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The Rise of the Bullshittery

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Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#101

Post by iguessthislldo »

Nathanba wrote: post #85

I think bullshittery is generally underestimated as a threat and not new at all. There are entire global organizations like Scientology who are founded on bullshitting. Entire product lines, food categories and industries made for no benefit to you except the thinnest layer of taste to bullshit your senses into accepting the trash into your body or life. Bullshitting just like lying isn't merely something a few perce…

Absolutely, it's been part of humanity since well before before Ea-nasir was dealing his copper. Maybe I'm being too optimistic of human nature, but I'd like to think most of the time we don't do it concisely. I think a lot of it is earnest things we've convinced ourselves of. Now we have a have a massive industry dedicated to programs that are amazing from certain perspectives but can bullshit at a unprecedented scale. Does GenAI really change things? Maybe not fundamentally but it certainly makes it a lot easier to bullshit even if people don't mean to. The well meaning people with bad ideas are still gonna have those. Maybe an LLM will convince them it's bad (or more likely play along), but the not so well meaning people now have new tools that they can explicitly use to extend their abilities.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#102

Post by upupupandaway »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #29

> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to…

> A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.

I am 100% convinced that a significant number of job posts on LinkedIn are entirely fake and either 1) a way to farm resumes and contact details for sales 2) propaganda to make a company appear to be hiring more than it is.

Positions from companies like Andiamo, Jobgether, etc. are most likely #1 above, while Adyen, Affirm, Airwallex are the latter.

In fact I build a prototype classifier of job listings to separate true opportunities from bullshit posts, but I am too scared to publish it and get sued to oblivion.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#103

Post by iguessthislldo »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #52
sollewitt wrote: post #43

In an attention economy the thing that pays is capturing attention - a terrifyingly finite thing that determines our lived experiences. Rewarding people who are good that this is a compounding mistake.

The one good thing I hope comes from the en masse adoption for this sort of slop is that it renders the problem of the attention economy inert, because now anyone, including the platforms themselves, can now generate masses of pointless content at a whim. I hope, very very HOPE, that what that will do is that vacuous bullshit content will finally be SO abundant, so ubiquitous, that even regular people who generally d…

Right now YouTube is supposedly trying to crack down on AI-generated videos, so I think some of this is happening. I don't know how to feel about it since I keep hearing about honest niche channel getting caught up in it. Ultimately and unfortunately I think there's an equilibrium between slop vs genuine content that the platforms will tolerate or maybe even actively encourage. Youtube has GenAI tools built into it, so it's not much of a stretch for them to generate videos either if they thought they could get away with it.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#104

Post by dataviz1000 »

upupupandaway wrote: post #102
dataviz1000 wrote: post #29

> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to…

> A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda. I am 100% convinced that a significant number of job posts on LinkedIn are entirely fake and either 1) a way to farm resumes and contact details for sales 2) propaganda to make a company appear to be hiring more than it is. Positions from companies like Andiamo, Jobgether, etc. are most likely #1 above, while Adye…

I automated all the major job boards last week. I thought about creating large quantities of fake resumes with different permutations like education at MIT, Stanford, Harvard, University of Florida, ect to see where the limits of the AI filtering are. It's a nothing burger to send out 10,000 or 20,000 resumes. Figured out that I can do a fanout with AWS Lambda to bypass rate limiting with rotating IP address.

If I get desperate, I might find the the cut off for 200 - 300 companies and try to honestly get my resume into those parameters. At this time, it is below me to do that.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#105

Post by pan69 »

jareklupinski wrote: post #95
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is max…

> One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. how? the value of gold plummets the instant that the market learns that the stuff literally comes out of rear ends

> ...comes out of rear ends

Instead we know it literally comes out of the ground and the market doesn't plummet.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#107

Post by paleotrope »

sosodev wrote: post #74
eikenberry wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone knows this is true of every large enterprise shop and is one of the reasons that wall street rewards layoffs.

If Wall Street was so wise they would only reward meaningful layoffs. Laying off 10% of a company by stack ranking every team accomplishes nothing. Particularly if the company just hires the same number of cut people next quarter. If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddress…

But then you are asking hard questions. Which leaves? Which branch? How do I create a protective legal theory to prevent numerous lawsuits?

Best just to do it randomly to avoid hard decisions and lawsuits.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#108

Post by piloto_ciego »

the_42nd wrote: post #19

Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work not…

It's UBI man. All those jobs are essentially UBI.

I've been thinking about this a lot, but basically, my old job was basically superfluous and we didn't accomplish anything important but I had to pretend that it was real, important, meaningful, and progressing.

The truth is that most people's jobs are kind of unnecessary in the white collar world, and in some David Graber-esque hellscape we have to pretend that all the work is hyper important and aligned, etc.

Basically, society in the US is so opulent that for a great many people in the white collar world, it's more important that they look busy than actually do anything. It's the Pareto principle in action, or maybe a power law thing, or something where to get those few people who bust their ass and produce and add great value a ton of hanger-oners have to be a part of the org in order to facilitate that. Regardless, it's basically UBI but with meetings.

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#109

Post by negura »

this genre of content seems to trend often. i guess it's satisfying to list and neatly organize all the details of a problem. but it doesn't try to explain what lead to this. in the case of pointless jobs they need to be financed in the first place. so the monetary policy of central banks has obviously played a big role

Re: The Rise of the Bullshittery

#110

Post by CobrastanJorji »

jareklupinski wrote: post #95
CobrastanJorji wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine that you decide that you would like to try farming, and you buy some geese. One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. It is as profitable as your thousand closest neighboring farms combined. So naturally, you hire guards for the goose and experts on golden geese veterinary science to make sure that the goose is fed and healthy and is max…

> One of the geese, for whatever reason, begins to lay golden eggs. Your little farm is now unbelievably profitable. how? the value of gold plummets the instant that the market learns that the stuff literally comes out of rear ends

Law of Demand. Cheaper gold supply means that the demand for it grows tremendously. Or something.
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