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Comment by nivertech | Hacker News Reader

The Evolution of The Human Workforce:

  hunter-gatherers
   farmers
    slaves
     serfs
      employees on-site
       employees WFH
        contractors
         temps
          freelancers
           China-fication
            Uberization (gig workers)
             Robotization

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no offense, but this is absurdly reductionist.

I guess its apropos for twitter.

What's wrong with being reductionist or using analogies or metaphors?

Analogies are simplified models, all models are wrong, some are really wrong, but some are really useful.

The best professors are using them to explain complex phenomenons in simple terms.

I compressed decades of my history learning into a single tweet here. Most people are unable to be succinct. They're writing 500 pages books about subjects that can be summarized in a tweet.

Please show what's wrong with the way I explaining the evolution of work?

There's a point where all nuance and complexity is lost such that the model becomes useless. IOW this is, besides being incorrect, over-simplified. Your assumptions, especially for the future, are completely unjustified in this format.

As far as its incorrectness, this model implies both that this history of work is a progression, which it's not, and that each stage succeeds the previous, which it does not. Many of these stage overlap, sometimes by millennia.

You clearly invented the second paragraph: I can point out that gig worker and WFH employees coexist presently, and they are on different levels in the "model". I'm imagining that it has to be viewed through a sliding window.

In any case, it's cute. Lighten up a bit.

Sorry, but no. Those kind of pithy meaningless comments are great for reddit or twitter, but I think these forums have the room for better expression of our ideas.

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