I heard a radio interview by the author a few days ago. An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new. I see the same behaviour everyday in the hardware industry and passed off as innovation.
My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff.
My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for disruption by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer.
Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.
> An interesting bullshit job he described is the ‘duct taper’ in software engineering. Basically those who take existing software and tape it all together as something new.
Taking existing components and building something new by combining them? What on earth is wrong with that? That's great software engineering if it's possible to do for what you need.
People have no idea how much of their favorite music is built on the same handful of chord progressions. And it's fine because the real magic is in the notes you lay on it, the sound design, the way the different instruments work together.
Other 'bullshit jobs' including making trains and toasters and ladders by taking existing components like nuts and bolts and simply welding them together.
I've always wanted to like David Graeber. Superficially, he seems like a smart, rigorous, heterodox left-wing thinker. But his work is intellectually bankrupt more often than not. Brad DeLong has been doing the hard work of breaking down Graeber's facile arguments and incorrect information for years. Here's one blog post to look at if you're curious. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2014/11/monday-smackdown-in-th...
Brad DeLong is a self-proclaimed troll and a proven serial liar. He for some unfathomable reason decided to go gunning for me despite my never having met him or interacted with him in my life; he started by spewing outright personal slander that had nothing to do with my work (or anything else I could figure out) until I pointed out false personal aspersions were actionable; so then he appears to have decided to go after the book instead. The first time I tried to correct one of the obviously false statements about my work that appeared on his blog, providing irrefutable evidence (he claimed Giovanni Arrighi had never said something I'd attributed to him, I produced a quote from Arrighi saying exactly what I'd claimed), he simply cut the part with the evidence out of my response (he carefully edits the comment section). After that I blocked him on twitter and stopped even looking at his blog. I thought eventually he'd get bored and go away, but bizarrely, he kept it up for literally years. He stalked me online, showing up to attack me whenever my name was mentioned prominently in a public debate, on twitter, he made up dummy eggshell accounts to try to trick me into engaging with him, he'd pretend I was arguing with him, knowing I couldn't see his tweets (people showed them to me later), he'd take tweets I'd made in arguments with others and putting them on his blog pretending they were addressed to him, and otherwise behaved in a totally and frankly rather unhinged fashion. Finally, again, knowing I'd blocked him and had refused to interact with him for years at that point, he created a twitter bot to attack me every day for a month, each tweet ending with "stay away!" - i.e., pretending he wasn't the one stalking me but the other way around.
So the man is irrefutably a liar. You can believe his other claims about my scholarly work if you like.
In fact, most of the "factual errors" he claims to have found are either differences of interpretation, downright misrepresentations of my position, or points so trivial it's somewhat flattering that's the best he managed to find. Example: he once posted an entire blog post just to say my interpretation of the Sumerian principles called "me" was incorrect. When I showed this to one of my best friends, who is a Mesopotamianist, the friend started laughing out loud. Nobody, he said, really knows what the "me"s are. There are a half dozen interpretations. The one I adopted was the most widely accepted one but sure, he said, lots of people have other ones. I think the biggest actual mistake DeLong managed to detect in the 544-odd pages of Debt, despite years of obsessively flailing away, was (iirc) that I got the number of Presidential appointees on the Federal Open Market Committee board wrong. I thought it was one, actually it's three. Yup. Guilty as charged. I got the number wrong. The difference between 1 and 3 had absolutely no bearing on the point I was making in the sentence in question. But DeLong has triumphantly trumpeted this again and again as proof that I'm an ignoramus. In other words, he's still not managed to find anything really substantial wrong with the book.
Frankly, this is a transparent and rather pathetic game. Anyone who goes through a long book on diverse topics will be able to find some things they can hold out and say are "errors." Just to show how easy the game is to play, just in the course of his trolling me, DeLong managed to himself make more glaring errors than he managed to come up with in 544 pages of text. Some were genuinely embarrassing. Let me recall a few offhand:
1. he claimed that Switzerland doesn't have an air force (it does)
2. he claimed that Jeremy Bentham's body is preserved in London School of Economics (everyone who knows anything about Bentham knows his body is in University College London, LSE didn't even exist when he died - and this guy is an economic historian?)
3. he was completely unaware that the bubonic plague struck Medieval Europe more than once - which, again, for a professional economic historian, is incredibly embarrassing. I mean this is very very basic Medieval History 101 stuff. And he was just totally clueless.
I hate to be seeming to blow my own horn, but when there's a crazy person out there using dishonest methods to try to destroy your intellectual reputation, and where there are honest people like you apparently taking the bait, some things have to be pointed out. The best measure of the accuracy and relevance of scholar's work is what other scholars in the field think of it. If you want to measure my standing as a scholar in anthropology, you might want to consider the fact that the most eminent scholar in the field, Marshall Sahlins, co-wrote a book with me. If you want to assess the merit of Debt, you might wish to consider the fact that there have now been two different scholarly conferences specifically dedicated to engaging with the book, attended by Classicists, Assyriologists, Medievalists, Economic Historians, Anthropologists, and other specialists in the fields addressed in the book. Do you think that would have happened if it was a "intellectually bankrupt" work full of obvious mistakes? For instance, Brad DeLong has been an economic historian for decades now. Has anyone even thought to hold conference to discuss the implications of any of DeLong's writings or ideas? Finally, if the argument is that I'm clueless when it comes to economics, I might ask why you think it is that on Tuesday I will be presenting a macroeconomic seminar at the Bank of England.
Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.
> Sorry, but you've been suckered by a liar and a con man. I've honestly tried to just ignore the guy, hoping he'll eventually go away, but since he won't, I guess I have to explain what's really going on.
After reading your response and digging into this a bit further, I retract my previous comment and no longer put any stock in Brad DeLong's intellectual honestly. I apologize for spreading it further.
Thanks much for saying. I mean it's understandable. It wouldn't normally occur to anyone that someone that reputable - professor at Berkeley, former Treasury official - would also be an internet troll. In fact he might be the only person I know of in a position that reputable who behaves the way he does. But he does.
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..."
Yes, DeLong, we all know there was a garbled sentence in the first edition that was instantly removed the moment anyone noticed it. The only reason anyone has heard of it since is because you have reproduced it probably 457 times in a your endless attempts at defamation.
Look, I don't know you, DeLong, and I don't know or particularly care why you have decided to go on a five-year mission to use whatever dishonest means you can think of to destroy another scholar's intellectual reputation (a mission at which you seem to have failed pretty miserably, considering some of the honours I've noted above), but I'm starting to get tired of this. Your first effort at outright personal libel constituted an obvious potential legal case. The endless dishonesty about the book is less clear ground from a civil law perspective, but from the point of view of professional ethics, it's a very clear case of a violation, in fact, short of actual plagiarism, it's about the clearest case of a violation of professional ethics I can imagine. Universities have ethics codes, Berkeley does too, and using calculated dishonesty to try to defame another scholar, with clear and even admitted malicious intent - let alone, doing it perhaps a hundred times - isjust the kind of violation over which it is possible to make a formal complaint. Do you really want me to have you hauled up before your university's ethics board? Because I'm seriously considering it.
(Oh and there's no point in taking down the tweets and blogs containing the most obvious, demonstrable lies because I have screen-shots.)
Why isn't this from Graeber completely dispositive on whether he is a loon or not?
"Apple Computers is a famous example: it was founded by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages..."
Genuinely curious: it seems to me (and to people I talk to) to demonstrate that Graeber not only does not do his homework but does not even know what doing his homework might be...
There was a garbled sentence in the first edition that I didn't catch in proofreading but was instantly removed as soon as anyone noticed it. DeLong has seized on this and endlessly reproduced it, quite possible hundreds of times, pretending it's still in the text.
Why does he do this sort of thing? I honestly have no idea. I've never seen anyone else behave remotely like it.
Is a devops engineer who builds some microservice as a FaaS deployment in AWS just a 'duct taper'? Amazing to see someone say "taking existing things and creating something new is a bullshit job". That's a pretty insane position.
This was striking for me because I immediately thought that all the stuff I've authored for salt, ansible, grunt, etc. is duct tape. And I hated doing that work. I always did.
It's necessary and necessarily complex but a lot of the complexity is because fitting all this stuff together is going to be a mess no matter what. We can argue about better and worse approaches to managing the complexities (micro-services, whatever) but it's still complex and I resent that.
Review of _Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber_; review by Eliane Glaser
> As well as documenting personal misery, this book is a portrait of a society that has forgotten what it is for. Our economies have become “vast engines for producing nonsense”. Utopian ideals have been abandoned on all sides, replaced by praise for “hardworking families”. The rightwing injunction to “get a job!” is mirrored by the leftwing demand for “more jobs!”
Edit: you can read more about the idea here.
https://books.google.ie/books?id=Lsc8DwAAQBAJ&pg=PT75&lpg=PT...
My recollection was off. It’s more about duct taping being about paid work doing maintenance on making innovative code interoperable while many programmers spend their personal time actually building the really interesting stuff.
My gripes about my observations was related to colleagues (trained in heat transfer) responding to calls by clueless managers for disruption by buying a bunch of consumer electronics taping it all together can pretending they redesigned the computer.
Incredibly frustrating when you’re actually trying to do novel research.