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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]

#171

Post by misterman0 »

thanatropism wrote: post #165
misterman0 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear! For the love of Jesus Christ, the bullshitting in our industry must stop! This is my main gripe with our industry and the reason I've been contemplating getting the fuck out of Dodge on, holy shit, so, so many occasions. I've been in it for 25 years+. But, people who are full of shit need to shut the fuckz up. It takes a significant amount of civil courage to take tone in a meeting full of bosses. But if…

ESL here. What is "take tone"?

Sing!

Edit: in case anyone thinks I'm trying to sing the gospel of The Christ, then you are wrong. I'm not a Christian. I'm much more in favor of rationality. I'm using the name of The Lord as a kind of "click-bait" if you will. But you didn't realize I as being doubly-sarcastic, so I realize now why I'm being down-voted.

Shame on me for trying to be witty.

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

#172

Post by mmsimanga »

onemoresoop wrote: post #77
stelfer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The realization that I came to was that by speaking up I was usually asking a question that many people were not asking; by providing a strong opinion it would help to catalyze deliberate action. If you stay silent we'll never get anything really done.

There are even bullshit questions, ones that give the appearance that one has an idea or an insight when in fact they end up convolution the path to a solution that eventually emerges naturally...

The best bullshit question is always to ask developers if they are sure their solution is foolproof. This has two nice side effects if you are looking to suck up to management. 1)It shows you are concerned about the project/product/company. 2) Should something go wrong even if it is the tiniest thing you like you had a point. You get all this while not taking the risk of doing the implementation. That is bullshit 101.

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

#173

Post by n05tradamu5 »

It seems like "bullshit", in the way that it is measured in this paper, is an analog to confidence and risk taking. The groups that were most likely to bullshit (high socio-economic status, male, immigrant, North American) are generally groups who have been exposed to strategic risk taking that has paid off. "Bullshitters", in the context of this paper, seem to be the ones who are willing to put their hands up and have the confidence to explore ideas and concepts that are at the fringes of their skill and knowledge sets. This is very different than the colloquial idea of a bullshitter.

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

#174

Post by cm2012 »

mathattack wrote: post #161

The article seems to be catching overconfidence (a human bias) as opposed to BS (a disregard for truth). Or am I missing it?

I mean, if you say you know a made up branch of math very well - isn't that BS? That's what the researchers tested (they asked students to rate themselves in 16 branches of mathematics, 3 were completely made up)

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

#175

Post by scruple »

plutonorm wrote: post #47
stelfer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The realization that I came to was that by speaking up I was usually asking a question that many people were not asking; by providing a strong opinion it would help to catalyze deliberate action. If you stay silent we'll never get anything really done.

Yeah, but I find I usually take a social hit by asking the question. A good 80% of those listening will think that you simply don't understand something. The other 20% are either indifferent or actively threatened by the observation. It doesn't pay to speak up about anything, you just get talked down to by those who are bullshitting.

I once stood up, as an intermediate level software engineer, in a meeting with executives and senior managers and senior engineering leadership, and identified multiple areas where a consultancy, who we were entering into a partnership with, was utterly full of shit. Isolating not only where the technical solutions wouldn't meet the technical challenge, but also in areas of outright legal / regulatory violation.

You know what I got for it? I was asked not to return to the meeting that afternoon. They went forward and everyone was happy and confident that everything would be perfect. I didn't get a promotion that year, and I do believe it was in no small part because of the fact that I called out specific instances of bullshit, and I earned a reputation that persisted there as a person who torpedoes progress.

Well... ~3 years after that meeting, and having watched many millions of dollars evaporate, we're in litigation with that consultancy. Yet, the people who made those original decisions had gone from manager to Director or VP. They go on to make other insanely stupid fucking decisions, without consequence, and with an even wider reach because of their shiny new titles. Wasting more and more resources and causing pain for the folks under them.

There's no justice here. The bullshitters have won.

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

#176

Post by btilly »

forgotmypw wrote: post #158
vonmoltke wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "I worked the assembly line and now I'm the CEO" is Hollywood fiction or outright lies in 99% of the cases. Do you have a citation for 99% or are you... bullshitting?

Actually, this is what my PhD thesis is about. See doi.13376942/8008135.2006/foo

That isn't a working link.

Is it somewhere online?

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

#177

Post by allenu »

Spooky23 wrote: post #20
wsdfsayy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that if you're an IC you generally have to produce actual work that will be evaluated at some point. It's of course possible to BS your way into showing your manager you did more than you actually did or better than what you actually produced. If you're in management , then your job becomes mostly talking/meetings, which is much more conducive to "hand waving," which is probably why there are so man…

No way. Plenty of people drift through life getting other people to do work for them.

Bullshitters are good at presenting the work they're doing as very challenging even when it's trivial, so they can also just ride simple a task for a long time.

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

#178

Post by bartread »

bigred100 wrote: post #79
adamnemecek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are the fizzbuzzers real? I feel like their existence is somewhat mythological.

A friend of a friend asked some highly confident guy how to do fizzbuzz in an interview and he failed. It does happen apparently

I'm probably not the friend of a friend you're talking about but I've asked confident, articulate people to solve fizzbuzz and similar toy problems many times, only for them to fail hard.

Nowadays I tend to use such problems as pre-screeners in a short telephone interview[1] before inviting candidates to attend a full face to face interview because it saves wasting everybody's time, including the candidate's.

Sad but true.

[1] We use codeshare.io or, if it's oversubscribed, Google Docs. Massively prefer the former because it includes syntax highlighting and support for many different languages, so it feels much more like a decent code editor. With Google Docs you're using a word processor which is far from ideal for many reasons, including that you feel like you're fighting autocorrect the whole time.

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

#179

Post by pintxo »

minikites wrote: post #138
trevor-e wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think academia is a special brooding ground for this kind of people. Everyone is worried about their own professional reputation since it sticks with them for a long time — unlike a regular job where you can jump around easier — so very few people are willing to put theirs on the line unless they have undeniable proof. There's also a big power dynamic at play where underlings don't want to question a senior profess…

>There's also a big power dynamic at play where underlings don't want to question a senior professor because obviously the professor knows what they're doing. This exists much more directly in business. Questioning your boss can lead to you getting fired by that boss. A senior professor can't fire an adjunct. A dean can't arbitrarily fire a professor with tenure.

Do you believe a Phd student should risk questioning his supervisor? Which could likely end a planned career in science right there?

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

#180

Post by thecatspaw »

forgotmypw wrote: post #158
vonmoltke wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The "I worked the assembly line and now I'm the CEO" is Hollywood fiction or outright lies in 99% of the cases. Do you have a citation for 99% or are you... bullshitting?

Actually, this is what my PhD thesis is about. See doi.13376942/8008135.2006/foo

considering that it spells leet 69 42 boobies 2006 foo, I doubt it
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