Black Swan author: An employee is basically an “obedient, housebroken dog.”

Black Swan author: An employee is basically an “obedient, housebroken dog.”(linkedin.com)

23 points by jcarpio 4 years ago | 14 comments

Unless you are independently wealthy (good on you) you always work for someone. If not your employer, then you work directly for your customers. Your customers can often be very unrealistic and unreasonable, and it requires time, effort, and grey hairs to keep them happy. I often find myself humming "And I'm one step ahead of the shoe shine, two steps away from the county line, just trying to keep my customers satisfied." Wise words by Paul Simon.

ThrowawayR2 4 years ago |

The parable of the wolf and dog might be motivating at first glance but one has to wonder what happened to the hungry wolf afterwards? In the wild, animals live a rather precarious existence, fight and eat each other to survive, and die of starvation and disease in untold numbers. "The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?" ― Angela Y. Davis

What exactly is it that Mr. Taleb proposes we do? Even starting one's own business means inflicting the state of being a domesticated dog upon others which seems even less laudable than being a domesticated dog oneself.

krapp 4 years ago | |

>The parable of the wolf and dog might be motivating at first glance but one has to wonder what happened to the hungry wolf afterwards?

In real life, of course, the wolf just eats the dog because it's a dog eat dog world, and trading your next meal for ideological purity isn't something wolves do, it's a privilege afforded to dogs who sometimes like to imagine themselves as wolves.

perl4ever 4 years ago | | |

>the wolf just eats the dog

Wolves eat livestock, not being trained otherwise. Wolves are rare in a lot of places where they used to be numerous, coincidence?

twobitshifter 4 years ago | |

Yeah, that fable isn’t the greatest. The dog could run away but it benefits from the arrangement and in many countries dogs don’t even have collars - yet they still return home.

The wolf like an entrepreneur is still a slave to survival just with higher stakes. You may think that you don’t have a boss, but you still have clients/customers in the end. Freedom (Financial independence) is gained once you can collect rents, investment income, or delegate responsibilities - but someone else is now your ‘slave’ in those cases.

The company man in the tropical paradise was a strange example. The company gives him a better life than he would have otherwise had and let’s him live like a king - so he supports the company. Is there any treatment of employees possible that Taleb would think is a fair shake? Perhaps because the title is “skin in the game” he thinks they must make their income through company stock?

MattGaiser 4 years ago |

> Evidence of submission is displayed by the employee’s going through years depriving himself of his personal freedom for nine hours every day, his ritualistic and punctual arrival at an office, his denying himself his own schedule, and his not having beaten up anyone on the way back home after a bad day. He is an obedient, housebroken dog.

And in exchange I get to not really care about complicated things I do not enjoy other than whether it indicates I need to go find an owner with more dog food, I practically get to use many of those hours at work as I please, and at least as a professional, I can carve out hours as required for other things.

partomniscient 4 years ago |

Nassim Nicholas Taleb may be right about some things some of the time. He's also egotistical, arrogrant and painful to read/listen to. Plus this article is on Linked in, another self-serving entity.

The answer (as usual) is 'it depends'.

The trend for employers is that they want unreasonable loyalty and/or employees as interchangable parts and the power to rearrange them at a whim.

Not all employers are like this, although many of them are.

I have to wonder whether posting of this 3 year old article is just an attempt at exploiting the long tail of his book sales?

March_f6 4 years ago |

The meta to this is that even without an employer you are doomed to be an "entrepreneur of the self." The employer/employee relationship has essentially been internalized to the extent that we are always exploiting ourselves to one degree or another.

jpindar 4 years ago |

Every obedient, housebroken dog I know seems very happy.

alisonkisk 4 years ago |

Is being housebroken a bad thing? I don't want to live in my own filth.

the_third_wave 4 years ago | |

The alternative to being housebroken is not to live in your own filth, it is to live in freedom without fetters and chains. To take the dog comparison a bit further, the alternative to that housebroken dog is a free wolf.

ThrowawayR2 4 years ago | | |

> "it is to live in freedom without fetters and chains"

Except that wolves are pack animals who work for the good of their pack, which isn't freedom. Solitary wolves exist but it's because they're trying to create their own pack.