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Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

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Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#111

Post by qzw »

devonkim wrote: post #46
will_brown wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness The industry (tech, startups, VC money) do bring bullshit to the front of the industry consciousness. I’ve never seen another industry push and promote “fake it till you make it” so hard. Democratizing this...disrupting that...we respect your privacy and data...DAO/code is law...Self driving cars...uber is creating good jobs.…

A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Most executives in finance have done some form of financial analysis and reporting, construction company owners have almost always done a hard day’s worth of labor, and a lot of directors have had to do some acting / camera work and whatnot. In tech (especiall…

I don't think the bullshitter problem is at all limited to the tech industry. In the financial industry there was Madoff, and not just him, but the surprising number of people who were ostensibly running their own funds who just put all the money into Madoff's hands and then took fees off the top. And having someone with a technical or engineering background at the top is no panacea against bullshit. IIRC, the top leadership of VW all started as engineers, but that didn't stop them from perpetrating the diesel fraud.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#112

Post by icedchai »

kuzehanka wrote: post #38
will_brown wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness The industry (tech, startups, VC money) do bring bullshit to the front of the industry consciousness. I’ve never seen another industry push and promote “fake it till you make it” so hard. Democratizing this...disrupting that...we respect your privacy and data...DAO/code is law...Self driving cars...uber is creating good jobs.…

I always interpreted 'fake it till you make it' as 'promise what you could do with sufficient resources'. That is fundamentally different from people who just make up random shit that sounds good to whoever has money, without any idea or plans to materialise it or whether it's even possible. You do raise a good point with Uber/theranos/dao.

It's a very blurry line between "insufficient resources" and "making stuff up." Everything is easy when you're not the one doing the work.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#113

Post by ngngngng »

BjoernKW wrote: post #102
kuzehanka wrote: post #7

The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything. The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed…

It's not that simple. There certainly are those who confidently sell something without having any actual real-life experience with the matter at hand. However, another harmful pattern is rampant in the tech industry as well: The one that assumes that technical knowledge is the only thing that's valuable and everything else (sales, marketing, business stuff in general, you name it ...) is just bullshit. This widesprea…

It's not even THAT simple.

There's a difference between thinking sales and marketing is all bullshit, and thinking that the sales and marketing people you're working with are bullshit.

A previous company of mine hired a product manager. I definitely don't think product management and direction is bullshit. But this guy just wrote "synergy" on white boards all day, made us start sizing our tasks, and never gave anyone good ideas or direction.

Hearing me complain about this, you might assume that i'm just another engineer that thinks anything but engineering is bullshit.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#114

Post by eslaught »

4ntonius8lock wrote: post #106

I dislike bullshitters and I've unfortunately had to work with many. I read the paper and something that really stuck out at me is how bullshitters were more likely to actually try and understand the problem than non bullshitters. Page 25: I think about what might have caused the problem and what I can do to solve it Non bullshitters: 85% Bullshitters: 90% I study a map and work out the best route Non bullshitters: 5…

I don't find this surprising at all. People who lie, first lie to themselves. In many cases I suspect they're being entirely genuine and don't see where they fall short of their own self-assessment.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#115

Post by rexpop »

devonkim wrote: post #46
will_brown wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness The industry (tech, startups, VC money) do bring bullshit to the front of the industry consciousness. I’ve never seen another industry push and promote “fake it till you make it” so hard. Democratizing this...disrupting that...we respect your privacy and data...DAO/code is law...Self driving cars...uber is creating good jobs.…

A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the company?” Most executives in finance have done some form of financial analysis and reporting, construction company owners have almost always done a hard day’s worth of labor, and a lot of directors have had to do some acting / camera work and whatnot. In tech (especiall…

So long as human labor is structured under Capital's impetus, we'll have such structures of idiocy because the VC is apodicticly talentless in the domain of his investment.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#116

Post by bradjohnson »

mwfunk wrote: post #61
kuzehanka wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always interpreted 'fake it till you make it' as 'promise what you could do with sufficient resources'. That is fundamentally different from people who just make up random shit that sounds good to whoever has money, without any idea or plans to materialise it or whether it's even possible. You do raise a good point with Uber/theranos/dao.

"Fake it till you make it" means, sound like you're way more confident about what you're saying than you actually are, until you become the sort of person you're presenting yourself as. It's not people making up random shit, it's people making up totally plausible sounding shit.

If the ones that are buying that shit don't know enough about how it works, it's not that difficult for a bullshitter to make the implausible sound plausible.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#118

Post by everdrive »

hirundo wrote: post #67
Fede_V wrote: post #21

If you've never experienced it before, the first time you work with someone who is a pathological liar and bullshitter is a completely disorienting experience. Normal people just don't lie that brazenly and with so little remorse - so you walk out of meetings wondering if perhaps you just misunderstood because there's no way someone would straight up lie that way. Interestingly, both of the worst bullshitters I've ev…

Sometimes a bullshitter consistently peddles untruths, but is unaware of it, and so isn't a liar, just mistaken. I grew up with an older brother like that. He regularly spouted pure bullshit that to him was Truth. That became clear once when I was struggling with math homework. He looked at the problem, pronounced that he understood it and could solve it easily. So I handed him the pencil. He didn't know he was bulls…

I've previously encountered just this same sort personality. Being pretty paranoid, it took a long wrenching journey for me to discover that he wasn't being deceptive: he just didn't have a handle on the facts, or whether or not he was competent.

Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

#120

Post by resters »

I think the word bullshitting is a harmfully imprecise way to describe what is actually several problems:

Naive over-confidence: People who lack the experience necessary to update their beliefs to more reasonable ones. I'd argue that this is both a good thing and a bad thing. When it works out well (Tesla) there are still people who are angry that it happened and call bullshit on it. Most examples of truly uncommon vision will be characterized as this sort of bullshit by skeptics, who are sometimes (in hindsight) wrong and sometimes right.

"Alpha" culture: Companies/teams where leadership is confused with stereotypical alpha behavior such as dominance, brashness, and artificial confidence/decisiveness. This one is predominantly negative, as it shuts down important thought and enquiry. To make matters worse, it creates a filter where the culture is blind to leadership that is not couched in stereotypical alpha behaviors. This is often referred to as bro culture.

Lying: Some people lie strategically about things that are important to a business or team. They do this often to serve their own goals at the expense of company goals. When looking at this one we must ask what incentives allow it to seem like a winning strategy for anyone? In my opinion it occurs when there is not a culture of trust to begin with.

Intimidation: This is similar to bro/alpha culture, but is more sinister, and has more to do with problem individuals behaving in antisocial ways and trying to opportunistically use pecking order, law of the jungle approaches to get what they want out of the situation. This resembles "bullshit" because it is a form of tactical speech that is not based in truth and is meant to create a desirable outcome for the person doing it. It is always harmful to a group dynamic and is often hard to detect because sometimes someone observing the situation will think that the person who is tactically intimidating others is more of a natural leader, or will interpret the successfully intimidated peoples' behavior as timid or un-leader-like.

Company-wide lies: All companies have an origin story, and some are more true than others. But when there is a big lie that starts at the top, it creates many opportunities for people in the organization to exploit information asymmetries to their own benefit. Since it is based on a lie, the information asymmetries exist due to politics and are not based on truth, so being observant and truth-oriented is not helpful in understanding when someone is trying to act opportunistically. This one is really bad, and the consequences are very broad and include everything from hiring or firing people based on dishonest metrics to leading to resumé inaccuracies, fudged metrics, and (worst of all) major strategic blind spots.

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