231–240 of 270 posts
I'm amazed Ireland is so low on the bullshit scale. I feel like we're amazingly good at it. Actually I would say that the country is full of quite subtle bullshitters. I think they gamed the test.
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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…
Theranos was a poster child for what you describe, all the engineers/lab analysts who complained were systematically gotten rid of and threatened. People who invested in or made deals with the company did zero due diligence. They are either disconnected from reality, or they think it's one big game. Reading the book "Bad Blood" is so unnerving. And yes, you are absolutely right!
A common experience is that the bullshitter will behave semi-reasonably until they have stuffed up, and will then seek to cover up what happened, including by pathologically lying. If you are forced to work in a flat org structure with such a person you need to find another job, because otherwise their bullshit will come back to haunt you.
In reality, a lot of BSers are a byproduct of the environment society has created. In my opinion, two main factors come into play: information asymmetry and base expectation. I'll exemplify a single test case with multiple potential outcomes:
Consultant demos a solution and he believes he can deliver X item by Y date.
- He may truly believe that, even though he may not be accounting for factors that are outside his control
- Teams and society have always found a need to have someone(s) take the lead. Since folks have limited intel while having the need to guide others, they will sometimes wing it
- He may wing it because if he doesn't and says he is not certain, it becomes unacceptable to the other party
- He may bs because nobody has raised his lie before and if they did, the individual still found value in acting that way in the long run.
Sometimes we may not realize, but our actions or lack there of can have a direct impact on how others are incentivized to act
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I've seen people fail fizz buzz firsthand.
There are two ways of “doing fizzbuzz” or any other small interview programming problem 1) in an editor, iteratively, until it works. This is the correct way. Every developer should manage to solve FizzBuzz in this setting. 2) By writing it on paper or a whiteboard without feedback. Even the greatest developer in the world would randomly fail this. It provides zero information about the capability of a developer and…
(I would argue that 'now, find a bug' is a good follow up question in most any coding interview, regardless of how perfect the first draft was...)
I have to admit I was wondering after the first couple pages if I was being bullshitted by reading it. Really good though.
> They present experiment participants with “pseudo-profound bullshit” - vacuous statements constructed out of buzzwords - to ascertain when they can differentiate bullshit from meaningful statements and create a Bullshit Receptivity (BSR) scale.
Wouldn’t that be meta.
When job postings are full of trivial BS language, why complain that some people are completely serious about playing that BS game? It's a wart of contemporary corporate culture, particularly in the tech sector. When you are searching for a "blockchain expert to influence the team", you are attracting only extrovert types maybe with good communication abilities, not a modest and calm guy possessing a sense of inner p…
I once read a wanted ad that described how their company was focused on AI, blockchains, UX, IOT, cloud computing and Big Data. That was the coveted bullshit, buzzword bingo I'd always heard about!
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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.
Bullshitters never really followed this. It's the Trump game. Keep talking, making stuff up, while moving faster in the direction you want. And it's too hard to keep up, so implicitly people believe portions of it.
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>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?