Month: April 2014

How Does One Define a Good Job?

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Charles Stross has a smart post titled “A Nation of Slaves” on how he differentiates a good job vs. a bad job:

There are two tests I’d apply to any job when deciding whether it’s what sociologist David Graeber terms a Bullshit Job.

Test (a): Is it good for you (the worker)?

Test (b): Is it good for other people?

A job can pass (a) but not (b) — for example a con man may enjoy milking the wallets of his victims, but their opinion of his work is going to be much less charitable. And a job can pass (b) but not (a) if it’s extremely stressful to the worker, but helps others—a medic in a busy emergency room, for example.

The best jobs pass both (a) and (b). I’m privileged. I have a “job” that used to be my hobby, many years ago, and if Scrooge McDuck left me £100M in his legacy (thereby taking care of my physical needs for the foreseeable future) I would simply re-arrange my life to allow me to carry on writing fiction. (I might change the rate of my output, or the content, due to no longer being under pressure to be commercially popular in order to earn a living—I could afford to take greater risks—but the core activity would continue.)

On the other hand, many of us are trapped in jobs that pass neither test (a) nor test (b). If Scrooge McDuck left you £100M, would you stay in your job? If the answer is “yes”, you’re one of the few, the privileged: most people would run a mile. 

 

On the Wisdom of Crowds and The Good Judgment Project

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This is a very interesting NPR piece on The Good Judgment Project, whereby 3,000 ordinary citizens are making incredible predictions about world events/current affairs.

In fact, Tetlock and his team have even engineered ways to significantly improve the wisdom of the crowd — all of which greatly surprised Jason Matheny, one of the people in the intelligence community who got the experiment started.

“They’ve shown that you can significantly improve the accuracy of geopolitical forecasts, compared to methods that had been the state of the art before this project started,” he said.

What’s so challenging about all of this is the idea that you can get very accurate predictions about geopolitical events without access to secret information. In addition, access to classified information doesn’t automatically and necessarily give you an edge over a smart group of average citizens doing Google searches from their kitchen tables.

The story focuses on Elaine Rich, a so-called superforecaster:

In fact, she’s so good she’s been put on a special team with other superforecasters whose predictions are reportedly 30 percent better than intelligence officers with access to actual classified information.

Rich and her teammates are that good even though all the information they use to make their predictions is available to anyone with access to the Internet.

When I asked if she goes to obscure Internet sources, she shook her head no.

“Usually I just do a Google search,” she said.

Google FTW.