Historians will see the administrative bullshitization of every aspect of life as the defining feature of our era. (“How could they have slid into accepting that almost all of almost everyone’s time was wasted on pointless, unpleasant tasks?”)
Another major example is the amount of mainly pointless work parents are now effectively required to do to maintain administrative relationships on behalf of their children. As with most of this stuff, it’s actively harmful as well as pointless. freerangekids.com
My parents complained about paperwork, but the amount they had to do was wildly less than the amount I have to do.
The amount I had to do thirty years ago was wildly less than what I have to do now.
We’ve slid into this mostly without noticing how bad it has gotten.
Our problem is that we have gotten so rich through automation that we can afford to waste nearly all our labor on fake work that produces nothing.
We built systems to take care of things for us, and accepted that they would occasionally demand form-filling, but we lost control.
Burnout results from work you feel you should not have to do [more than: too much work].
Burnout is a moral injury. (I got this framing from @blackgoatpod!)
Our society as a whole is chronically burned out by time-wasting junk we are made to do.
@St_Rev Just about to launch a long rant about this! :)
@St_Rev I was going to do a second whole rant about how the natural numbers are bad actually, contrary to “God made,” because you can multiply them, and you get division that way, and if you have division you get primes, and if you get primes you get number theory, and that is AWFUL,
@St_Rev whereas the reals are wonderful, people are scared because they encapsulate actual Lovecraftian infinities with tentacles, but you get continuity with them, so you can do calculus, and calculus is great, calculus is actually the foundation of THE WHOLE MODERN WORLD,
∑ Fascinating indeed! This is how MOST research works, but I didn’t appreciate quite how true it is in math (or at least current number theory). Lots of tasty morsels in this thread; h/t @DRMacIver
🧪 Science also USED to be like this and isn’t any more: “Mathematicians’ intuition about what's true is mysteriously really good, so publishing false results is quite rare.”
🧪 A few decades ago, most published science was more-or-less true, even though there were often glaring gaps or outright mistakes in experiment. [My informal observation; I don’t have numbers on this.]
Now most published science is more-or-less false, even when done “right.”
It’s so weird reading twentieth century philosophers. They were genuinely panicked about the loss of epistemological foundations. Not as an academic intellectual thing, but as “oh my god what am I personally going to do!”
It’s impossible to fully recover that feeling now.
I just barely grew up in modernity, as it was collapsing around me, and I can sort of remember feeling that panic myself in my 20s, but the shape of it is barely discernible through the fog of time.
I mean, seriously. This is from 1988, at least a decade after modernity was over. It’s practically the TVTropes definition of Wangst.
Meditation and science are two of the things I value most. It’s hard to know when too much “this can be extremely bad” publicity becomes counter-productive. Both can be extremely good.
It’s seems we’re close to the point where every reasonably clueful lay person understands science is in trouble. Then tweeting more of that will be counter-productive.
We’re still a long way from every reasonably clueful lay person understanding that meditation can kill you.
I'm never quite cynical *enough*. The only part of the report I didn't anticipate was their putting machine learning in there. In retrospect: of course they did, how could they have passed up that opportunity?
The UFO report certainly tried to be as vague as possible, in order to allow people to continue believing what they like.
My reading was “Yeah, we haven’t got anything, but if you give us LOTS more money, it’s imaginable that we’ll find something.”