The Importance of Human Beings

We congratulate ourselves on removing gatekeepers, then wonder why the gates don't keep anyone out anymore.

On three separate occasions over the past week, I’ve been reminded that people are constantly trying to reduce the number of people involved in any process. Ideally, it seems, what these people want is to press buttons on a computer or phone and have whatever they want delivered without any human intervention at all.

One of these occasions involved someone complaining about a lack of jobs in the humanities. There are no more jobs for editors, for proofreaders, for translators, for fact-checkers. And now we see all these articles with bad grammar and spelling, translations that are borderline unintelligible, wild spurious assertions with no basis in reality.

Another was a complaint that Amazon is flooded with algorithmically generated garbage; people are using bullshit fake AI to produce worthless crap aimed at confusing people into buying it instead of what they actually want. Nobody is in the way of this. You can write whatever bullshit you want and publish it on Amazon and nobody will stop you.

And the third was that it has become impossible to get a job by speaking with human beings. You have to pass multiple automated filters applied by machines to eventually get an automated email asking you to fill out the form a human being will actually read.

What I’m also kind of perturbed by is the efforts of more and more people to stay out of the office, working distributed and disconnected, perhaps never even meeting their coworkers. Because there’s an important element of human society that everyone seems to forget.

People are stupid.

We make stupid mistakes. We get sloppy and we forget things and we don’t check our work. We focus on one thing to the exclusion of all others and the “all others” part is kind of important, at least here and there.

The world’s greatest expert can write the most insightful paper ever on some esoteric topic, and if he starts it with “Theirs a big problem we’re not talking about” nobody will fucking read it. We have all these automated tools designed to help you with this, but technically that is correct. That is a valid English sentence, meaning the big problem we’re not talking about is their problem, in an archaic and therefore poetic structure. It is just not the sentence you want, and a machine may not be able to tell.

A person can, though. A person who reads that will say “what the fuck” and point and laugh. And if you have more than a few people look at the paper, one of them is actually going to read that first sentence and point and say “fix that shit.” People are excellent error filters. Even if they’re not experts, even if they’re not trained to find and filter errors. We’re just inherently good at it.

We’re all stupid in a thousand ways, but at any given point in time we are being not-stupid in at least a couple. Linus Torvalds once said “given enough eyes, all bugs are shallow.” If enough people look at something that is wrong, someone will know it is wrong and say it is wrong and then you can get it to someone who knows how to make it right.

The problem is that nobody likes to be told they are wrong, and nobody likes to be told to make something right. I talked in a video earlier this week about TPS reports, a slang term from the movie Office Space, which means the stupid report you’re supposed to write for no good reason.

But there is a good reason! You’re supposed to know what you do. In a large organisation, lots of people may not know what you do. Writing that report proves that you know what you do, and that you are doing it, even if other people don’t understand what you do from day to day.

If you can write three pages a week on what you did and hand it to your boss, you’ve put your job on the line saying “this is why you pay me.” These things that you did this week. And your boss will collect all those and send them to his boss, and they go up the chain until they eventually get passed back down the chain to some poor guy in a file room who will put them in a cabinet and leave them there.

And he will write in his TPS report “filed organisational TPS reports,” and put a cover sheet on it.

What everyone imagines will happen is that someone looks at your report and narcs on your to the brass, then someone comes to your desk and says “you are doing the wrong things, do these things instead” or even worse “we don’t need these things anymore, you’re fired.”

But it’s your job to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. You’re the first line of defence in whether your job is important. If you should be doing something else, you need to go to your boss and tell them what it is and why you should be doing it. It is then their job to decide whether you’re right. It may need to go up the chain.

We have a lot of petty tyrants in corporate America, and that’s certainly an issue. But from the bottom, it’s hard to tell. A lot of people at every level of a hierarchy don’t know what they are doing, and it’s fairly common for them to cover it up rather than admit they’re clueless. None of us like to think that may be us.

So we isolate ourselves, we pull ourselves off into a little pocket of the universe where we will be left alone to do our thing, and we imagine that this will make us more productive. And it will, in the sense that nobody will ever tell us we fucked up and need to fix it.

But that doesn’t mean we fuck up any less. It means we are not fixing what we fuck up. It means we deliver our fucked up shit to clients and customers and consumers, who are often even less qualified than we are to see what we fucked up.

What we need is a screen filter of a half dozen people or so to look at everything we do, because the chance of something stupid getting through that many people is very low. This is why we have so many meetings at work. It’s why we write reports on our progress. It’s why we have code reviews and QA and a beta program, in the tech industry. To get the work in front of people and make sure it, well, works.

And this is an underappreciated reason why so much of everything is shit these days. We have gotten rid of the people. People are very, very good at saying “this is shit.” But we’ve replaced them with machines that can only say “this is objectively wrong,” which is not the same thing. Theirs a big difference.