Why we make up jobs out of thin air (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Why we make up jobs out of thin air (2012)

lemire.me

16 pointsbthallplz8 comments

> So, who has a “make belief” job and who has a real job? Here is a hardship test: if you stopped doing your work, and nobody replaced you, how much suffering would that cause?

By this definition any form of research or speculative R&D is a "make belief" job. Despite the dramatic advances made by people in those occupations on any given day if they went home no additional suffering would result.

The premise of this piece suffers from immediacy bias and is in my opinion ridiculous.

I disagree. If people researching how to industrialise antibiotic production had all gone home, there would have been an enormous amount of extra suffering.

If the people who came up with "Monday" as the new name for PricewaterhouseCoopers had all gone home, no extra suffering.

Only with hindsight can you say that. Up until the day the discovery was made they’ve contributed nothing of use to the suffering. Some go their whole careers chasing dead ends and never discover anything.

Besides the article explicitly includes academia as a made up job.

I disagree.

Firstly, I disagree with the specifics of your counter; I disagree that industrialising antibiotic production is some kind of academic exercise. That's just a specific, though; I'm inferring that's what you're saying, from your comment on academia. Maybe that's not what you're saying?

My larger disagreement; I think the article isn't about the individuals. It's about the work. The article asks "if you stopped doing your work, and nobody replaced you, how much suffering would that cause?" If nobody industrialised antibiotic production, the additional suffering is huge. It's not about deciding that one person went down a research dead-end and therefore that job is a made-up job. I don't need hindsight to identify that industrialising antibiotic production is a less made-up job than renaming PwC "Monday".

Your rebuttal is a much stronger argument than what was in the linked article. Unfortunately I could only reply to what was written there.

Of course I’ve seen poor branding bring down companies so I don’t consider it a made up job. Certainly if the company goes under due to lack of customers all the employees will suffer.

Will their suffering be balanced out by the reduction in suffering their competitors experience? Should we value jobs that simply move suffering around?

And if the remaining competitor becomes a monopoly and price gauges the entire market? Would not suffering increase in absolute terms?

In a highly interconnected world it’s not sufficient to show a job doesn’t produce direct value to prove it is pointless.

I suspect that desire for prestige is less of a factor in why jobs are created and kept than the article suggests, but I'm quite willing to accept that it may be a significant factor — a notion that I hadn't considered before (naievely, perhaps). Love the quip about governments being inefficient financially but efficient in terms of providing prestige.

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