“We were all needed for the upload project. There are others around the world who are also indispensable. But not everyone is indispensable. Look at what you did for Dis, keeping her spirits up and distracting her. You were very good, but there are others who are just as good. If you hadn’t been there, someone else would have done the job.
“Now take Dis. She was indispensable. We couldn’t bring her back without her! We’re in different fields, but I follow hers closely. There likely isn’t anyone else in the world who can do what she does. She is literally one of a kind. I’m not one of a kind—I’m good, but at the end of the day, I’m an applied mathematician with pretenses to pure math. There are pure math people who spend ten years contemplating the algebra necessary to prove the topological equivalence of a coffee cup and a donut. Wizards from another dimension. Your people are all fighting self-serving bullshit, the root of all evil. There’s no bullshit more self-serving than the idea that you’re a precious snowflake, irreplaceable and deserving to be treated like a thoroughbred, when there are ten more just like you who’d do your job every bit as well. Especially when you’re supporting the one person who really can’t be replaced.”
“I’ve heard this all. My dad used it to explain paying his workers as little as he could get away with, while taking as much pay as he could get away with. I told him: he might have an ‘indispensable’ skill for running the business, but he couldn’t do it himself. The reason everyone else shows up to help him isn’t because of his magic ‘indispensable’ skill, either. It’s because they need money, and he has it.”
Gretyl’s jaw worked. “You’re assuming that because zottas talk about meritocracy, and because they’re full of shit, merit must be full of shit. It’s like astrology and astronomy: astrology talks about orbital mechanics and so does astronomy. But astronomers talk about orbital mechanics because they’ve systematically observed the sky, built falsifiable hypotheses from observations, and proceeded from there. Astrologers talk about orbital mechanics because it sounds sciencey and helps them kid the suckers.”
“My dad’s an astrologer then?”
“That’s an insult to astrologers.” They laughed. Some of the tension boiled off of Iceweasel. They’d bonded over talking shit about her dad. Gretyl used him as an avatar of every evil of the system. Iceweasel was pleased to go along with that for her own reasons. “Your dad is like a bloated duke who’s hired court astrologers to sacrifice chickens and reassure him that he’s the cat’s ass.”
“You’re talking about economists,” she said.
“Of course I’m talking about economists! I think you have to be a mathematician to appreciate how full of shit economists are, how astrological their equations are. No offense to your egalitarian soul, but you lack the training to understand how deeply bogus those neat equations are.”
Iceweasel stiffened. She knew Gretyl was kidding, but didn’t like to be told she “wasn’t qualified” to have a discussion, even in jest. She pushed the feeling down, strove to access the part of her that lit up when Limpopo described this stuff.
If Gretyl noticed, she gave no sign: “Your dad hires economists for intellectual cover, to prove his dynastic fortunes and political influence are the outcome of a complex, self-correcting mechanism with the mystical power to pluck the deserving out of the teeming mass of humanity and elevate them so they can wisely guide us. They have a sciencey vocabulary conceived of solely to praise people like your father. Like job creator. As though we need jobs! I mean, if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that I never want to have a job again. I do math because I can’t stop. Because I’ve found people who need my math to do something amazing.
“If you need to pay me to do math, that’s because a) you’ve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A ‘job creator’ is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you don’t want to do.
“I used to watch you kids do your Communist parties, when I was in default and pretending any of that shit mattered. I’d get so angry at you, beyond any sane response. It wasn’t until I walked away that I figured out why: because every time you broke into an empty factory and turned the machines on, you proved I was a plow horse whose poor lips had been scarred by the bit in my teeth as I pulled a cart for the man with the whip and the feedbag.
“That’s my point about the difference between the kind of meritocracy we have in the university and the bullshit the zottas swim in. When we say that Amanda is a better mathematician than Gretyl, we mean there are things Amanda can do that Gretyl can’t. They’re both nice people, but if there’s a really important math problem, you’re better off with Amanda than Gretyl.”
Limpopo’s voice ricocheted in Iceweasel’s mind. “But Amanda can’t do it all. Unless she’s working on a one-woman problem, she’ll have to cooperate with others. If she sucks at that, it might take a hundred times more work in total to get it done than if Gretyl—who’s good at sharing her toys and keeping everyone purring—were the boss. This isn’t anecdote—as you keep telling me, the plural of anecdote is not fact. Limpopo sent around this meta-analysis from the Walkaway Journal of Organizational Studies that compared the productivity of programmers. It broke out the work programmers did as individuals and inside groups. It found that even though there were programmers who could produce code that was a hundred times better than the median—one percent as many bugs, one hundred times more memory efficiency—that this kind of insane virtuosity was only weakly correlated with achievement in groups.”
Gretyl sat up, momentarily distracting Iceweasel with her body. “Explain that?”
“I just read the summary and skimmed the stats and the methodology for smooshing together the different data sets. The tldr is these hacker-wizards who produce better code than anyone were often so hard to work with that they made everyone else’s work worse, buggier and slower. The amount of time they had to spend fixing that code slowed them down so much, it ate up their virtuosity gains.
“Attempts to put together ‘Manhattan Project’ teams made from wizards without normal dumb-asses like me showed exactly the same effect.