This. The OP is effectively a re-wording of the Gervais principal - same idea with slightly less words in blog form. It's a bit ingenious to claim a whole new theory.
I think it boils down to having enough free time and money to care about dumb things. Your basic needs are covered, so you have spare energy for various causes and weird hobbies.
I suspect that baby talk is just how you answer to someone you can't relate to. I answer just the same when someone tells me about sports, or their racing horses. It's just what you default to when there's a cultural disconnect, but the desire to show respect.
This is a really well-written article. I am not sure if this spin on the cited references is novel but it is the first I am seeing any of it. I am jarred how well it describes the "middle" of society, including how many of my own behaviors/beliefs are captured.
One thing I am having trouble with is the connection between Michael and the "educated" ladder, even though a big portion of the article is dedicated to that. I will have to mull on it more before I can convincingly respond to "So you think Michael Scott represents the PhDs of the world?"
The metaphor definitely breaks in the middle ladder. Why not just do labor, middle management, owners like in the first part of the piece? I get that everyone hates NYT opinion writers but that’s like 20 people - not a social class.
Also do software engineers fall into upper middle class or high skilled labor? I think they’re in both. Or maybe I just don’t have any interactions with the middle ladder in real life and I’m clueless
It doesn't mean "Just NYT opinion writers". It means all the people who think they're leading culture around on a leash by pushing their articles in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Mother Jones etc. and so forth.
And that very much is a social class, or more accurately, its a specific subset of a social class. Another subset of the same social class are book editors at the major publishing houses. Look around on LinkedIn. You'll find that easily 3 in 4 of them are female, went to a small-to-medium-sized liberal arts college, etc. They literally gatekeep both fiction and non-fiction, and its why self-publishing and alternative publishing outlets are on the rise.
There are likely other subsets of this same social class that I'm unfamiliar with, but I don't generally give it much thought, because I don't care and I don't have to care.
EDIT: Sorry, I meant 3 out of 4 of them are female, not 1-in-4.
To an uncritical thinker, it might definitely seem that way.
To address the "liberal arts college" aspect, I mean specifically they're insulated from a lot of the reality of the rest of the world. I specifically mean the Dartmouths, Browns, etc. of the educational world.
I mean people for whom a $200,000 education to have a $35,000 - $115,000 a year job is perfectly reasonable, because after all, they're not the ones paying for it in any capacity. Their family can easily foot the bill, and if they can't, then they end up married to a junior IB / exec type who can easily afford to pay back that pesky student loan.
Obviously this skews more female because of evolutionary dynamics, but you still probably get the occasional male for whom this might be an option of some kind.
So what are the implications of a majority female, thoroughly middle class-to-upper middle class group who attended the same or similar small liberals arts colleges?
Homogeneity. Women are statistically more willing to conform to the group, or rather, they're higher in trait agreeableness if you want to hash it out scientifically. This means a reluctance to champion a book that could cause controversy, much less intense controversy. We're seeing this already with Penguin having to deal with employees demanding that Jordan Peterson's new book not be published.
The second layer of homogeneity is that in order to do well at those colleges - to even be accepted beyond being the 'token' of your specific sub-divided little group - is that you need to speak a certain way, act a certain way, and think a certain way. That gets reinforced and becomes self-selecting. The location of the major publishing houses are all large cosmopolitan cities, cities where the concerns are, "Do I seem culturally accepting enough?", "Am I projecting the 'correct' values?", etc.
You need not take my word for it though. You can find plenty of authors who complain about these sorts of things.
EDIT: I should add... I know these people. I occasionally work with and consult for these people. The certainty of their positions relative to their utter lack of worldly experience is not just staggering, but offensive.
I've travelled all over the world, for over 19 years. I've been to 72 countries, I've lived in 12 different nations for over a year at a time. Women and men with the kind of credentials I've mentioned above are almost always the same. They're utterly convinced of their own moral superiority, whilst also being utterly ignorant of anything outside of their little bubbles.
> Now I'm curious. The world you describe seems quite hostile to someone with your beliefs
That's because I don't have beliefs, I have data. I'm not interested in "beliefs". I'm interested in being able to concretely prove something with varying degrees of certainty, and I won't present my findings and conclusions unless I have the strongest available data to back them up.
To autopsy your assertion even further, you could extrapolate to the entire world. Most people in the world don't really want to know why the world is the way it is, or even why they do the things they do. People don't like that they can be quantified, that they can be predicted if someone, somewhere, with enough knowledge and understanding has enough data about them. Yet Facebook and Google and Twitter and YouTube do this every day, fairly easily nowadays I might add. It only upsets people when its in their face and clearly visible. When they can't turn away from it and deny it.
The nearly wholesale rejection of evolutionary biology, psychology, and the Big Five personality traits by a subset of certain people is hilarious because 1) its anti-science, which is made even more ridiculous given the credence these groups place on science and 2) it not only can be, but often is used against them by researchers who have no moral misgivings about the nature of the science and accept it for what it is - its neither inherently good nor bad, its just how we evolved based on the selective pressures nature placed upon our species.
> how and why are you in it?
The why is probably easier to answer than the how. By their own admission, I bring value to their organizations. When someone asks me what I do, instead of going through a bunch of technobabble and mathematics/statistics jargon I just tell them, "I bring order to chaos." It usually sparks more interesting conversations than talking about R, K-means clustering, Bayesian inference, and all the other jargon surrounding data science that frankly almost no one besides mathematicians, statisticians, and other data scientists will understand anyway. The second part of the "why" is "enormous consulting fees". :)
The how is a very long post that I just don't have time to type up right now.
I assume most people on HN have some control over their professional lives. Part of the sibling comment's response is that part of their motivation is "enormous consulting fees", for example. There is a calculus there for weighing how annoying the world you choose is vs. how well it remunerates you.
The annoyance is generated moreso from their certainty than who they are as people. I'm wary of people who little-to-no experience with a certain "thing" who are absolutely certain they understand that "thing".
But there seems to be this idea that I don't like working with these people, but that's not true. Most of these people are really good people who are good at their jobs, who want to be a force for good in the world, and they legitimately think they're on the side of righteousness. They're the modern day version of crusaders, frankly. And much like the crusaders of old their prejudices are borne from ignorance and their certainty is tempered by each other as they self-reinforce.
The tops of the ladder are there to show what people further down aspire to be. The idea is that if you are a building super you daydream about owning a general contractor business. If you’re a VP at an investment bank you dream of being a billionaire hedge fund manager.
The conceit is that random lawyers and doctors wish they could be the kinds of lawyers and doctors that could get an Op-Ed published, but I don’t think it works. Maybe most Econ PhDs secretly want to be Paul Krugman. I doubt it, but maybe. But no way I buy most doctors secretly want to be Anthony Fauci.
> Why not just do labor, middle management, owners like in the first part of the piece?
I think the idea is that the communication styles from the first part carry over to the second. Which means that if you're an university-educated professional or a cultural leader, you mostly communicate through baby-talk and posture-talk. At least that seems to be the author's point, I'm not sure to what extent I agree.
What's weird about software engineering is you can literally be on all three ladders.
That high-paid 60 year old man working for his state's labor department keeping the COBOL churning out unemployment checks? High-skill labor.
That university researcher who's working night and day to design a new machine learning paradigm? She's an elite creative (Hell, she might even be a Ph.D. and a blue check mark nowadays).
The Stanford / UCLA / MIT dropout who builds the next Uber / Instagram / Twitter / Facebook? Working rich. At least until he/she sells the company to someone and bails out.
However, those tools are used for business purposes that create a significant amount of value for the business. And the learning curve of using them within any particular business is generally pretty high. This naturally puts software engineers in a position of high leverage, which happens to be the currency of the elite.
I'm surprised, personally I would put software engineer akin to a new-age factory worker, but worse for multiple reasons. This is taking into account how many new software engineers are joining and where the field is going in general, sure some are doing novel work but most are definitely not.
Yeah, I was picturing my math education. He could probably get through calculus with cheating, tutoring, and begging. But I can't see him actually putting in the work to get through 200 level courses, much less grad courses.
But, omg, I can't imagine him surviving a chem lab. The whole place would be on fire within a few minutes.
Its interesting seeing this formal non American pov and how the American Office is very denatured compared to the UK one.
So "the good place" is prestige TV! would not that be more like discussing the latest "in our time" about the plague of Justinian over the water cooler ?
I don't think the author really understands the characterization of Michael Scott. I can't imagine the hypothetical scene of Michael Scott taking pride in knowing how to use chopsticks. That sounds way more out of character to me than having him not know how to use them. Hard for me to take the article seriously when it has to make up character traits for Michael Scott to make its point.
I believe that the type of person the author thinks Michael Scott is exists and sucks (and I'm probably one of them), but I don't think Michael Scott is one of them.
I agree, this bit in particular seems wrong to me:
> Posturetalk is everything said by Michael, Dwight and Andy, to anyone: the staff, the execs, or each other. Everything they say is some form or another of meaningless, performative babbling.
I only really remember the first four seasons of The Office, but I remember Michael as being a very skilled salesman and a very unskilled manager. But Michael's skill as a salesman comes from a genuine desire to connect with people and form relationships --- recall the episode where he takes a second job as a telemarketer and keeps deviating from the call scripts to ask people about their lives. In that sense, a big chunk of what Michael says is pretty close to the opposite of performative?
You just wrote it yourself - he has an enormous desire to be praised, so much so that he completely fails to notice just how much he lacks a connection with literally anyone or anything (Michael is of course a comically over-emphasized example). This is the key to understanding the "clueless" or the "educated gentry" ladder, they are unhappy with being in "labor" but lack the balls/intelligence/true desire/luck/whatever else to be the "elite", so they come up with alternative scoring rules. Why do you think writing an op-ed in the NYT is so highly desired in that ladder? The other ladders don't dabble in praise, they either want their jobs to satisfy basic life needs (labour) or want ever-growing power with minimal regard to others opinion (elite), more specifically others opinion is only relevant insofar as it is a stepping stone on the path to more power.
Maybe your (and sibling's) comment along with mine illustrate two sides of the same coin. I think Michael is interested in status mostly as a path to connection. The dreams he talks about, if I remember correctly, center around having a family and a nice life, not prestige or power or winning. That's part of why I think the "Michael Scott" analogy is such an awkward fit for the middle ladder proposed in the article. My recollection of the series is that Michael is actually pretty satisfied with his status in society, but not his status relative to the people around him. If Michael dreams of writing an op-ed in the New York Times, it's because he hopes it will make Oscar like him or something.
I agree that his desire to connect on a personal level isn't posturing and is very much a huge piece of who he is- as such, it's wrong of the author to say that everything he says to everyone is posturetalk. At the same time, I'm not sure it's fair to dismiss the author's point entirely. One of Michael's other defining features (which goes hand in hand with his desire to connect personally) is his absolute need to be liked. His desire to connect on a personal level often feeds into this need to be liked, and attempting to satisfy this need is where a lot of his posturetalk comes from. He sees traits in others that he admires and he will do whatever he can to convince other people he has those same traits. Example: during performance review time, Pam mentions that she doesn't know what to expect from hers because her previous review began with Michael asking her where she sees herself in five years and ended with him telling her how much he can bench press. Heck, there was a whole episode about him trying to prove to the office that he was the toughest fighter around. Not to mention the paper conference where he pretended his $100 per diem was just what he would tip normally; or the time he said that anyone who could do more push ups than him could go home early; or like when he takes Jim to Hooters and says to the waitress that he's doing it because he's the boss and he can afford it but then we see when he gets back to the office that he's trying to get it expensed as a business cost because he can't pay for it; or when he tells Oscar to tell Jan that he's a financial guru who cut their debt in half; or when he buys his condo and brags about having two microwaves; or any interaction he has with a woman he finds attractive. These are just a couple easy ones off the top of my head.
My point is that it's not one or the other- Michael is a great salesman because he wants to connect on a personal level, but man alive he sure spouts off a whole lot of posturetalk.
michael's desire for connection does make him a lot more genuine than most of the other characters on the show, although this might be because he just isn't capable of the subterfuge and even the casual sarcasm employed by the others.
a lot of michael's behaviors are pretty naked attempts at gaining status. the irony is that he latches onto things that no one else actually respects. a good example is when he bought the sebring. michael did not buy that car because he liked it; he bought it because he wanted other people to see him in it, purely a flex. as is often the case, the joke was on him. no one thought the sebring was a cool car. just continuing on the car theme, look at what pre-breakdown jan was driving: a volvo, a nice vehicle befitting someone of her stature but not flashy.
Right, Michael Scott would tell someone he of course knows how to use them and then end up in a Japanese restaurant with that person and be found out to be the fool once again.
That I can see. Or he would fixate on the fact that someone else does know how to use them and get competitive about it, trying and failing hard to show that he's also worldly.
The other part is that Micheal doesn't posturetalk to his employees. He desperately wants them to be his friends, because he has none. It's one of his defining characteristics.
This was an interesting take but I'm a little disappointed that the author didn't take the language idea further. As in, in this author's conception of class based language, what's an example of "straight talk"? How do the elites "babytalk" to the Michael Scott-gentry middle class? Most interestingly, what would "powertalk" be in this conception of class? Would it be raw datasets and financial spreadsheets? Because that seems at odds with the "barbarians" he posits via Church are at the top of the elite ladder. Or are the "barbarians" ruthless state-leaders who only speak in intelligence reports and legal/military briefs and those types of documents are "powertalk"?
Babytalk from the Elites to the Middle Class would be something like the all staff meetings for Penguin staff complaining that Penguin Canada is publishing another Jordan Peterson book or Politico staff complaining that Ben Shapiro was invited to write an entry in their outside opinion section. Or potentially some of the corporate higher up talking up social responsibility actions that are at best token.
I'm more interested in the "real talk" between Elites and Losers -- what's that look like?
"Real talk" means skipping the niceties and getting to the point. e.g. If an elite hires someone to clean their house: they quickly agree on a cleaning price, no chit-chat is expected in either direction if they cross paths, when cleaning is finished they leave immediately, if they don't do a good job they'll be replaced, if they do a good job they'll be retained.
Elites don't do this (as much) to the middle class because: 1) they (members of middle class) aren't as easily interchangeable 2) they're workhorses that produce a good ROI 3) the elites clearly see the delusional reality most of the middle class lives in, and are happy to egg it on to keep the machine churning.
Good point about corporate-speak as elite-to-middle babytalk.
I would hazard a guess that the closest thing to straight talk is at the possible inception of a union. Not after the union is formed and established - I don't think there's a lot of straight talk between UAW and GM nowadays - but if someone like Musk is afraid the gigafactory workers are banding together, he might be forced to talk to them directly. Unfortunately, I don't think this "real talk" is ever recorded or broadcast.
The most stark example I can think of is when Emperor Hirohito informed the Japanese citizens of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki[1], but funny enough that is mostly known for how confusing it was for the average Japanses citizen to understand what was going on.
In Brent Staples's Parallel Time, the author documents Rupert Murdoch after he bought the Chicago Sun-Times. Murdoch points at people and tells them, "I own you and you and you."
Conversely, there's the Alex Baldwin monologue at the beginning of Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross.
This kind of social class theory is unfortunately not one that yields a lot of leverage, while simultaneously promising to cause a lot of hurt. (It also reads as if it betrays some hurt feelings on the part of its creator, IMO). I think this is why it's traditionally, historically, so incendiary to talk about class theory.
Also, here we are at the point in history when even reclusive billionaires are starting to change and improve the way they contribute to the world. Some are even giving away all their money before they die, which was once seen as a feat the bible itself couldn't envision.
Michael Scott is also given occasional but shy credit on the show for being someone whose values freely interconnect with those of his workers, which to me was an understated win of the series.
The fact is, Michael can't be the best of everybody, even though he tries. But he can sure reflect their good back onto them, even when he's completely exploding an otherwise harmless situation! It's an underrated gift. We need more of that good-reflecting in the world, and less criticism of the kind that reflects a hopeless situation.
Discussing social class is so incendiary in America specifically because Americans have convinced themselves for a long time that they only have economic classes and no social classes. Discussing social class therefore became a taboo, as it breaches the polite fiction that America is a classless society. I call it a polite fiction because if you pay attention there are tons of ways that Americans find a way to separate social class from economic class (e.g. “money can’t buy taste” as a way to dismiss someone as being low class and rich).
Of course, like any way to divide up people there is ample opportunity for harmful and mean stereotypes. But I don’t think that alone is why discussing class is so explosive in America.
Meh.... This has a real "I'm 14 and this is deep" vibe. Like a teenager who thinks their dad is a loser, and that the real men are the guys at the bottom in tough blue collar jobs, or at the top in power suits being Wolves of Wall Street. Insights like this can be fun, but they're for the third beer with your buddies, not for writing down.
Pretty ironic take given that the site you're writing the comment on was founded by pg writing a bunch of essays breaking the world down into "nerds" vs "jocks" with VCs being "high school girls". pg decided to write those down rather than share them over a third beer and it seems to have spawned a bunch of billion dollar companies.
The author refers to michael o church who had much clearer takes on the subject, not-withstanding a lot of other craziness that undermined some of his interesting opinions. He certainly was one of the first people to publicly call out that companies like Google and VC-backed startups spend a LOT of effort on PR that they are "social good" despite being as ruthlessly money-making oriented as any conventional companies they claimed not to be. He coined one of my favorite sayings that "Silicon Valley is just Wall St for people who can't wake up early." Those takes are a little less novel in 2021 now that everyone realizes how morally bankrupt companies like Google are but credit's due where it's due so I'd recommend checking out his old blog posts.
Just because PG/YC has success doesn't mean that a lot of those posts aren't "third beer" observations. PG's essays didn't start the companies, and they're fair-game for criticism IMO.
I think Google really was more idealistic. With their 20% time, thinking new businesses would grow from it.
There was also Sun's business model, of free software (eg java) to sell hardware.
It's not that they were selfless... but their interests were aligned with others.
Of course, looking back, MS's open platform seems positively benign today, yet te were habitually vilified at the time... maybe today's corporations will seem similarly benign in hindsight? After all, you can't make money without some alignment with customers.
I've never watched the show, but I have to admit I'm a bit bemused by the number of times I've come across people saying they've got [professional] life figured out by realizing it's actually exactly like The Office, which coincidentally, is their favorite show. As I said, I haven't watched the show so I can't really appraise the claims properly, but it seems suspect to me.
(Incidentally I noticed a similar tendency in myself to think I had policing and Baltimore local politics figured out after watching The Wire. Did that show really teach me as much as I feel? Or do I have a false sensation of being informed, steming from my enjoyment of the show?)
> Did that show really teach me as much as I feel?
I think one thing The Wire does is show you how bad equilibria can arise from mostly rational people making mostly rational decisions in response to the incentives around them, and seeing it play out in compelling dramatic form is a good way to cement the idea. So now it's pretty easy for me to come up with a plausible reason why bad thing x happens in my city y.
I think my main takeaway from watching The Wire in college was various ways of arriving at the conclusion that things are pretty complex. Except for the war on drugs, which should mostly end.
Unrelated observation: "just do the opposite of what Michael Scott would do" is actually pretty decent management advice, and probably better training than 80% of what new managers are taught (which is usually nothing more than "here is what you need to do to not get us sued").
"When confronted by a fact that clearly goes against some deep conviction of ours, we can react to it in one of two basic ways: either simply and brutally rejecting it, or endorsing it in a “subl(im)ated” form, as something not to be taken literally, but rather as an expression of a deeper or higher truth. For example, we can either reject outright the idea of Hell (as a real place where sinners suffer endless pain as punishment for their deeds), or we can claim that Hell is a metaphor for the 'inner turmoil' we suffer when we do something wrong." (Zizek, Less Than Nothing)
It's a common form of pseudo-analysis that you'll find in a lot of "high brow" YouTube videos these days with titles like "[Movie/Show Name], a masterclass in [esoteric intellectual-sounding term]". Chock full of non sequiturs and logorrhea, sounding vaguely intelligent but having almost no meaningful content whatsoever.
Maybe you just didn't get it? How far did you make it through the article before you decided it was invalid?
As someone on the spectrum, this actually expanded on some of my own observations. For a large portion of society, much of what they do and say is driven by posturing. This posturing is driven by insecurity. It is especially predominant in the upper-middle class.
Spock said it best, humans are highly illogical. They don't say what they mean. They spend significant resources on posturing, trying to reassure themselves of their standing by convincing their peers.
This article probably isn't going to lead to epiphanies in many of the groups mentioned. It seems intentionally inflammatory, which will cause individuals with the described behaviour to become defensive.
It seems a lot of people are taking this sort of article more seriously than perhaps they should. To me it’s an interesting model to think about, regardless of its true validity; all models are faulty when they meet reality, after all. And I think with that it mind it’s interesting, and matches some of my own observations (loosely!)
It's very odd that 'baby talk' is professional. I don't think society was always this way. I also respect anyone who questions why this is the case. Assuming it's an efficiency, we should be able to justify this behavior.
I worked as a software developer, in a non software company, I sat in an odd spot off to the side half way up the org chart.
The non software people climbed the hierarchy not because they are competent at their jobs, in fact a highly competent person will often be passed over for promotion because they are useful where they are - but because of how they negotiated very complex social networks.
A senior manager, my manager at the time felt that with very little skill to separate the people working at the company, ascendancy was about positioning yourself in bullying networks, and he described this this kind of 'baby talk' as a subservience signal in which you were surrendering to and accepting a manager as your patron and any further advancement you made was by their grace.
If you chose to do the 'honest talk' with someone senior to you, it came with a risk and a potential reward, you had to do it well enough to convince them you were a worthy formidable peer and an ally. If you did it unconvincingly you would be struck down.
This seemed to be a widely held worldview and therefore more or less the social reality in the non software parts of the business. I was free to do 'honest talk' because as a software person, I was clearly to the side of the game, it wasn't really possible for me to fall or climb too far.
I don't really know what any of the things you're referring to in this comment mean. Can you expand on what "babytalk" is, maybe with an example? What is a "bullying network"? And what is "honest talk"?
User monkeycantype's comment discusses the article that this HN thread is about; it is linked at the top of the page. The terms you ask about are from that article. To participate in a discussion about it, it helps to read it first.
I'd be surprised if there was any place or time where people didn't placate and humor those with power over them. The article's label of "babytalk" for this behavior just obscures the observation; it would be like calling typical code review language "fussytalk" and then expounding on how fussy programmers are.
Hmm, well, I'm a social scientist so perhaps I'm a bit elitist about what counts as seriously understanding the world.
It's not that there's no insight in what the guy says. Some of it is quite accurate. I think I would say that (nearly all) the insight was delivered by The Office in the first place. I never saw the US variant, but I LOVE the UK version. We like shows like that because they do speak to us - we do recognize the appalling awfulness of middle managers, or how decent people get stuck in dead ends.
The problem is the attempt to systematize and generalize and make some deep "theory" out of all this. It just isn't worthwhile. There's no sensible theory where everyone at the top is a sociopath, and everyone at the bottom is a realist, and every middle manager is an idiot. I mean, come on. And this "theory" isn't meant to be tested, and never will be... at best, it'll be written down in some kind of fun, pseudoscientific book like Bullshit Jobs.
On most points here I’m in complete agreement, the only nit I would pick is that there should be room for fun insights like this. Articles that wouldn’t hold up under academic scrutiny, and woe betide the fool who bases their life outlook on an Office-based theory, but are fun to muse about, and to overthink a little bit, as you say, over beers with friends.
How do we allow for work like that to be done? I would hate for this kind of silliness to be lost because it isn’t rigorous enough.
Besides, the very people who would take this seriously are the same people who aren’t actively thinking and applying insights on how society interacts in their daily lives anyway.
I partly disagree with those who assert Michael Scott does not know how to use chopsticks. Scott does know how to use chopsticks and is so proud of his “skill” he insufferably tutors chopstick maladroits regarding technique.
However, Scott’s technique is both suboptimal and childish, his grasp of the sticks conforming to how children are taught to use chopsticks and offering less precision than techniques which adults use. [0] Furthermore, Scott’s not actually very skilled at using chopsticks. He’s a step above stabbing food with them or using them with one in each hand, but his mastery of the kids’ way of using chopsticks is barely better than rudimentary.
Often while lifting food from his from his plate and into his mouth, Scott will clumsily drop the morsel back onto the plate and chomp at empty air. Watching Michael Scott eat with chopsticks is to be embarrassed for him, while he himself remains oblivious and proud.
Michael Scott will replace his chopsticks with a spoon for the last 25% of his meal.
Lastly, the linked article is a marvelous troll guaranteed to rile even the most self-assured (and they are nothing if not self-assured) member of the Whytian Clueless.
[0] In my corner of South Korean culture, the kids’ way of holding chopsticks involves the thumb, index, middle, and ring fingers. The adult way omits the ring finger.
The human capability for pattern recognition is still beautiful and amazing to me — and hey, you can still find interesting models that have some value from them, even if you won’t elucidate the root cause.
I disagree completely, at least in this context. If the model doesn't explain the variance, maybe it isn't a good model to use. If you're making art or some other creative endeavor, then yeah, fantastic. If you're trying to show us how the world works, nope.
If you’re interested in this stuff, the book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System by Paul Fussell is an entertaining and insightful book (from 1983, so a bit dated in parts but well worth it).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class:_A_Guide_Through_the_Ame...
Good quick read; I think most of it does hold up. Art depicting clowns or cowboys, probably lower class; threadbare but once-good Persian carpets and shelves of books, probably higher class. The "top out of sight" class is an element most people probably don't think of.
Perhaps the most annoying thing about this article is the built-in defense that "if you don't get it, you're a Micheal." I see many people in the comments making comments like this.
Intriguing point. I'd add that the "if you don't get it" phrase seems a lot more like a Michael Scott character's take on things (meanwhile--do they really get it? Or is there more than one perspective to get?). :-)
There are at least two very different things mixed in this text and no logic reasoning.
Paraphrasing an idea a few times is a very weak proof, to say the least.
And mixing a few random opinions on top is not improving the whole...
Pretty poor article.
There are disagreements here about whether the details are correct, but if you stick to the concept of languages, I think this is brilliant. I work in an environment with extreme wage disparity between the stratified layers described here, with me in the clueless zone, and the languages described here are mandatory in order to deflect analysis and discussion of the power structures and the trivial and grotesque ways they are routinely abused.
For me the takeaway is that the labor class and the owner class have clarity about the station and purpose in life while the managerial class doesn't because they don't know which end of the scale they fall on. Are they glorified labor or almost ruling class?
I think the author has met very few PhDs - in my experience, as a group they're very aware that if they continue to work in research, their work will neither be important to most people outside of their field, nor reap great economic rewards.
In fact the more I think about it, the more this reads as an anti-academic screed - basically dunking on those with high educational attainments or artistic abilities, but only a middle-of-the-road income to show for it. And also triathletes.
I see myself in here, particularly w.r.t. learning about other cultures and histories and using that knowledge as talking points. I guess the only thing to do is break out of 3 tiers entirely, like Creed Bratton.
This would kind of weaken the argument, because there's no way that Michael Scott would ever come up with a codified analysis of human class and interaction and put it on the internet. (It seems like a thoroughly Dwight move, though?)
I found myself mildly nodding along to this waiting for the moment of clarity where he describes more fully the elite ladder but he doesn't and so I have no idea how to contrast this middle tier with the upper tier to see distinctions. What's an example of the Elite behaviors/language? How would I know Powertalk when I see it? What would an Elite do/have to show their true status?
I definitely accept that I'm not an elite. I am "wealthy" in a strictly relative financial sense but I have no political power/connections derived from it and have never tried to gain any. This has always been my personal distinction between say myself and the true elites. Wealth doesn't inherently get you power and I don't really even know how I would leverage what wealth I have to gain power despite this being a potentially viable avenue. Is this not a much better distinction?
The middle class are just workers, who are paid more. The preformative aspects come from competition with their peers.
It's why white collar workers are so bent on doing public speaking things, TED Talks etc.. It's hard to be a VP you have to somehow get everyone else to think you're 'that much better' than the workers.
Watch the news: almost every contributor is making a performance.
Trump's the 'Apprentice' is a giant bit of performance, nothing to do with reality.
The elite use leverage. Think of them as VCs. They don't 'work' like we do, they negotiate hard deals with workers and try to grab all the surpluses.
It's really just a basic take on working/middle class + capital class.
I find it ironic that this piece is written from the perspective of the so-called "Educated Gentry", basically the same kind of performative babble of mid-tier cluelessness.
One time somebody posted an article (whose name escapes me now that) which asserted that "Endurance sports are the domain of white people because they need artificial pain and struggle to make their otherwise meaningless lives meaningful." It was such a lazy and pompous ideological hit-and-run.
I'm getting a lot of the same vibes from this piece. If you have disposable income and want to collect Japanese cookware then that doesn't inherently make you ignorant or detached from reality. The model is kind of interesting, but it mostly sounds like a dig by the author leaning heavily on stereotyping groups of people.
See also "The Peter Principle," which famously argued that everyone eventually rises to their level of incompetence.
The more interesting question is what do you do in response to that? The Peter Principle books actually argued you should turn down that last promotion. But how do we avoid becoming Michael Scott?
The thing about the Peter Principle is how do you know which is the "last promotion" that you should turn down? No one should turn down the first promotion (from "fresh into the workforce" to "basically competent developer" [or journeyman welder/electrician/plumber or whatever the equivalent is for your field]).
After that it gets murky because everyone has their own abilities and willingness to do what it takes to compensate for their own flaws and take advantage of their strengths.
I've seen a few developers get pushed into a management due to their leadership on engineering teams, and do an okay job in that role, but return to development after a year or less. One of them told me he recognized he had reached the level of his incompetence and did not want to be That Guy. I suspect that was true for some of the others as well, and I wish it was more common.
Making secondments and mentoring a more integral part of the process, perhaps, so you promotions happens because of demonstrated skill at what you would be promoted into, rather than demonstrated skill at what you would get promoted out of.
I think we just need to make it more acceptable in corporate culture to go, "hey, I'm no longer growing or thriving in this role, perhaps I should return to my old one", preferably without receiving a pay cut.
Oh geez. Until now, I thought the "Peter" in the Peter Principle was the biblical Peter, and I interpreted it as an indictment of Peter eventually getting promoted to a quasi-Jesus role as leader after Jesus...left the scene.
This article and the theory it presents has some interesting intersections with how society actually works (i.e. the elite being anyone who has real leverage). I liked the depiction of the intellectual classes, but I believe that rather than hiding from reality they are commenting on it and influencing society's culture, not having to worry about material security.
Also, the categories/ladders are looser than one would assume. Cultural and labor leaders, if determined, can seize power for themselves, as seen with the rise of the Soviet Union and Islamic Republic of Iran. I personally don't believe in the "babytalk" notion: this depends on individual character, and any common lingo would be based solely on the pressures of position the individual is in.
For an article that takes a more serious look at a very similar (analogous, IMO) three-slice breakdown of socioeconomic class in America, I’d recommend this article “the birth of a new American aristocracy”, as the tiers of the pyramid in this article seem to map one to one onto the three slices in the Atlantic article, and even though I read it years ago it’s still one of my favorites.
Interesting perspective. Without agreeing or disagreeing, I wonder where, on which ladder I’d want to be. Old Money is probably best, but, I don’t really have a choice. Seems Michael Scott is the next best option.
I can get on board with the idea that to other people and other classes the things you aspire to achieve are silly, and the way you act to get those things is ridiculous.
But the idea that the blue collar workers and elites "get it" while the bourgeoisie are fooling themselves comes across as ... self loathing, perhaps?
You could just as easily make the argument that the aspirations of the blue collar are shallow and meaningless. And or the elites are sociopathic because, hey, we all turn to dust in the end.
I just read both this and the Michael Church article it links to. I think they are arguing the opposite in many ways. Eg Alex Danck calls the gentry ladder clueless, while Michael Church says they will lead us to the future. It’s hard to see how they are both right.
According to the article you can be a loser, a sociopath or Michael Scott. And the harder you're trying, the more likely it is that you're Michael Scott.
The part about the upper middle class (myself included) being detached from reality is spot on.
You have no need to worry about money other than the desire to upgrade status symbols. You have no real power or path to power, so you don’t understand that either. You’re floating blissfully in the middle reading about mushroom foraging while the poor get poorer and the elite siphon even more wealth and power.
I believe America has 4 Great Games, with 4 traditional city centers: Knowledge (Boston), Money (New York), Fame (Hollywood), Power (DC). (Arguably there is a fifth, Tech (Silicon Valley), which is Knowledge, Money & Power, all rolled together, and in that order).
The Office only takes place inside a small, mundane part of the Money game, and I think the middle ladder in the OP's post muddles Money and Knowledge. Note that all the games are used as backdrops, Power being the more usual pick: all legal/police/crime content inhabits that space.
Its also important to note that the Office takes place in the UK and America, winners of the second world war, and so the ones where the Games have grown in size and complexity monotonically for over 100 years, and the players are fat, rich, and lazy (characteristic of late stage capitalism). The lack of external stressor (e.g. competition, frugal clients, and so on) is what enables the company, and its employees, to be detached from reality and still survive despite these costly distractions. This detachment is the inevitable cost of great wealth and long periods of uninterrupted success, and is the mechanism by which large scale structures, like civilizations, regress to the mean.
I get these on Dancos mailing list and haven't finished article yet but reading the comment thread I'm super interested in how provocative it was to HN.
The Gervais Principle was a great/cynical popular summary of some more refined ideas in management theory. Generalizing it to a theory of post-internet globalized class seems straight forward, with the caveat that it can only be as useful as any theory of class. It's the Marxist ceiling, like how classical Newtonian physics is fantastic for modelling coarse engineering problems, and loses coherence when applied to the nature of reality, and doesnt provide much more than some metaphors for things as normal as economics. Reading through it, I don't think this was written so much as an explanatory piece for an HN audience as it was to find others thinking about these problems.
I kind of disagree with the whole model, or at least as it pertains to large organizations.
I have spent too many unfortunate years at a big Enterprisey software development organization, and have concluded that the real sociopaths/incompetents/climbers lie in middle management. I would even go as far to say that if the middle management has no technical responsibilities, and as such entirely is detached from the work of engineers, nearly 100% of them come from the aforementioned categories.
Let me try to elaborate:
Upper management is generally characterised by a good awareness of market needs/conditions, what needs/can be delivered by the next release, and the available and required resources needed to deliver features on time.
They have both the power to make significant decisions, and are usually held accountable for delivering features.
Non-technical management usually draws its ranks from MBAs who think of engineers as pathetic nerds, engineering people who either don't want to code or suck at it, and culty
types who try to apply every hip development methodology/pop psychology hack to hopefully improve the performance of engineers (which is usually accompanied by universal resentment).
They usually have the luxury of playing head games with the people under them (I'm fairly convinced most pop management MBA bullshit exists to make their work and decision processes totally opaque/give them control to do whatever they want as well as to gaslight their 'subjects' about their perceived performance).
Since this is getting long I'll cherry pick 2 examples:
I spent 3 days (+overtime) debugging an issue that involved a bug in native code that created memory corruption in the Java side of the app, which naturally produced weird behaviour - I got berated for taking too long, as well as not writing a detailed enough post-bug report of the root cause of the issue (why was this even a thing).
Another time, some MM came up a great idea of improving software quality (which was shit due to the huge amounts of legacy code we weren't allowed to touch) - which essentially boiled down to filling out an extra field in Jira, making a compilation of said fields in a PowerPoint presentation, and having a 3 hour meeting about said fields, and based on the results, probably defining some extra wishy-washy action items to follow in the future.
Naturally, this added an extra responsibility to our understaffed, overworked team, which was created a naturally hostile vibe in us.
However one of the least competent, and morally flexible guys (the guy who literally couldn't solve a single problem on his own, but had a talent for making his problems somebody elses too - and advertise the result as 'teamwork') naturally stepped up to drive the idea - and was promoted to some management position a few months later, partially due to these efforts.
In summary, I feel like unlike upper management, and engineers, middle management serves no purpose in most organizations, and they know that, so they create their niche by mostly less then ethical purposes, so they get to play petty despots with some, but not much tangible power, and little to no responsibility/accountability.
While climbing the middle ladder, something snapped in me, or perhaps covid accelerated the process.
A year or so ago, I was working on my undergraduate thesis project in deep RL, I had been working on the project for 8-9 months at the time. Due to covid, lack of support and computational resources from the university, I was behind, and making progress was difficult.
Shortly after I submitted the thesis, I felt an eerie disillusionment with the absurdity of the middle class, and whatever we are all doing, the pretentiousness, how we are all stuck in our own little bubbles where we find ways to feel special and 'serious' about things, how we focus and advertise the niche-ness of our field, and how we all advertise our lives in social media and so on.
Sam Esmail put it greatly in the first episode of Mr. Robot in Elliot's monologue on what in society disappoints him so much [1] and concludes that the reason is that we are all cowards, we are looking to be sedated. Which is absolutely true, capitalism feeds on that, bought something?, bam dopamine rush, got a promotion to the same shitty position but with more responsibilities ? congratulations, another dopamine rush. Buying overpriced sushi and eating it with that chopstick skill you have mastered, another rush. Sharing our lives on the internet bam rush, and you know what, of course we need to share pictures with our friends, it's the contract, we scratch each other's back here, and the funny thing is, it is never enough, and it will never be enough [2].
Deep down, we all know that the world is utter shit, but living in these bubbles allows us to pretend that it is not so bad, because that is easier, it allows us to live with the situation instead of taking the roads and demanding that things change, if anything, why should we demand a change if "it's working for us", if whatever we have gives us a dose big enough to forget but small enough to function? Heck, even if we start fixing the world, Machiavelli argues that given the opportunity, the middle class will bring it back [3], because the new state of affairs will not enable that kind of detachment.
The problem with this disillusionment is that you aren't willing to be sedated, not anymore, you realize how shit the world is, how everyone is pretending and is unwilling to accept it that we are not in control of anything.
But what the f do I know. All I can say is that I have seen and experienced the 'Michael Scott' behaviour from the people the author mentions, but again, I live in my own little bubble.
[3] In "il prince", when a new prince conquers a region with the help of aristocrats, if he changes the norm, he needs to squash any chance of future opposition as the previous norm worked for the aristocrats and they will try to revert back.
Edit:
I must have hit some nerves. Sorry for telling the silent part out loud, Michael.
You should seek a really good therapist, you're far too young to be 'over it' already.
You can live an authentic life, you just don't know how because 1, you're a kid with zero wisdom and 2, you don't yet know what is important (related to point 1).
I found that reading philosophy helps, even just a little bit. The absurdists figured it out I think. Absurdism also helps with coping with the belief in determinism I guess, but I am still in conflict.
It was indeed an enjoyable read in tandem with the followup post. Some years ago, I was in the 'Pure Land' and in a weird way I was happy that I never 'grew up', by that I meant that the educational system didn't kill my curiosity as it does to most kids, and that I found everything interesting in some way and I was never really bored of things.
I guess I lost that curiosity during the last parts of my thesis and covid lockdowns last year. The thesis and the internship after beat the curiosity out of me simply because doing *good* research was neigh impossible with my limited resources. I remember desperately trying to make progress but when everything takes ages to complete, it is easy to lose interest, and deadlines make everything harder.
I tried to get back to that state of mind, but it can be quite difficult at times.
> Deep down, we all know that the world is utter shit
Well, yes and no. On one hand, we're all destined to mortal frailty and death, and most of us will experience things worse than a nightmare and have to keep on going. On the other hand, to live is a precious gift with more beauty and potential than one can imagine, especially if focused on the other part.
It's neat although I'm not sure how 'right' it is.
This is also possibly just a re-articulation of age-old delineations between working/middle and upper class sentiments.
I think the working/middle class are the same ladder though and most of them share the same values in that they are no psychopath barbarians.
The right-hand ladder is actually 2 parts:
The ibankers belong squarely in the middle class rung. They are just workers like everyone else, and frankly, as preformative. Most of them are regular people and not sociopaths.
The difference with some 'banking' roles - is that they are playing in games of 'dealing and leverage' - not so much value creation.
So they're naturally going to acclimate to a different way of viewing thew world. They play zero-sum games whereas everyone else is doing work, or trying/pretending to.
They have access to the 'old money' class and they see the potentiality.
But really - the lower rungs of banking are just upper-class elite.
The 'old money' are not necessarily sociopaths - they are often quite nice people, they vary from down-to-earth to detached to egoist. Maybe not nice enough to give up their money but not necessarily bad people. And living off of a stipend of limited wealth can give a sense of the limitations of money and these people are not wagging their money in your face.
There is a hugely fundamental difference between 'barbarian' like Donald Trump, or Putin, and kids from the Bertelsmann family because those who are 'out of the game' and living off old money are super effete, it's not like they are going to be that important or influential. They are useless and they know it.
I also dispute the morale differentials etc. I think there's some truthiness there, but it's a function of aspiration: the 'working class' have more likely than not accepted their lot while the 'middle class' are competing for surpluses.
Finally, I'm not so cynical. Those 'middle class' people do important things. It's not easy to be a dentist, doctor, write software, manage people etc..
I believe the function of this article, as evidenced by some comments in this thread, is to believably criticize media like the NYT or Twitter. If you take the authors world view as true, and you identify yourself as a laborer in the conservative notion, for instance maybe you like Donald trump or Jordan Peterson and hate critical theory, then you see the world clearly and you have friends in high places, unlike the clueless left academics and media who opposes you. The left, simply because they are in the middle, are universally wrong and mocked by everyone who isn’t as delusional as they are. I suspect this article and it’s author of having underlying (and deniable) partisan motivations.
The examples picked by the author are evidence of this bias.
Triathlon hobby, “right amount of hops”, and PhD are the author’s examples of supposed middle-grade cluelessness.
Are those any different from a hunting hobby, “right caliber of gun”, and being a country club member? Presumably the latter would fall on the author’s sanctified leftmost ladder of Labor where people only talk straight and aspire for reasonable things. Yet the article makes no effort to justify why certain hobbies and pursuits are “loser real” and others are “clueless fake.”
Every person not in the bottom rung is a "sociopath"? Honestly I get a little tinge of joy out of the bitterness of these whiners sometimes.
If you think every person in life that has gotten a different outcome than you is a "sociopath" your are probably something a lot closer to a sociopath than average (ie a seeming total lack of ability to empathize with a vast swath of people based on superficial differences)
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...