do anything for contract negotiation or whatever the senior banker later does where mistakes can be costly.
Which employee best demonstrates the ability to thoroughly review their own work? Which would you want as a senior reviewing other peoples work before sending/presenting it to clients?
They're not training a specific activity, they're training an attitude towards mistakes in all cases.
This somehow reminds me of the "proof of work" in cryptocurrencies. You are not doing any useful work, you are just showing that you have the power to do it (by burning that power).
I wonder if all the waste from bitcoin mining is just an analogy of similar waste in the corporate world... and ironically, now that human work is no longer involved in the loop, people suddenly care more because the old excuses such as "it builds character" no longer make sense.
This is so true for mate selection in animal kingdom e.g. the gelada baboon male[0] has a bright red spot on its chest and females choose the male with brightest and largest red spot, though it is has no useful biological function. Expending energy to maintain an unnecessary function, hints at superior genes similar to your IB example.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gelada#Physical_description
More seriously, some people think that by a similar mechanism human intelligence has evolved. That in its first stages it was simply a costly (more difficult childbirth because of larger heads, more precious energy burned by brain function) and mostly useless mate-attracting thing. Until at some moment a critical threshold was crossed, and human culture became possible; and then it became dramatically useful.
So yes, there is a more general mechanism of how value gets burned in signaling competitions. Robin Hanson built his entire blog on finding examples in human society: www.overcomingbias.com
But then there is another general mechanism, where the heaps of waste accumulated by the aforementioned processes suddenly become a new niche to exploit for something useful. Such as people who build huge bitcoin-mining machines in Siberia, where the wasted heat warms their homes. So perhaps on another level there is something good to be gained from the corporate bullshit jobs.
Actually, I suspect what it could be... if your job is bullshit, it is less noticeable if you take some time off to browse a web. It could turn out that bullshit jobs are actually a huge factor driving today's culture. -- If you would remove bullshit jobs, for example by reducing the working time to 20 or 15 hours a week, many popular websites (including Hacker News) would lose most of their traffic. Because most people would spend their free afternoons differently, e.g. with their kids, or doing sports. I am not saying it would be worse... just different, maybe in ways we can't predict.
I mean he may think it is, I mean "true" as in that it actually works. I doubt it, at least in this specific case. I see two levels: On the intellectual one and on a deeper brain level, system 1 and 2 in Kahneman speak, I fail to be convinced that flipping through a hundred slides impresses either part of anyone's brain.
I think all explanations given here (or, ever) should be viewed under that light. Just because they are given (as explanation) does not actually make them an explanation. After all, one of people's greatest strengths is coming up with convincing stories for anything! That was one of the problems of coming up with the "scientific method" to overcome that very strong tendency, both the one to create stories, but also the one to believe them.
I think I agree, however.
A hundred slides might not impress anyone, but it means that anyone who wants to attack the presenter has too many targets to pick from. This is especially true if many of the terms in the slides are unfamiliar to the listener.
It goes by too fast. If you have an objection on slide 43, then by the time you get an opportunity to object you're already on slide 76. Maybe you forget all of the details that you were upset about. And the presenter can claim that your specific objection is handle somewhere in the other 99 slides. Somewhere that you're unlikely to fully understand the details and/or terminology.
Nobody likes the guy who gets hung up on one tiny detail and refuses to let it go even though the presenter claims other details resolve the issue. And everybody knows that nobody likes that guy. So everyone is going to be much more reserved about raising objections.
You could alternatively attack the presentation holistically, but this becomes potentially exponentially hard as the length of the presentation increases. Depending on how the details interact.
Sure, he might believe that the clients only want to know that the vendor is able to create all those slides. And this might be because when they present the slides they get the deals. But the reality might be that when they present the slides the result is that the people who would make important objections are intimidated into keeping quite. And that's why the deals are going through.
"Man who catch mistake in power point with chopstick, accomplish anything"
No, this hasn't been going on very long at all...