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.
Because he uses private framings of concepts that are well understood. So if your first encounter is through Graeber you’re going to have friction with every other understanding. If you’ve read much else you will say “hold on a minute, what’s about …”
Please read my comments here engaging with the ideas in the text and specifically your concern that bullshit jobs are just jobs that don’t feel important.
You have written bunch of comments regarding advertising, single comment criticizing Graeber for using concepts in uncommon way, and one reply to my comment that doesn't really connect with the content of that comment.
Yes, David graeber talks a lot about the idea of bullshit jobs but fails to identify them concretely. As we see in this thread, whenever someone puts up an example, there is actually value he misses because he is unfamiliar with the workplace and business.
The example used here was advertising. And then when we push on the example the fallback is to the subjective - feeling unfilled, definition.
So I am still look for concrete examples of bullshit jobs to justify the original comment that AI will find efficiencies by letting us throw these away.
Got any? You are an expert on the text so I’m hoping you can identify one.
> 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.