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> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

Not a doctor, but a college professor. I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.

It seems that, according to the article, I'm a "loser". As such, "it is clear that I am an idiot". Probably true lol. But a fairly happy idiot.

Just as a note, the article specifically lays out that you are only a loser in a pure economic sense, you have not maximized monetary profit and have chosen to prioritize something else. Not an idiot at all :)

> I love my job, take pride in it, and work hard at it. But I think of myself as working for my students, my collaborators, and my immediate colleagues. I pay little attention to my university as a whole, don't view it especially positively, haven't learned how to work its bureaucracy, and feel little loyalty to the institution in general.

Thank you.

If only all professors had this attitude.

Agreed!

>Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

Making positive contributions to society doesn't change the fact that you're being exploited. It's become increasingly clear that Doctors (at least where I'm from) have low pay early in their careers, unsafe working conditions, and have almost no life outside of work. On top of that they have a stressful job involving interacting with members of the public.

Given the fact that nowadays doctor is mostly a rote memorization educational path, I often wonder if increasing the number of doctors but reducing hours and somewhat pay would be an overall improvement.

Both me and my girlfriend were majors of our promotions and had more than enough in the way of academic achievement to become doctors, but the insane workload was a very effective deterrent.

This is purely anecdotal but, please, no more influx of antibiotic and steroid dispensing doctors that don't know anything else. I'm so tired of doctors that give me the distinct impression they're the equivalent of a tier 1 desktop support rep for the human body.

Or if we must have them, please keep the confined to the minute clinics at the drug store and bar them from billing themselves as real GPs.

Don't blame the doctors, the entire medical establishment from pre-med undergrad to the hospital has been captured by the insurance companies with the backing of federal regulation. They've removed any doctor/patient relationship with a simple heuristic that (surprise!) always results in some pharmaceutical intervention.

Australia has tried to get some of the way there with Nurse Practitioners.

I'm in Tasmania, so here's the a PDF from the Tasmanian Department of Health Services explaining what a Nurse Practitioner can do, including prescribing some medication and interpreting diagnostic test

https://www.dhhs.tas.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/6408...

This is partly because in Australia, regular nurses can do virtually nothing on their own initiative.

A friend of mine was an ICU nurse in Canada before moving to Australia. It was a long and painful process to get qualified again, and when she did, she found out she had been demoted from being able to meaningfully improve patient care (eg the prescriptions and diagnoses you mention) to a robot carrying out orders.

I intentional refrained from ranting about the medical profession’s protectionism in Australia.

Thank you for putting this so eloquently.

I have been down this cycle myself becoming almost nihilistic and seeing it all as a pointless game of machiavelian diplomacy.

These days I'm much more optimistic, and doing much better overall but in hindsight your explanation is exactly what I went through at my worst.

Both scenarios can be true, you can be "clueless" and optimistic at the same time. Even if the Gervais Principle is real, it doesn't mean you need to be nihilistic. If your work is giving you meaning and joy, does it matter if sociopaths are benefiting more than you? It's kind of like being resentful of professional athletes, it simply wasn't in the cards... Saying this as a definite "loser" btw.

An alt-side is never ending pleasure of closing laptop at the bell .. in anticipation of bbq, wine, family, and friends. Knowing fully well it’s ephemeral. IMO there is no doom and gloom in this view.

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

In fiction?

Back on the original topic, Erik Dietrich's "Developer Hegemony" has a less extreme view of the corporation; worth reading IMO.

+1 For Dietrich's version of it. He renames sociopaths, clueless, and losers to opportunists, idealists, and pragmatists, and in general tones the theory down a bit, and I think the result is something that is both more palatable and more reflective of reality.

The opportunists see the corporate world for what it is and do what is best for their careers, the idealists believe in the shared corporate myths and put in the hours to uphold the values they're taught, and the pragmatists value being home for dinner more than climbing the ladder. It describes the broken system without implying all the people in it are broken, and since the focus is really on the incentive systems that create this situation I think that's a better take.

Is the corporate world "what it is" without the actions of these categories of employees? You may have the causation arrow pointing the wrong way, because to me, being more "reflective of reality," it's better worded as, "the corporate world is composed of the decisions, actions, and personalities of (sociopaths|opportunists), (the clueless|idealists), (losers|pragmatists)." Your choice of terminology is only a value judgement on each of the categories, but it's all the same people, working in a company, and making it a living thing. The specific words don't change the meaning of the principles being discussed.

I don't think the subjects of the Gervais categories are broken people so much as dangerous ones, careerwise (and possibly mental healthwise).

The words absolutely do change the meaning of the principles. The idea that actual literal sociopaths are common in corporations is much more contentious than opportunists being common. Losers implies that going home at 5pm because you have other things going on in your life is morally wrong, in a way that pragmatists doesn't. Clueless implies that believing in the corporation is wrong, in a way that idealists doesn't.

The existence of "actual literal sociopaths" does not depend on the words used to describe them. If you use words other than "actual literal sociopath" to describe the actual literal sociopathic acts of a person, that doesn't mean they aren't an actual literal sociopath. I mean, if I understand your stance here, you're arguing for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to be true, which experimentation tells us is not[1]. See also: the "euphemism treadmill."[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

2. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/euphemism_treadmill

I'm arguing that if you look at the actions of the group in question, "opportunist" is a better description of what they do than "sociopath". If you use the word "sociopath" then you've changed the meaning of the principle under discussion, because the language suggests "sociopaths" are real Antisocial Personality Disorder sociopaths, when that is observably not the case.

The research on linguistic relativity focuses on sensory perceptions that differ across languages. It's not applicable to the decision to claim that most of the managerial structure have a diagnosable mental illness when they clearly don't, by an English speaker in an essay read by other English speakers.

I have been 'studying' Dilbert since the first time I laid eyes on it/him 20 years ago.

This cartoon prepares you for life in large-corp environments. I've seen so many (real life) scenarios play out exactly as some of Dilbert's (and the other chars) stories.

Edit: for clarity, the article does refer to "The Dilbert Principle".

> although it does reflect part of reality, the Gervais Principle is overly cynical in my opinion

Of course it is. That's what comedians do: they take something with enough basis in reality that people will recognise and identify with it, and then caricature and exaggerate it to extremes.

Forgive me for being blunt :

> leaves no room for honest positive and meaningful work, and at risk of pointing out the obvious, there's a lot of meaningful work to be done.

There's plenty of meaningful work to be done, but most of it doesn't generate profit, so it doesn't get done. That which does get done, often pays poverty wages. Raising good citizens, caring for the elderly, educating our children, producing high quality nutritious food, cleaning our streets of litter - all meaningful and vital, all pay buttons. Many more jobs pay so little, we dont even bother doing in the West anymore and give those jobs to other countries.

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

What percentage of the workers Doctors ? Bonus : why isn't everyone a doctor ?

> Adopting this philosophy is dooming oneself to a neverending feeling of being exploited and the argument that this is what is actually happening in totality is all philosophical opinion so why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?

Pretending you are happy and contributing to society while you are required to piss in a bottle is to concede all human dignity. To pretend that giving up 70 hours a week crunching numbers so a Corporation pays less tax that is to sell your soul and work to the detriment of society. To think anything else, means it's already too late for you.

tldr : meaningful jobs exist, but are rare as rocking horse shit and great swathes of us never get to experience meaningful jobs, because our culture needs obedient workers to make profits ahead of anything else.

He does mention meaningful work, that's done by the clueless. But to the author it's a sidenote that he doesn't bother explaining. It's this bit where he briefly touched on it:

the standard promotion/development path is primarily designed to maneuver the Clueless into position wherever they are needed

So a transmogrification of The Peter Principle but in more words?

If by transmogrify you mean changing the intent, along with every noun and verb in the original, then maybe.

However it feels like a profoundly different claim to Dr Peter's.

I agree with your analysis here, although from what I understand he argues that these phenomena have to do with working for big companies. The book “developer hegemony” makes a similar argument and argues that the “way out is to have lots of small software consulting shops.

> Where does that leave people like doctors who earnestly help their patients?

I'm sure they'll BOTH figure it out.

>why would I adopt a philosophy that is so personally ruinous, demoralizing, and demotivating?

But why not be discontent with your reality? That's typically a sign to enact change and willingfully settling is an acceptance of how things are.

I think the problem lies in the way that capitalism treats companies and labour. Im not proposing we abolish capitalism but selling our time at a loss* to our employer doesn't "feel" good. Maybe you feel rewarded by your work and maybe you don't but you shouldn't destroy that feeling for the sake of complacency.

*Loss is possibly controversial, but an employer does seek to get more value out of an employee than they pay them.