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A coincidental convergence of recent tweets: we are wasting the surplus from technical and economic innovation on mandatory, soul-killing busywork. 1/
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“As income rises, people’s time use does not appear to shift toward activities that are associated with improved affect.” We are so dumb
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2/ It’s tax season in the US, so everyone in the country is forced to spend a couple days doing administrative work we hate and consider idiotic. IRS official estimate is that for individuals this takes 13 hours on average. Including biz, ~$500 bn/year.
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Replying to @literalbanana
Seems to me that all the time saved by mechanization has been taken up with administrative negative externalities. Everyone spends 20 hours/week dealing with dysfunctional institutions that demand form-filling and phone calls with low-level bureaucratic staff
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3/ What makes dealing with health insurance, credit card company errors, retirement plan allocation, and taxes so awful?
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Replying to @literalbanana
I think it’s: (1) they are mostly obviously pointless, (2) they take much longer than they need to, (3) outcomes are unpredictable and out of your control, and (4) they can impose vast arbitrary costs. Everyone is doing taxes now, which is an obvious case.
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4/ Mandatory unpaid administrative busywork is mostly new, enabled by innovations in IT. We could use IT to free ourselves from nonsense; instead, collectively, we’ve used it to enslave ourselves.
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Replying to @Meaningness and @literalbanana
I don’t think my parents spent much time on this stuff, and I don’t remember having to do much before ~ the mid-90s either. Cheap mainframe computers have made it possible for govs & cos to impose huge amounts of pointless work on other people
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5/ We’ve replaced the drudgery of actual work with the drudgery of talking about work (mostly done by machines). Actual work may be rougher on the body, but at least you feel like you’ve done something.
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Replying to @Meaningness and @literalbanana
Trouble is, mechanization made it possible to work at scale, and humans really don't do that very well. The way we work around that is by communicating, which technology has also enabled at scale, so now our work is sorting through our communications to find the effects of work.
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6/ “Talking about work” is now most of the economy.
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The US Economy, broken down into components: 35% VBA Macros 21% Fwd:Fwd:RE:RE:IMPORTANT 13% Dialing into conference lines and getting the user ID wrong 31% Requesting password resets for Outlook
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8/ Collectively we have frittered away the vast surplus generated by systematization. And, we’ve allowed those systems to rust. Basic institutions of modernity are increasingly dysfunctional—and we’re so rich we can get away with neglecting maintenance.
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Replying to @turrible_tao @Meaningness and @literalbanana
My view is that better technology lets institutions keep going past the point where they would have collapsed from internal rot before.
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9/ made a similar point in a long tweet thread a couple days ago:
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17/ This business-normalcy-field is in fact the greatest economic asset that separates developed and developing/third-world economies. It's an operating system that carries 80% of the intelligence of running a thriving, wealthy economy.
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10/ ’s thread is both terrifying—because he points to evidence that systematicity is collapsing overall—and hopeful, because he thinks alternatives are possible.
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19/ My point is this: as and when this field finally starts to collapse, the business world will be at a fork in the road: collapse into developing country state, or reinvent management knowledge on a new assumptions stack.
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Replying to
I’m not convinced systematicity is essential to flourishing constructions of consciously apprehended reality. I’m toying with idea that it is only necessary in built environment (eg, infrastructure and native morlocks have to embody scientific systematicity, but not “civilians”)