I Alone

 

Deliberate Practice

Today's reading covers Plato's views on democracy and tyranny. Although Plato's views on democracy aren't very flattering and deserve to be pondered over carefully, in this lesson I want to focus on what Plato thinks is the absolute worst form of government: tyranny. Once democracy has devolved into complete chaos, one man will take power and restore order. Of course, this job won't be pretty, and his policies will generate great resentment. However, the people will realize that the tyrant has amassed too much power and he is impossible to remove from office.

How does the tyrant convince the citizenry to give him absolute power? It must be the case that civil society has truly degenerated to a level of unlivable disorder. Once the people can no longer stand the mayhem, it is at that point that the tyrant says, "I alone can fix this."

Never one to make normal connections, this part of the dialogue makes me think about things that ought to be done alone as well as things that are best not done alone. Let's first think about things that really ought to be done alone. Let me start with some context.

Earlier in this course, I reported on the work of various scientists who are finding that there are genetic influences on many of our character traits and abilities, including political preferences, intelligence, and disposition towards violence. It should really be emphasized that this is no way some sort of "determinism" where genes determine with absolute certainty the course of one's life. Rather, genes influence or predispose one towards certain behaviors and preferences. The reason for mentioning this here is twofold. First of all, many right-wing ideologues attempt to use these findings to justify social inequality. This is far from the only interpretation. One can just as easily use the same findings to justify left-leaning social interventions (e.g., Harden 2021).¹ Second, we actually do know what the most important factor is if you want to achieve excellence in some particular field. And it's not genes—thankfully. It's deliberate practice.

What is deliberate practice? Honing in on what deliberate practice is was the life goal of Anders Ericsson (1947-2020), the expert on expertise. Let's just say that you want to become an expert at something: you want to be a concert pianist, a world-famous surgeon, a chess grandmaster, an olympic gold medalist, whatever. What's the most important ingredient? Although in some domains, like basketball, genes really do matter, in most domains the most important factor is actually the kind of practice that you put into mastering the relevant skill. In particular, one must engage in deliberate practice: a type of practice where one engages in highly-focused, well-regimented practice sessions such that quality feedback is produced and then new practice activities are developed to hone in on the skills that are still lacking (based on the feedback from the previous practice sessions). Ericsson summarized his life's work in his 2017 work Peak. After studying experts in various fields for decades, he figured out what they all did in common: deliberate practice.

To me at least, it is a relief to hear that one's own work ethic and the time that one puts into a skill are more important than genes to the overall outcome. Having said that, deliberate practice is extremely difficult. I emphasized a couple of aspects of deliberate practice in the quote above. Notice in particular that Ericsson admits that it is not enjoyable. Having worked as a jazz pianist for some time, I can tell you that working up to a level where you can play for money is extremely difficult and not at all fun. Rehearsing and mastering certain pieces is extremely exhausting, time-consuming, and frustrating. Before you say that this was just my personal experience, Ericsson confirms for us that 100% of the experts he studied arrived at their expertise through deliberate practice and that none of them reported enjoying practicing. Put differently, if you're enjoying your rehearsal, you're not engaging in deliberate practice. In fact, in chapter 8 Ericsson takes the time to demolish the notion of prodigies (e.g., Mozart, the high jumper Donald Thomas, etc.) and so-called “idiot savants”. It is deliberate practice in all cases that leads to excellence and elite level performance. In other words, according to the expert on experts, exactly zero experts in a domain got there without the grueling process of deliberate practice—and Ericsson looked for an exception for 30 years!²

You might be thinking to yourself: Why is this being brought up here? It's for one very important reason: solitary practice is key to deliberate practice. As it turns out, deliberate practice is one of those things that requires individual study. In other words, you just have to seclude yourself, get rid of all distractions, and put in the work. Sure, have your group practice sessions and talk with a coach. But the actual practice itself is a very lonesome experience. Alone. That's how you master a skill.

Something to think about next time you're planning a group study session...

 

Argument Extraction

 

 

 

Democracy at Work

Tyranny sounds like a bad deal. I'd wager that most Americans don't want to submit to a tyrant—despite what some liberals say about Trump supporters (see Hibbing 2020). So here's my question: Why do people regularly submit to a tyrant at work? Maybe you like your job, and maybe you have a nice boss. But if you're like most employees in a capitalist enterprise, you have no ultimate say in any essential aspects of the business. You don't get to decide what to produce, at least not unilaterally. You don't get to decide where and how to produce it. And you certainly don't get to decide what to do with the profits. Worse yet, thanks to innovations in scientific management (like Taylorism) and efficiency algorithms which use computational power to micromanage your every move (like those used at Amazon), many jobs are extremely unfulfilling and set unreasonably high expectations for the human body and mind. Let's start with Taylorism. Here's a helpful video:

 

 

Let's talk briefly about efficiency algorithms. As many know, one of my primary philosophical interests has been artificial intelligence and its effects on society. I am not—I don't think—an alarmist, like some writers on the subject who think that AI will bring about the end of humans. However, I do think that there is a high likelihood that a. automation will ameliorate many jobs which won't be replaced with other jobs, and b. that those jobs that are left over will incorporate more and more efficiency algorithms that will make the worklife of employees increasingly miserable (see the lesson titled The Chinese Room from my 101 course). In particular, I believe certain job-types (like management roles) will be more easily automated than others, the result being that there'll be more and more jobs where you are micro-managed by a supercomputer—a technologically updated version of the push and quota system used during slavery (where slaves were whipped if they didn’t reach their daily goal and the goal is progressively increased as time passes). Put differently, many jobs are already difficult enough as it is with a human manager micromanaging your tasks all day. This would get much worse, both psychologically and physically, if your manager is an all-seeing, all-documenting AI. One person who's gone through this, Emily Guendelsberger, writes about it in her book On the Clock.

By the way, there's also a class of jobs called bullshit jobs, which are not the same as shit jobs (Graeber 2019). According to Graeber, shit jobs are often blue collar, low hourly wage, and socially looked down upon (at least by some). Bullshit jobs, on the other hand, are usually salary white collar jobs. A job is a bullshit job if the employees themselves consider it to be a bullshit job (and even if they profess otherwise to their coworkers). In other words, bullshit jobs are those jobs where even the employees who perform the job can’t justify the job to themselves. Bullshit jobs, by the way, are on the rise, according to Graeber. Why? In chapter 5 of Bullshit Jobs, Graeber gives his theory: the proliferation of bullshit jobs came about through a change of perspective in what’s morally required of corporations. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, there was an implied Keynesian bargain, where basically increased profits which were due to increased productivity would be at least partially redistributed to the workers in the form of higher wages and better benefits. In the 1970s, however, the phenomenon of the great decoupling took place: productivity kept rising but wages stagnated. Where did the profits go? Much of it, obviously, lined the pockets of the owners and CEOs of firms. But a considerable amount went towards the hiring of middle management and their administrative staff, i.e., bullshit jobs.

Maybe you think that this is just the way work is or has to be. But some have actually dreamed up a different possibility. The trouble is that it has a worrisome name. It's called Marxism.

 

Important Concepts

 

The capitalist class-process

It is far beyond the scope of this lesson (and class) to cover in detail the views of Karl Marx. (For a bit more detail than what is given here, the interested student can refer to the lesson titled The Game from my 103 course. For a lot more detail, take PHIL 117.) Here's what you need to know for our purposes in this course. For Marx, class doesn't necessarily have to do with how much money you earn; rather, your class has to do with your role in the production process. Those who work for private industry, like maybe you do, labor to produce profits for their company. This labor may be in the form of manufacturing some product, of selling some product, or perhaps it has to do with transporting some product so that it can be sold. Whatever the case may be, we know that, for workers, the value that they produce with their labor is less than what they get paid. In other words, if you work in the private sector, you only have a job because you make your boss more money than what he/she pays you. That's simply how it works. So, there's the value that you produced with your labor that you actually get paid for, and there's the value that you produced with your labor which your boss keeps. Marx has labels for these. According to Marx, necessary labor is performed during the portion of the day in which workers produce goods and services the value of which is equal to the wages they receive (i.e., the value that you produced with your labor that you actually get paid for). Then there's surplus labor: labor performed during the portion of the day in which workers continue to work over and beyond the paid portion of the day (i.e., the value that you produced with your labor which your boss keeps).

Of course, Marx argues against capitalism, which he defines as a social order where it is ok for the owners of businesses and firms to pay their employees less than what they produce. Put more formally, what Marx calls the capitalist class-process—that is to say the class-process that is prevalent in the United States—is the legalized yet ‘criminal’ activity in which the products of the laborers’ creative efforts are appropriated (i.e., taken) by those who have nothing to do with their production and who return only a portion of those fruits to the workers (wages), keeping the remainder (the surplus) for themselves. Put yet another way, the capitalist class-process is the state of affairs where the employers regularly and reliably exploit their employees by paying them less than the value they produce. Marx's contention is that this is exploitation. So, he concludes, the capitalist class-process must be abolished.

When Marx makes the case against capitalism, however, what he really means is the capitalist class-process—the exploitative relationship between employers and employees. That's at least the way that Amherst School of Marxism interprets Marx. This school, which pays special attention to volumes 2 and 3 of Marx’s Das Kapital, claims that the fundamental Marxist argument is that firms should be run by employee-owners (see Burczak, Garnett & McIntyre 2017). The way to do this is to convert society into one in which the workers are the owners of the enterprises in which they labor; in other words, build society so that the norm is worker-owned cooperatives.³

Worker cooperatives are a type of firm where the workers play two roles: 1. their normal labor function; but also 2. an administrative function which allows them to vote on what the firm makes, where the firm makes it, and what the firm does with the profits. In a word, this is democracy at work. These, in case you didn't know, already exist. In these enterprises, surplus labor is still created, but it is appropriated by those who created it: the workers themselves. There could still be pay differentials, with some getting paid more than others, but the key difference is that workers had a say in establishing the pay differentials—through their vote. The result would be that, instead of the tyranny that we submit to at our places of work today, we can instead achieve democracy at work—assuming you don't think democracy is non-optimal (like Plato does).⁴

 

Food for thought...

 

So?

What does this mean for Ninewells? There is both acknowledged positive consequences as well as an intuitive fairness about worker-owned firms (see footnotes 3 and 4). If this truly is a means of reducing exploitation in the workplace and improving the mental health and the quality of life of workers, then this is perhaps a organizational arrangement that we can promote in our new city. However, I assume that at least some of you will be uncomfortable with the notion. Why? This might, after all, be one of those things that are best not done alone. It does seem like worker-owned cooperatives work at least as well as traditional firms (again, see footnote 3). So why do some have a knee-jerk reaction against this interpretation of Marxism? I think it might have to do with what we were taught as children. We've been taught, since childhood, that work is supposed to be a certain way—and it's definitely not the way Marx envisioned. So, just like other topics we've covered recently (the ban on teaching religion to children and the abolition of police), the main reason for why we are opposed to something like worker-owned cooperatives is that we have been conditioned to be naturally predisposed towards rejecting the idea. And that's not exactly a good reason.

In the lesson titled No Gods... I promised I'd touch on four topics related to beliefs that, once they take hold in childhood, are hard to let go. We've now discussed three of those four beliefs: the belief that teaching their religion to children is a parent's right, the belief that police are necessary, and the belief that the workplace has to be as it is under capitalism. I hope these discussions have sparked some questions in your mind about the power of those beliefs imparted on children. Perhaps they've also made you think about what beliefs you have that don't let you process information in an even-handed, unbiased way. One more belief to go...

 

 

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FYI

Suggested Viewing: Workplace Democracy, Workers' Self-Directed Enterprises (WSDE)—by Richard Wolff

Supplemental Material—

• Video: Amazon, Anders Ericsson - Deliberate practice makes perfect - Insights for Entrepreneurs

• Video: London Real, BULLSHIT JOBS - David Graeber

Related Material—

• Audio: Letters and Politics, The Rise of Meaningless, Unfulfilling Jobs, and their Consequences

• Podcast: Freakonomics, How to Become Great at Just About Anything

• Reading: Insider, I'm a writer who went to work at an Amazon warehouse, a call center, and a McDonald's. I saw firsthand how low-wage work is driving America over the edge.

Advanced Material—

• Reading: Harvard Review, The Great Decoupling: An Interview with Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

• Reading: Bob Black, The Abolition of Work

• Video: Levy Economics Institute, Richard D. Wolff Lecture on Worker Coops: Theory and Practice of 21st Century Socialism

 

Footnotes

1. In her recent book The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality, Harden’s goal is to peel away the interpretation of genetic studies from white nationalists and those attempting to justify the status quo. Instead, she makes the case for how to use genetics to make society more just. Her basic argument is this. You can either be a eugenecist (which is not an option for non-racists), attempt to be "gene blind" (where one pretends that genes don't matter for social outcomes and that everyone is born the same), or hold the anti-eugenics position (where one uses genetic markers to find individuals who need interventions so that they have more positive life outcomes). She argues for the anti-eugenics position. This, she argues, is better than the "gene blind" position since approaches to equity that don’t take into consideration genetic variants shown to give students an academic advantage are likely to be either a failure or inconclusive. For example, Harden considers the initiative to ameliorate the word gap. In case you haven't heard of the word gap, researchers found that the average child in a high-income family hears 2,153 words per waking hour, the average child in a working-class family hears 1,251 words per hour, and an average child in a welfare family only 616 words per hour. The authors of this study and subsequent researchers have posited that the word gap—or certainly the differing rates of vocabulary acquisition—partially explains the achievement gap in the United States. But, Harden interjects, what if the achievement gap (as well as the high communicative nature of parents/children) are actually best explained by genes. In other words, instead of blindly assuming that hearing more words leads to better educational outcomes, maybe both being more chatty and doing better in school are actually the products of the same underlying cause: certain gene variants. On this point, Harden argues that unless a study is done controlling for gene variants, say, on high-income parents with adopted children, then the word gap data is merely correlational. Basing a social intervention on this merely correlational foundation would be a waste of money and time.

2. What if you want to master a skill in which there isn't already a well-established training regimen? That's ok. Ericsson extrapolates from the notion of deliberate practice to give a more generic approach to mastering a skill. The key is to follow the three Fs: focus, feedback, fix. First, make sure you really focus on performing some task as well as you can possibly do it. Make sure to have some objective means by which to measure how well you performed the task. Then study your feedback. What did you do right and what did you do wrong? Then attempt fixing your shortcomings by coming up with exercises to improve your ability on just those aspects in which you need improvement. Do that and then repeat the whole process again. And then again. And then again. You catch my drift. For more info, see chapters 5 and 6 of Peak.

3. In her chapter in González-Ricoy & Gosseries (2016), Virginie Pérotin makes the case that, contrary to popular opinion, worker cooperatives are larger than conventional businesses, are not less capital intensive, survive at least as long as other businesses, have more stable employment, are more productive than conventional businesses (with staff working “better and smarter” and production organised more efficiently), retain a larger share of their profits than other business models, and exhibit much narrower pay differentials between executives and non-executives.

4. By the way, for reasons that are completely beyond me, Ronald Reagan once advocated for worker-owned enterprises, going as far as stating that this is "the next logical step."