Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
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Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#2A thread from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#3I've discussed and recommended this article at length with various associates and colleagues, though I haven't actually read it and have no idea what it's talking about.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#4I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about.
I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an entire team.
In many cases this is an impossible problem to solve - with non-technical executives sitting above the non-technical managers; a layer-cake of bullshitters blind to bullshitters with a vested interest (born of self-preservation) in remaining so.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#5`On Bullshit` is one of my favorite things I've ever read but it's frustrating that this paper simultaneously cites `On Bullshit` while immediately defining bullshit in a way that does not conform almost at all with the `On Bullshit`
This article starts out by defining bullshitters and therefore bullshit as: "‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. "
They at least somewhat remedy this by mentioning the better partial definition used in `On Bullshit` which is shared with the word "humbug": "deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings or attitudes”"
The important difference is that bullshit is not lies, and you do not have to "have little experience or skill" on a topic to spread bullshit on that topic, all you need is a disregard for the truth, in favor of whatever is convenient to you which could overlap with the truth or not. In this way this definition is almost directly in opposition to Frankfurt's which makes me think this paper is a bunch of bullshit.
edit: Frankfurt's own words on his definition of bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&feature=youtu.be...
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#6I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an e…
For every really-faking-it-until-they-make-it junior dev there's a goldbricking veteran spending 80% of company time on a side pursuit.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#7I’ve worked with a few people they could do case studies on.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#8I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an e…
How is the knowing developer, not with the lead title, able to survive on a team like this?
I tried escaping - from my bumpkin locale to Boston, a 3 hour trip every morning and 3 hours back, until I couldn't handle it five months later and went tail back to the same team with the same issues. Here, I'm still hopeful to eventually figure this out.
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#9I think the elephant in the room for this study is the high bullshit scores of immigrants. If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you understand something, you're probably used to having to figure it out offline - but you might say "yes" anyway, for a myriad of reasons.
Something I find disingenuous in this study is the failure to follow up on competency. "High bullshit index" individuals claim with higher frequency to be able to calculate the petrol consumption of a car, and are confident in their popularity. Are they wrong? Immigrants are more likely to bullshit when they are confronted with language they don't understand - but they are also highly experienced at figuring out things they don't understand after the fact.
I found it queer that the tasks asked about where relatively mathematical, and the domain they used to measure bullshit was also mathematical... if the checklist of "could you find the gcd of two numbers" "could you find all the complex roots of this polynomial" etc. were interpreted as "if you were prompted (in good faith) on a homework assignment to do this task, are you confident you could do it?" (this is a much more ecologically valid situation than being asked to do something meaningless or impossible), then the answer learned through hard experience might correctly be "yes", despite the respondent "not actually knowing what they were talking about".
Food for thought anyway. I think the article takes an exceptionally otherizing stance towards would be bullshitters. (And uses some... hopefully ironic? ... rhetoric. "We all know a bullshitter" is the classic fallacy of appealing to popular belief).
Re: Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]
#10I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an e…
How is the knowing developer, not with the lead title, able to survive on a team like this? I tried escaping - from my bumpkin locale to Boston, a 3 hour trip every morning and 3 hours back, until I couldn't handle it five months later and went tail back to the same team with the same issues. Here, I'm still hopeful to eventually figure this out.
Find a better company (and let me know how you managed it).