“My best guess is that they are pretty equally “motivated” to do work whether it seems important to an ultimate goal or not?”
I’m kinda like this, I think. Getting a thing done is satisfying, and while obviously I’d rather do meaningful work, getting meaningless work done feels good too. I don’t get bored easily.
And of course there are those days when I have to work 8 or 9 hours but don’t feel capable of doing really challenging work, and I’m glad relatively meaningless tasks are there for those days.
I think getting bored is important—it’s a natural warning that you’re wasting your time. Of course, other people will tend to suppress it, since it implies _your_ time, as opposed to theirs, is important.
There should be some kind of game which tracks your status and, as a function of it, other characters decide whether to respect you, reason with you, coöperate with you and be honest with you, or to bully you, mock you, gaslight you, bullshit you and defect on you. I mean, some besides real life.
> There’s a real way to do anything, and a fake way; we need to make sure we’re doing the real version.
Coöperate response – Of course.
Defect response – There’s no such thing as the truth [except when _I_ am interested in getting something done].
Optional embellishment – Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If you believe in an objective truth [same exception], you’re a fascist or mentally ill.
> It is our job to do stuff that’s better than the societal mainstream.
CR – Of course.
DR – Oh, so you think you’re better than everyone else?
OE – Go tell ’em to their faces!
Another DR – Oh, how funny, a loser who thinks it’s their job to actually do their job. I’ll be extra lazy and obnoxious, letting them feel morally obligated to pull all the weight I’m dumping on them, act like I’m doing them a favor and use my advanced social skills to get everyone else to sympathize with me and to be mean to them, too.
> Pointless busywork is bad.
CR – Of course.
DR – Pointless busywork is good for you. [Note it says _you_, not _me_.] It teaches you discipline / shows restraint / keeps you from doing things I don’t like.
> If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally _everyone_ will like it.
CR – Of course not.
DR – You’re so full of yourself! If you want my coöperation, first you have to show me you’ve gotten A’s approval, and B’s, and C’s.
OE – Go tell ’em all to their faces how incompetent you think they are!
> It’s important to have an honorable purpose; commercial purposes can be honorable.
CR – Of course.
DR – An honorable commercial purpose is a contradiction in terms. The honorable thing to do is to destroy the economy till we’re back to the Paleolithic and this discussion is forgotten.
Another DR – The honorable thing to do is to stay loyal to our tribe / our investors no matter what.
> Remember to include the outsiders (and all young people start out as outsiders).
CR – Yeah!
DR – What have they done to earn inclusion? We were here first.
Compromise – Let’s agree on how much they should be hazed before we give them a chance.
> What am I even saying?
CR – _(Keeps reading.)_
DR – Look: this rando doesn’t even know what they’re saying! Don’t listen to them!
OE – <Insert some gratuitous mental-health diagnosis here.>
Yes!! I work in improving efficiency (amongst other things) in my company, which I consider “a good thing”. But many people don’t share that, even when they can see it is better to do things in a new way, they push back. It seems many people would do anything to avoid the pain of learning something new, They crave the blissful certainty of pointless and repetitive busywork. Maybe this tendency, hard for people who enjoy learning and thinking to understand, is a general feature of many humans. But it doesn’t allow the world to improve, and so it must be a moral imperative for those who can imagine how things can be better, to try to make them better.
I'm in a similar boat where I assume many of these things but don't do a good job of articulating them. Society could work a lot better if more people started from these principles. Thanks for writing this. Well done!
I love this post. So much that resonates with what I see in the world around me. And a great framework for explaining why some people/ organisations/ ecosystems are just not right.
Maybe most people don't experience things in life as vectors, only scalars. All is movement, in random directions, self cancelling. Like a soap opera, constant movement but no change. In which case, the whole concept of improvement makes no sense.
I will give mild pushback to 3 and say that while busywork is indeed bad, hyper-optimizing the system to where there's no slack and everyones either working at full capacity on something important or not is also bad. Reality is messy and alignment and figuring things out are part of being effective, and that tends be inherently inefficient from a certain perspective. Also how much time should be spent aligning vs doing is an open question and is highly context dependent. So while some things are obviously busywork, the utility of many efforts isn't always obvious.
yeah, I've heard of companies where it actually makes sense that they have staff with nothing to do most days (because they need to have enough people available on short notice in emergencies.)
And yeah, how much "move fast and break things" is appropriate depends on the context and how dangerous it actually is when you "break things." I don't eg fault the commercial aircraft industry for being cautious and safety-oriented!
I do still think it's always important to ask "is this an example of smart or stupid overcapacity/procedure/etc?"
Re. "4. If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally everyone will like it."
What is more-commonly believed is the claim made by Plato, St. Augustine, Rousseau, and all their intellectual descendants: "If we're doing something worthwhile, literally everyone who isn't stupid or evil will like it."
What's more, Hegel, Marx, and a whole lot of the most-influential 20th century philosophers extended that claim to say that most individuals don't have enough agency to like something on their own; they can (and should!) only express the preferences of their class or race.
Some phenomenologists and social constructivists extended this even further, to say that these aren't just /preferences/; they are in a certain sense The Good, which is different for each class or race because each class or race has a different truth. I think this is the paradigm of highest status among Western intellectuals today.
My problem with most "you can do things" discourse is not that I believe the opposite
I'm just worried it adds up to normality
Like, nobody is saying "do stuff even when you're pretty sure it will be fruitless, costly and annoying", it's more "consider the pros and cons and if it's +EV, do it" or something
But pusillanimous, arguably un-agentic little me is already doing that!
And even if I resolve to blindly follow the advice of the "do things" crowd, the only way I do that is to slightly bias my naive estimates in the "doing things" direction
Which is hard, partly because that direction is often difficult to identify, and partly because I can't always tell which actions I would naively consider "almost worth it"
look, I had the same reaction to "you can just do things" discourse -- "I guess I don't do anything especially bold or impressive, am *I* a low agency NPC?" -- until I met people who were way *less* oriented towards "consider your goals then try to achieve them" than me, and I was like "oh wow this discourse was a complaint about a Type of Guy who is indeed frustrating!"
I think this generalizes; eg a lot of feminist discourse is complaints about a Type of Guy who really does treat women terribly (eg groping strangers), and you will find the discourse bizarre and frustrating if your own social circle does not contain this Type of Guy.
A lot of generalized rants that feel like they're attacks on "people like you" are actually complaints about a more narrowly specific behavior pattern that you'd find irritating too if you encountered it IRL.
“My best guess is that they are pretty equally “motivated” to do work whether it seems important to an ultimate goal or not?”
I’m kinda like this, I think. Getting a thing done is satisfying, and while obviously I’d rather do meaningful work, getting meaningless work done feels good too. I don’t get bored easily.
And of course there are those days when I have to work 8 or 9 hours but don’t feel capable of doing really challenging work, and I’m glad relatively meaningless tasks are there for those days.
I think getting bored is important—it’s a natural warning that you’re wasting your time. Of course, other people will tend to suppress it, since it implies _your_ time, as opposed to theirs, is important.
There should be some kind of game which tracks your status and, as a function of it, other characters decide whether to respect you, reason with you, coöperate with you and be honest with you, or to bully you, mock you, gaslight you, bullshit you and defect on you. I mean, some besides real life.
> There’s a real way to do anything, and a fake way; we need to make sure we’re doing the real version.
Coöperate response – Of course.
Defect response – There’s no such thing as the truth [except when _I_ am interested in getting something done].
Optional embellishment – Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. If you believe in an objective truth [same exception], you’re a fascist or mentally ill.
> It is our job to do stuff that’s better than the societal mainstream.
CR – Of course.
DR – Oh, so you think you’re better than everyone else?
OE – Go tell ’em to their faces!
Another DR – Oh, how funny, a loser who thinks it’s their job to actually do their job. I’ll be extra lazy and obnoxious, letting them feel morally obligated to pull all the weight I’m dumping on them, act like I’m doing them a favor and use my advanced social skills to get everyone else to sympathize with me and to be mean to them, too.
> Pointless busywork is bad.
CR – Of course.
DR – Pointless busywork is good for you. [Note it says _you_, not _me_.] It teaches you discipline / shows restraint / keeps you from doing things I don’t like.
> If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally _everyone_ will like it.
CR – Of course not.
DR – You’re so full of yourself! If you want my coöperation, first you have to show me you’ve gotten A’s approval, and B’s, and C’s.
OE – Go tell ’em all to their faces how incompetent you think they are!
> It’s important to have an honorable purpose; commercial purposes can be honorable.
CR – Of course.
DR – An honorable commercial purpose is a contradiction in terms. The honorable thing to do is to destroy the economy till we’re back to the Paleolithic and this discussion is forgotten.
Another DR – The honorable thing to do is to stay loyal to our tribe / our investors no matter what.
> Remember to include the outsiders (and all young people start out as outsiders).
CR – Yeah!
DR – What have they done to earn inclusion? We were here first.
Compromise – Let’s agree on how much they should be hazed before we give them a chance.
> What am I even saying?
CR – _(Keeps reading.)_
DR – Look: this rando doesn’t even know what they’re saying! Don’t listen to them!
OE – <Insert some gratuitous mental-health diagnosis here.>
Reading this made me feel like I don't need to start a blog anymore... You've said pretty much everything I'd like to rant about. Thanks!
Yes!! I work in improving efficiency (amongst other things) in my company, which I consider “a good thing”. But many people don’t share that, even when they can see it is better to do things in a new way, they push back. It seems many people would do anything to avoid the pain of learning something new, They crave the blissful certainty of pointless and repetitive busywork. Maybe this tendency, hard for people who enjoy learning and thinking to understand, is a general feature of many humans. But it doesn’t allow the world to improve, and so it must be a moral imperative for those who can imagine how things can be better, to try to make them better.
I'm in a similar boat where I assume many of these things but don't do a good job of articulating them. Society could work a lot better if more people started from these principles. Thanks for writing this. Well done!
I love this post. So much that resonates with what I see in the world around me. And a great framework for explaining why some people/ organisations/ ecosystems are just not right.
Maybe most people don't experience things in life as vectors, only scalars. All is movement, in random directions, self cancelling. Like a soap opera, constant movement but no change. In which case, the whole concept of improvement makes no sense.
I will give mild pushback to 3 and say that while busywork is indeed bad, hyper-optimizing the system to where there's no slack and everyones either working at full capacity on something important or not is also bad. Reality is messy and alignment and figuring things out are part of being effective, and that tends be inherently inefficient from a certain perspective. Also how much time should be spent aligning vs doing is an open question and is highly context dependent. So while some things are obviously busywork, the utility of many efforts isn't always obvious.
yeah, I've heard of companies where it actually makes sense that they have staff with nothing to do most days (because they need to have enough people available on short notice in emergencies.)
And yeah, how much "move fast and break things" is appropriate depends on the context and how dangerous it actually is when you "break things." I don't eg fault the commercial aircraft industry for being cautious and safety-oriented!
I do still think it's always important to ask "is this an example of smart or stupid overcapacity/procedure/etc?"
Re. "4. If we’re doing something worthwhile, not literally everyone will like it."
What is more-commonly believed is the claim made by Plato, St. Augustine, Rousseau, and all their intellectual descendants: "If we're doing something worthwhile, literally everyone who isn't stupid or evil will like it."
What's more, Hegel, Marx, and a whole lot of the most-influential 20th century philosophers extended that claim to say that most individuals don't have enough agency to like something on their own; they can (and should!) only express the preferences of their class or race.
Some phenomenologists and social constructivists extended this even further, to say that these aren't just /preferences/; they are in a certain sense The Good, which is different for each class or race because each class or race has a different truth. I think this is the paradigm of highest status among Western intellectuals today.
My problem with most "you can do things" discourse is not that I believe the opposite
I'm just worried it adds up to normality
Like, nobody is saying "do stuff even when you're pretty sure it will be fruitless, costly and annoying", it's more "consider the pros and cons and if it's +EV, do it" or something
But pusillanimous, arguably un-agentic little me is already doing that!
And even if I resolve to blindly follow the advice of the "do things" crowd, the only way I do that is to slightly bias my naive estimates in the "doing things" direction
Which is hard, partly because that direction is often difficult to identify, and partly because I can't always tell which actions I would naively consider "almost worth it"
look, I had the same reaction to "you can just do things" discourse -- "I guess I don't do anything especially bold or impressive, am *I* a low agency NPC?" -- until I met people who were way *less* oriented towards "consider your goals then try to achieve them" than me, and I was like "oh wow this discourse was a complaint about a Type of Guy who is indeed frustrating!"
I think this generalizes; eg a lot of feminist discourse is complaints about a Type of Guy who really does treat women terribly (eg groping strangers), and you will find the discourse bizarre and frustrating if your own social circle does not contain this Type of Guy.
A lot of generalized rants that feel like they're attacks on "people like you" are actually complaints about a more narrowly specific behavior pattern that you'd find irritating too if you encountered it IRL.
I see, you're mainly talking about outliers then
To be clear I don't feel attacked, I just feel like I haven't done much in my life so far
I get most of this but I do enjoy a nice bit of pointless busywork. The repetition is soothing!
I love every word of this. I couldn’t agree more on those specific values and the disconnect that not everyone is on the same page.