Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty.
An odd tendency I’ve noticed about Graeber is that the more someone apparently dislikes his work, the more it will seem like they’re talking about totally different books from the ones I read.
> And that book sort of vaguely hints around at all these jobs that are surely bullshit but won’t identify them concretely.
See what I mean? We push on where these fake jobs are and you fallback to a subjective internal definition we can’t inspect.
And now let me remind you of the context. If the real definition of bullshit isn’t economic slack, but internal dissatisfaction then this comment would be false:
> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.
wolvesechoes|12 days ago
bubblewand|11 days ago
groundzeros2015|11 days ago
See what I mean? We push on where these fake jobs are and you fallback to a subjective internal definition we can’t inspect.
And now let me remind you of the context. If the real definition of bullshit isn’t economic slack, but internal dissatisfaction then this comment would be false:
> What if LLMs are optimizing the average office worker's productivity but the work itself simply has no discernable economic value? This is argued at length in Grebber's Bullshit Jobs essay and book.