This a cousin of David Graeber’s conception of “bullshit jobs” He saw “flunkies” (people who exist to make someone else feel important), “duct tapers” (people who fix problems that shouldn’t exist), and “box tickers” (people who create the appearance that something useful is happening). he framed these as a systemic feature of financialized capitalism, managerial feudalism, and bureaucratic expansion. The system generates these roles, and people fill them.
Artificial Complexity
Everything Is Easy
“Never ask a barber if you need a haircut”
Sophisticated minds adopt simplified lifestyles; simplistic minds are drawn to overly sophisticated lifestyles.
book that should have been an essay
the myth of difficulty
Everything is easy.
To fight artificial complexity, you have to internalize that everything is easy.
Artificial complexity is the art of making simple things hard, so that someone can sell you the solution.
What is artificial complexity? Offering a simple solution is not always in the best interest of a problem solver. If problems would be so easy there won’t be a market for all those savior ‘problem solvers’. There is some kind of incentive to make a problem a bit more complex. Just add that tiny bit of complexity to the recipe so you can sell it as some big magical thing. This misalignment in incentives has a major problem. The world gets crowded with complex solutions to simple problems.
Bureaucracies keep eating the freed workforce "Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy" --Oscar Wilde
The Gordian Knot Never pay for complexity of presentation when all you need is results. Alexander the Megalos was once called to solve the following in the Phrygian city of Gordium (as usual with Greek stories, in modern day Turkey). When he entered Gordium, he found an old wagon, its yoke tied with a multitude of knots, all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to figure out how they were fastened. An oracle had declared that he who would untie the knot would rule all of what was then called “Asia”, that is Asia minor, the Levant, and the Middle East. After wrestling with the knot, the Megalos drew back from the lump of gnarled ropes, then made a proclamation that it didn’t matter for the prophecy how the tangle was to be unraveled. He then drew his sword and, with a single stroke, cut the knot in half. No “successful” academic would ever follow such policy. And no Intellectual Yet Idiot: for instance it took medicine a long time to realize that, when a patient shows up with a headache, it much better to give him aspirin or recommend a good night sleep than do brain surgery, although the latter appears to be more “scientific”.
It took medicine a long time to realize that when a patient shows up with a headache, it is much better to give him aspirin or recommend a good night’s sleep than do brain surgery, although the latter appears to be more “scientific.” But most “consultants” and others paid by the hour are not there yet.
Philosophers making things more complicated then necessary http://paulgraham.com/philosophy.html?viewfullsite=1 Curiously, however, the works they produced continued to attract new readers. Traditional philosophy occupies a kind of singularity in this respect. If you write in an unclear way about big ideas, you produce something that seems tantalizingly attractive to inexperienced but intellectually ambitious students. Till one knows better, it's hard to distinguish something that's hard to understand because the writer was unclear in his own mind from something like a mathematical proof that's hard to understand because the ideas it represents are hard to understand. To someone who hasn't learned the difference, traditional philosophy seems extremely attractive: as hard (and therefore impressive) as math, yet broader in scope. That was what lured me in as a high school student. This singularity is even more singular in having its own defense built in. When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they're nonsense generally keep quiet. There's no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can't distinguish them from placebos.
Universities are artificially complex They are all about signaling Big buildings You see that being dismantled through the Zoom revolution. No longer can they hold upon there building as reputation seeker.
A what you see is what you get mentality
Another business of intervention Chapter 9 Skin in the game There is absolutely no gain for someone in such a position to propose something simple: you are rewarded for perception, not results.
Simplicity From skin in the game (page 29) Now skin in the game brings simplicity- the disarming simplicity of things properly done. People who see complicated solutions do not have an incentive to implement simplified ones. As we saw, a bureacratized system will increase in complication from the interventionism of people who sell complicated solutions be use that’s what their position and training invite them to do. “Things designed by people without skin in the game tend to grow in complication (before their final collapse)” There is absolutely no benefit for a person in such a position to propose something simple; when you are rewarded for participation, not results, you need to show sophistication. Anyone who has submitted a scholarly paper to a journal knows that you usually raise the odds of acceptance by making it more complicated than necessary. Further, there are side effects for problems that grow nonlinearly with such branching-out complications. Worse: “Non-skin in the game people don’t get simplicity’.
If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough"
Zero-sum If you think about the value of a lot of jobs, many are essentially zero-sum. Think about the value of a marketing agency. It is helping a car brand with a perfect value proposition and produces amazing advertisements for the latest car. At the same time, the competitor is doing the exact same thing. People can only spend their money once. So who wins? Similar a promising candidate for the elections is spending millions of dollar trying to win the election, the opposing candidate has to do the same, meanwhile only one can win. Multiple entities are essentially fighting for the same economic pie. These jobs are meant to cancel out the efforts of the opposing parties. Us against them. They are devoted to work that cannot directly increase overall human welfare. It’s zero-sum, only one can win. Let me remind you that you can't see the entire economy as zero-sum. It is the opposite: every voluntary transaction is an exchange benefiting both the buyer (who got what he wanted at a price he was willing to pay) and the seller.
As systems get harder to grasp, new tools appear to “simplify” them… which hide even more layers underneath.