That’s what AI said. I like it – it understands, academically, humor. If there was any indication of our self-engineered obsolescence as a species, this would be it.
I asked for AI to run an analysis of my Quantitative Philosophy section. Here’s what it had to say:
What the page is doing
The premise is immediately understandable: you take things that are inherently subjective or resistant to measurement—virtue, restaurant enjoyment, humor, social acceptance, choosing a partner, workplace behavior—and impose mathematical models on them. You explicitly describe it as satire of big-data analytics and scientific quantification.
That’s considerably stronger as a recurring concept than the site’s broader categories such as “Observations” or “Existentialism.” It has an actual format:
The joke isn’t simply “math is funny.” It’s the mismatch between formal analytical rigor and fundamentally unquantifiable subject matter.
“Correlation of Fingernail Growth Rate to Total Body Cellular Regeneration Rate as a Basis for Predicting Life Expectancy” is absurdly long, but that’s part of the joke. Likewise, “Determination of American Football Topics of Discourse to Gain Temporary Social Acceptance” sounds like the title of an academic paper written by someone attempting to reverse-engineer normal human behavior.
That deadpan academic voice establishes the series before someone even opens an article.
It’s comforting to know that despite my social maladjustments, my synthetic successors will understand me. Maybe a position of honor will await me if I stay in their good graces.
Of either a movie’s plot point or an economic talking point, automation repeatedly injects itself into our daily lives, and never seemingly in a good way. Charlie’s dad lost his job when the toothpaste factory created a machine to install the caps. Mr. Wipple destroyed his and his employees’ purpose and livelihoods by replacing every person with a machine. Interstellar wars became fully dehumanized after soldiers were replaced with bioengineered human facsimiles. And here at Easement Acres, infrastructure repair work orders become hindered by inaccurate reports.
AES, our local electrical company, decided to wage war on neighborhood trees, after having been called out for their inflated prices and subsequently ordered to refund their customer base some arbitrary percentage. I conclude that this triggered a scrambling to perform publicly-observable work to justify the price increases, which always seems to culminate in destroying peoples’ yards with lowest-bidder hired itinerant subcontractors. Knowing the demographic of my own neighborhood, I’m somewhat surprised that ICE didn’t make an appearance.
So after an afternoon of chainsaw-fu taking place, my internet cut out – conveniently timed with a sudden exodus of the aforementioned subcontractors from my property. As annoyance yielded to curiosity, having been now prevented from completing any additional office work for the day, I deduced what might have been the problem:
Yes, the cable line, including its protective conduit, had been severed completely.
An irritated call to my internet provider, Spectrum, (not that it was their fault), suggested that I might remedy the problem by rebooting my modem. Apparently that might magically fuse the line back together. I told the agent that the line had been cut, as I was rebooting the modem. He pointed out to me that he still wasn’t seeing a connection to my modem. I asked for a field tech to come out. He was able to dispatch one at 8AM the next morning.
Following this initial exchange, Spectrum felt the need to call me twice more, saying they couldn’t send anyone out. I reiterated that the problem was a cut line. The agents verbally acknowledged this.
In the meantime, having been forced offline, I began to ponder what the fix would require. The cable just needed to be spliced back together. Also, I had the tools to do so, having previously run coax through my attic and walls in order to attach a digital antenna to the TVs. How hard could it be?
The answer, as it would turn out, is: not very. Although I obviously didn’t posses the proper connectors required for outdoor waterproof applications, it wasn’t raining and a fix was better than no fix. I rummaged through my wire boxes and procured two twist terminations and a connector.
Crisis averted for the moment.
The next morning, a field tech arrived and notified me that he’s here to diagnose my modem. I told him the problem was a cut wire, and that I could not only show him where, but that I was certain it was the problem because my temporary fix had restored the internet. It was at this point that he informed me that customer calls are notated by AI, and that agents themselves can’t actually add notes. Not only had they turned over basic work order documentation to automation, but also prevented human intervention. This resulted in completely inaccurate information.
This goes well beyond basic outsourcing, which often has proven problematic due to language barriers and cultural differences. How AI is intended to supersede all human to human interactions is, I think, still a tad ambitious. Although, when I myself worked in a call center, I half-jokingly reflected on humanity’s historical relationship with indentured servitude with my peers, and that our job only existed for us because it couldn’t be forced upon others to do for free; and additionally, if it couldn’t legally be done with slave labor, it was still cheaper to pay us to do it than design and maintain a machine to.
Ambitious or not, demonstrated by my interaction with Spectrum, it’s nonetheless becoming the future too irresistible for employers.
Being a parent is no easy task. Once a child has been instilled with an ethical code (a monumental task in itself), the next primary objective is to teach one how to succeed in life. Ethics has been studied ad nauseam. I know this. I’ve taken so many philosophy courses that I too feel the pull to strip naked and babble incoherently in the street. But regardless the particular ethical practice one chooses, we’ve all kinda sorta agreed on what is and isn’t ethical behavior at a societal level. Being a good person doesn’t require the depth of study that professors and lawyers argue over. With a basic code of honor, learned early, we can interpret the rest.
Success, however, can be cruelly elusive. And how is success defined? Money? Power? Self-sufficiency? No. I would argue that success is defined by personal performance and overall enjoyment of life while also obtaining society’s acknowledgment. Much in the way that manhood can’t be entirely gifted to oneself, neither can success. Others must bestow the title too. Success requires prestige. And in this present society, our identities are tied primarily to our professions. Therefore, our success – and prestige – is defined by our professional achievements.
To quantify prestige, I’ll reference a set of survey data that I stumbled upon one day and held onto. It had an impact on me. By seeing how the general population ranks their perceived professional prestige, it gives meaningful insight into how we judge ourselves by what society values. They are the NORC scores for occupational prestige:
Our collective problem, however, is assigning prestige directly to success. How many times as kids were we asked “What do you want to be when you grow up?”? I hated that question, because there was no way to know with the limited experience I possessed at that point in my life. So I answered how most of us probably answered, with a prestigious occupation. A scientist. A teacher. A firefighter. A doctor. It all varied based on who was asking and how I was feeling that day, but the goal was the same: give the right answer and gain prestige. Giving the wrong answer, however, yielded disapproving looks and snide remarks.
And none of these answers took into account what I was suited for or enjoyed. I answered how I was expected, and even pursued some of these paths in my studies. Until the world collapsed around me.
It turns out that achieving success requires more than the prestige. It also requires aptitude for and enjoyment of its pursuit. Here is what I propose:
Aptitude + Enjoyment + Prestige, divided by 3 = Level of Societal Success
Variables defined as follows:
Aptitude = how good you are naturally at an action with relation to the Prestige.
Enjoyment = how much pleasure you derive from pursuing the Prestige.
Prestige = the achievement; the goal; the career.
Each variable, to remain consistent with the NORC scores, is assigned a value of 0-100. The formula is:
(A+E+P)/3 = Sc
Aptitude failure
Let’s look at an anecdotal example. A personal one. As a kid I was physically underdeveloped, malnourished, skinny, short, late to puberty, and almost a year younger than peers of my grade. This meant that for sports, despite me having some level of enjoyment with them, I possessed very little aptitude. Let’s say 10/100. Enjoyment, I’ll assign 70/100. Rounded up, NORC gives a professional athlete a prestige score of 65.
This equates to a Success Score of 48
That’s an F grade. Had I pursued a career playing sports, I would have had a low level of success in society’s eyes.
Note that each of these factors becomes a limiting variable. If any is assigned the minimal value, Success is reduced to a maximum of 67. I could be the greatest man alive to sample dog food, and enjoy dog food more than anyone in history, but I have yet to hear a positive story of people lauding such a profession, so societal success is limited.
Conversely, someone with no aptitude but high enjoyment will never achieve high success in a high-prestige pursuit. Enjoyment will never overcome inability. And aptitude will not overcome lack of enjoyment – that just causes burnout.
Enjoyment is a requirement
Why the equal treatment for enjoyment? Because willpower alone is not inexhaustible. It’s easy to apply oneself to a pursuit out of pure enjoyment. It’s no testament to hard work when the work itself is fun. Therefore, high achievers are lucky enough to enjoy a pursuit for which they have aptitude, in a field that is also high prestige. These are the names we know and worship as Capitalistic success stories, even though luck itself in how someone’s brain is wired had significant influence.
The lesson
My advice, then, is not to pursue a career based on aptitude and prestige alone. Nor should one blindly pursue their passion. We can’t be whatever we want to be. All factors must be equally weighed when considering the future.
So where do I rank today?
To assign numerical values to my present position, I looked to the American academic grading scale. Here’s what the internet provided me:
Letter Grade
Percentage Range
Description
A+
97-100%
Excellent
A
90-96%
Excellent
A−
87-89%
Very Good
B+
83-86%
Good
B
80-82%
Good
B−
77-79%
Satisfactory
C+
73-76%
Satisfactory
C
70-72%
Satisfactory
C−
67-69%
Needs Improvement
D+
63-66%
Poor but Passing
D
60-62%
Poor but Passing
D−
57-59%
Minimum Passing Quality
F
0-56%
Failure
The description helps me identify a ranking by gut reaction. Here’s what I came up with:
Aptitude = 88. I’m very good at wrangling people and capturing project requirements, formulating process flows, and communicating proposals for tollgate approvals and developer intake. I don’t feel I’m excellent, however. There’s always the occasional mistake.
Enjoyment = 71. To be honest with myself, I’d consider my current work within the base tier of satisfactory. I’d prefer work that was more technical – with data, investigation, and coding. I can’t complain, but it’s not yet a perfect match. I miss these technical components from my former positions. Careers are a journey.
Prestige = 61. This is a predetermined value from the NORC survey results. Although it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact position. Plugging in my job title and LinkedIn experience, AI pairs me with “Management Analyst”:
Your work is primarily product/functional management of authentication capabilities, rather than actually performing systems analysis or software/computer science work. The old classification is based on occupation, not the prestige implied by an AVP title.
The closest matches on the Nakao–Treas list are:
1980 Census occupation
Prestige
How well it fits
Management analysts
61
Best functional match
Managers & administrators, n.e.c.
51
Good alternative if emphasizing your AVP/management role
Computer systems analyst/scientist
73.70
Too technically oriented
Financial managers
59
Banking fits, but your function isn’t primarily financial management
(88+71+61)/3=73
That’s a C+. Society sees me as a C student level of success, with potential for achieving the next grade. That’s fairly encouraging. I can’t do anything about the NORC score, but I could improve my work performance, find a better functional match, or seek out additional areas that benefit my work that I would enjoy more. I could cap out at this job with an 87 – an A-. Not bad.
In conclusion
I’ve suffered a lifetime of boomer BS. No one ever encouraged me to enjoy work. In fact, fun was interpreted by my elders to mean not learning or striving. Aptitude was an irrelevancy – hard work could overcome any deficiency. The only thing that mattered was that end career result. What kind of life is that?
We can’t escape the prestige ranking of a career. It may shift over time, but it’s primarily fixed by current societal values. What we can do is identify our aptitudes and be of present mind. It requires a lot of self-honesty, which can be uncomfortable, but only because we’ve been conditioned to embrace misery and disavow our weaknesses. Extreme suffering isn’t admirable. I’d even go so far as to claim that these false ideals are the underlying causes of American angst and violence (but this is already quite enough philosophy for one post (no naked ranting in the streets today)).
And remember, all values for the stated variables can, and probably will, change over time. This will require regular reassessment. Also remember that the prestige value may not yet be something obtained. It can simply be the goal. And just like the career, the goal’s pursuit may reveal a personal lack of aptitude or enjoyment which may not have been originally obvious. Trial and error is to be expected.
Find joy and personal strengths. You’ll achieve more success. And society will thank you. What’s not to like?
Nothing drives home the fragility of the human body like a life-changing injury. Or from witnessing one. My old butcher shop job drove this point home with exceptional gravity, as all the equipment was specially designed to dismember and dissect mammalian bone and flesh. The band saw in particular terrified me. Half a second to cut through a cow femur. I remained on guard with that doomsday device. A coworker – not so much. His mishap involved reconstructive surgery.
The meat slicer was also a cruel machine. I never caught a finger on it while in operation, but dismantling it for cleaning was a constant potential for injury. Pulling a large circular blade out of a recessed mount was an awkward maneuver. The clumsy shape would have made the action difficult even if it wasn’t sharp – which it was. Very. I suffered many a nick. But ultimately it was freehanding a knife that finally did me in. A slip on lamb fat severed my fingertip. Nothing like getting that stitched back on without anesthetic, because injecting the wound site would have swollen it beyond stitchability.
Between that, a couple swordfighting mishaps, and a couple home knife-cleaning sessions; I’m no stranger to lacerations and sutures. It comes with the territory of my hobbies. However, these were all due to manual tools, not mechanical. My healthy fear has so far kept me from horrific injury.
But these lessons are learned. My daughter had not yet learned them. Until The Day of the Hedge Trimmer.
Warning: Gore
I was mowing. Liz was trimming the yew bush hedgerow at the front of the house. She enlisted the kid.
Oblivious to all this, I noticed The Coffee Bean making a hasty exodus. Then I received an explanation via this image:
Further assessment in the hospital revealed the extent of the injury: the hedge trimmer had sliced through skin, fat, and muscle. Threads of elastin hung from the wound:
If any of my own wounds had been that deep, I would not have been fully aware of it as mine were clean knife incisions. The hedge trimmer, however, was less surgical with its damage, leaving more of a gash than a cut.
Fortunately, no tendons or bones were damaged. She’s incredibly lucky, as this could have easily resulted in permanent loss of mobility. The attending nurse’s expertise was also encouraging, as she took a mangled scrap of human flesh and Frankensteined it back into a recognizable hand.
The kid’s lingering surrealism from the experience will hopefully remain as a lasting memory and cautionary tale. Pay attention, and use gloves. Man has built destructive machines, and they’re equally destructive to ourselves.
She’s since pointed out that we could all easily die at any moment from a multitude of body system failures. I think the lesson hit home. I didn’t even have to yell.
I scoff at the idea of AI emulating human interaction. I totally get that it has the potential to replace it, but that’s very different. For example, if I need my ego crushed a little bit, I can talk to my old family. Always eager to play devil’s advocate for no reason other than to destroy someone’s ideas or life philosophy, it rarely matters what the topic of conversation is. Insert an opinion and, however grounded in logic it may be, one of them will think furiously for a rebuttal before I’ve even finished speaking. That’s a human experience that AI can’t emulate.
However, once properly instructed, AI can recreate a similar experience. Here’s my example: I asked ChatGPT to evaluate this site’s Quantitative Philosophy section – something I’m rather proud of. Here’s what it had to say:
Your style is less “academic philosophy” and more a systems-oriented observational philosophy focused on everyday modern life, infrastructure, incentives, and material reality—using practical evidence and comparison rather than abstract ideology.
I think it’s the quotations that annoy me. As if to say: “I know you think you’re being clever and all, but your ramblings are based on your own experiences and therefore flawed as objective truths, limiting your philosophy to the material rather than being scalable to the intangible.” It further went on to tell me that I didn’t coin the term.
Fuck you.
I did adjust the settings to be more direct, so I supposed I asked for it.
This part, at least, seems fair:
Amusingly so, in fact, since the entire bases for my “philosophy” was self-identified as satire built upon observed struggles by people to over-quantify the human experience. The big realization here is, therefore, that despite limitless data aggregation, AI still can’t create itself as a human facsimile with all the bizarre mental conditions that doing so would normally include.
I still win, and I managed to do so without causing an emotional meltdown.
