Agreed. I think the two theories of bullshit jobs miss how bullshit comes into existence.
Bullshit is actually just the fallout of Goodhart’s Curse.
(note: it’s possible this is what Zvi means by 2 but he’s saying it in a weird way)
You start out wanting something, like to maximize profits. You do everything reasonable in your power to increase profits. You hit a wall and don’t realize it and keep applying optimization. You throw more resources after marginally worse returns until you start actively making things worse by trying to earn more.
One of the consequences of this is bullshit jobs.
Let me give you an example. Jon works for a SaaS startup. His job is to maximize reliability. The product is already achieving 3 9s, but customers want 4 because they have some vague sense that more is better and your competitor is offering 4. Jon knows that going from 3 to 4 will 10x COGS and tells the executives as much, but they really want to close those deals. Everyone knows 3 9s is actually enough for the customers, but they want 4 so Jon has to give it to them because otherwise they can’t close deals.
Now Jon has to spend on bullshit. He quadruples the size of his team and they start building all kinds of things to eek out more reliability. In order to pull this off they make tradeoffs that slow down product development. The company is now able to offer 4 9s and close deals, but suffers deadweight loss from paying for 4 9s when customers only really need 3 (if only customers would understand they would suffer no material loss by living with 3).
This same story plays out in every function across the company. Marketing and sales are full of folks chasing deals that will never pay back their cost of acquisition. HR and legal are full of folks protecting the company against threats that will never materialize. Support is full of reps who help low revenue customers who end up costing the company money to keep on the books. And on and on.
By the time anyone realizes the company has suffered several quarters of losses. They do a layoff, restructure, and refocus on the business that’s actually profitable. Everyone is happy for a while, but then demand more growth, restarting the business cycle.
Bullshit jobs are not mysterious. They are literally just Goodharting.
Thus, we should not expect them to go away thanks to AI unless all jobs go away, we should just expect them to change, though I think not in the way Zvi expects. Bullshit doesn’t exist for its own sake. Bullshit exists due to Goodharting. So bullshit will change to fit the context of where humans are perceived to provide additional value. The bullshit will continue up until some point at which humans are completely unneeded by AI.
So the question is “(when) will AI start to help top management reduce goodharting, by expanding the complexity that managers can use in modeling their business decisions and sub-organization incentives”? If we can IDENTIFY deals that won’t pay back their cost of acquisition, we can stop counting them as growth, and stop doing them.
Whether this collapses or expands the overall level of production (not finance, but actual human satisfaction by delivering stuff and performing services) is very hard to predict.
Additionally, bullshit gets worse the more you try to optimize because you start putting worse optimizers in charge of making decisions. I think this is where the worst bullshit comes from: you hire people who just barely know how to do their jobs, they hire people who they don’t actually need because hiring people is what managers are supposed to do, they then have to find something for them to do. They playact at being productive because that’s what they were hired to do, and the business doesn’t notice for a while because they’re focused on trying to optimize past the point of marginally cost effective returns. This is where the worst bullshit pops up and is the most salient, but it’s all downstream of Goodharting.
Agreed. I think the two theories of bullshit jobs miss how bullshit comes into existence.
Bullshit is actually just the fallout of Goodhart’s Curse.
(note: it’s possible this is what Zvi means by 2 but he’s saying it in a weird way)
You start out wanting something, like to maximize profits. You do everything reasonable in your power to increase profits. You hit a wall and don’t realize it and keep applying optimization. You throw more resources after marginally worse returns until you start actively making things worse by trying to earn more.
One of the consequences of this is bullshit jobs.
Let me give you an example. Jon works for a SaaS startup. His job is to maximize reliability. The product is already achieving 3 9s, but customers want 4 because they have some vague sense that more is better and your competitor is offering 4. Jon knows that going from 3 to 4 will 10x COGS and tells the executives as much, but they really want to close those deals. Everyone knows 3 9s is actually enough for the customers, but they want 4 so Jon has to give it to them because otherwise they can’t close deals.
Now Jon has to spend on bullshit. He quadruples the size of his team and they start building all kinds of things to eek out more reliability. In order to pull this off they make tradeoffs that slow down product development. The company is now able to offer 4 9s and close deals, but suffers deadweight loss from paying for 4 9s when customers only really need 3 (if only customers would understand they would suffer no material loss by living with 3).
This same story plays out in every function across the company. Marketing and sales are full of folks chasing deals that will never pay back their cost of acquisition. HR and legal are full of folks protecting the company against threats that will never materialize. Support is full of reps who help low revenue customers who end up costing the company money to keep on the books. And on and on.
By the time anyone realizes the company has suffered several quarters of losses. They do a layoff, restructure, and refocus on the business that’s actually profitable. Everyone is happy for a while, but then demand more growth, restarting the business cycle.
Bullshit jobs are not mysterious. They are literally just Goodharting.
Thus, we should not expect them to go away thanks to AI unless all jobs go away, we should just expect them to change, though I think not in the way Zvi expects. Bullshit doesn’t exist for its own sake. Bullshit exists due to Goodharting. So bullshit will change to fit the context of where humans are perceived to provide additional value. The bullshit will continue up until some point at which humans are completely unneeded by AI.
So the question is “(when) will AI start to help top management reduce goodharting, by expanding the complexity that managers can use in modeling their business decisions and sub-organization incentives”? If we can IDENTIFY deals that won’t pay back their cost of acquisition, we can stop counting them as growth, and stop doing them.
Whether this collapses or expands the overall level of production (not finance, but actual human satisfaction by delivering stuff and performing services) is very hard to predict.
Additionally, bullshit gets worse the more you try to optimize because you start putting worse optimizers in charge of making decisions. I think this is where the worst bullshit comes from: you hire people who just barely know how to do their jobs, they hire people who they don’t actually need because hiring people is what managers are supposed to do, they then have to find something for them to do. They playact at being productive because that’s what they were hired to do, and the business doesn’t notice for a while because they’re focused on trying to optimize past the point of marginally cost effective returns. This is where the worst bullshit pops up and is the most salient, but it’s all downstream of Goodharting.