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Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees. Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comf

Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees. Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems. In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays. And, the greater that decay, the more wool must be spun to pull over our eyes. It is said that, in North Korea, the only state organ that worked every single day during its great famine, was its propaganda department. In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. A movement shouldn't center around some vaguery, nor should it rely on each individual's moral fiber. Instead, a better approach would be to determine what bullshit is the everyday kind versus the kind concealing systemic failures in our present and future society, e.g. "Bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income, or "Corporate Social Responsibility" -> Tax Avoidance . Finding and solving the latter would reduce the need for, and thereby existence of, the more unbearable bullshit. Attack the disease, not just its symptoms.

sitkack 9y ago
> Bullshit is organizational self-deception I have known companies that were entirely run on the stuff. C-levels and wannabe C-levels would spew it in every direction. It was simply a signaling mechanism that you were a company player. It was so patent that it could serve no other purpose. If one rotated it the correct way, it was not unlike a Monty Python sketch. At some point I had a list of banned words, because they had lost all meaning, turning only into rest stop on a Markov chain road-trip. It simply wasn't possible to think with them, the Sapir-Whorf-Frankfurt Hypothesis.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  How did they convince their customers they we're worth paying?
  - sitkack 9y ago
    It was a mid-range casual gaming publisher. Most of the BS wasn't obviously customer facing.
dominotw 9y ago
Do you have a reference re: north Korea comment. I am so interested in what actually went down but so little official information has reached the picking through refugees.
- hitekker 9y ago
  It comes from a passage in "The Cleanest Race" by B.R. Myers[1], which I recommend as a lens into the internal effects of North Korea's propaganda >"One colleague told me he finds the North Korean personality cult too absurd to take seriously; indeed, he doubts whether even the leadership believes it. But no regime would go to such enormous expense, year in, year out for sixty years, to inculcate into its citizens a worldview to which it did not itself subscribe. (The only institution in the country that did not miss a beat during the famine of the mid-1990s was the propaganda apparatus.” There was another book on North Korea which corroborated this statement with actual numbers; I'm having trouble pulling it up at the moment. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Cleanest-Race-Koreans-Themselves-Matters/dp/1935554344 https://www.amazon.com/Cleanest-Race-Koreans-Themselves-Matt...
  - flatfilefan 9y ago
    http://fortune.com/2017/12/27/world-richest-trillion-dollars-2017/ http://fortune.com/2017/12/27/world-richest-trillion-dollars... On average every ten of these 500 people are adding whole GDP of North Korea into their pocket. There must be a lot of social engineering to control this wealth flow.
    - adventured 9y ago
      That's more a statement of just how backwards North Korea is in an increasingly prosperous world in which the median standard of living is at an all-time high and continues to rise by the year, famines are between extremely rare and non-existent, and global poverty is at an all-time low. It looks increasingly like North Korea may be among the very last of the failed state hold-outs. Even Cuba looks like it's set to change considerably for the better in the coming years.
  - 9y ago
stingraycharles 9y ago
> In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. It already exists, it’s called “radical honesty”. http://firstround.com/review/humans-hate-being-spun-how-to-practice-radical-honesty-from-the-woman-who-defined-netflixs-culture/ http://firstround.com/review/humans-hate-being-spun-how-to-p...
- hitekker 9y ago
  Oh man. The subtle spinning of her tenure at Netflix and the omission of her involuntary firing makes the irony rather palpable.
- sidlls 9y ago
  The best thing about the Netflix culture deck linked in that article is how much "bullshit" it contains. The part about "adequate performance gets a generous severance" is especially amusing, since most measures of performance are also bullshit. It's also "we only work with the best" re-worded.
temporallobe 9y ago
As usual, the really interesting bits are in the comments. I especially find "bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income especially true. I've always thought the same thing for as long as I've had a professional career. I worked in the aerospace industry as my first programming job and saw so much bullshit flying left and right, and identified that at least 60% of my coworkers and 80% of my bosses did exactly nothing but bullshit like reporting and summarizing on things that were already reported or summarized, or creating useless documentation that had to be created because of some arbitrary standards. We were very top-heavy and at one point I saw a hilarious org chart where there were more managers than engineers. Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. Now, 20ish years later, I'm pretty damn jaded and the bullshit has only increased, but now it's just more cleverly disguised in management methodologies like "SCRUM" and "Agile", with all of that deeply-imbedded culture and terminology baked into our everyday tools like the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Kahnban boards, etc.). Bullshit is here to stay, but in a sense it saves us from our own incompetence.
- javajosh 9y ago
  I see Scrum/etc as a program for people. It implies certain values, and defines new words, but in that sense it's like any program (in the machine sense). You may not like it, but it's hardly bullshit in the sense of the article.
- incompatible 9y ago
  The idea that a lot of people are wasting a lot of their time on bullshit doesn't imply that there's nothing useful that they could be doing instead.
- asveikau 9y ago
  > Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. This is precisely why I have loathed the cult of "pay per performance". Bonuses, salary bumps and promotions become a sort of (I wish this were an exaggeration of terms but it isn't) conspiracy to pass wealth and prestige to buddies. But they fill it with phony paperwork and propaganda about how the buddies have been objectively evaluated and are all top performers. If you are an honest worker doing good things but not in a management in-crowd, this can have crippling effects on morale.
coldtea 9y ago
>Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees. Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems. In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays. Sure, but that's assuming we need those organizations, and we need them to continue to operate as they do. And if not that, it at least assumes that some companies don't overdo this thing.

sitkack 9y ago

> Bullshit is organizational self-deception I have known companies that were entirely run on the stuff. C-levels and wannabe C-levels would spew it in every direction. It was simply a signaling mechanism that you were a company player. It was so patent that it could serve no other purpose. If one rotated it the correct way, it was not unlike a Monty Python sketch. At some point I had a list of banned words, because they had lost all meaning, turning only into rest stop on a Markov chain road-trip. It simply wasn't possible to think with them, the Sapir-Whorf-Frankfurt Hypothesis.

AlexCoventry 9y ago
How did they convince their customers they we're worth paying?
- sitkack 9y ago
  It was a mid-range casual gaming publisher. Most of the BS wasn't obviously customer facing.

dominotw 9y ago

Do you have a reference re: north Korea comment. I am so interested in what actually went down but so little official information has reached the picking through refugees.

hitekker 9y ago
It comes from a passage in "The Cleanest Race" by B.R. Myers[1], which I recommend as a lens into the internal effects of North Korea's propaganda >"One colleague told me he finds the North Korean personality cult too absurd to take seriously; indeed, he doubts whether even the leadership believes it. But no regime would go to such enormous expense, year in, year out for sixty years, to inculcate into its citizens a worldview to which it did not itself subscribe. (The only institution in the country that did not miss a beat during the famine of the mid-1990s was the propaganda apparatus.” There was another book on North Korea which corroborated this statement with actual numbers; I'm having trouble pulling it up at the moment. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Cleanest-Race-Koreans-Themselves-Matters/dp/1935554344 https://www.amazon.com/Cleanest-Race-Koreans-Themselves-Matt...
- flatfilefan 9y ago
  http://fortune.com/2017/12/27/world-richest-trillion-dollars-2017/ http://fortune.com/2017/12/27/world-richest-trillion-dollars... On average every ten of these 500 people are adding whole GDP of North Korea into their pocket. There must be a lot of social engineering to control this wealth flow.
  - adventured 9y ago
    That's more a statement of just how backwards North Korea is in an increasingly prosperous world in which the median standard of living is at an all-time high and continues to rise by the year, famines are between extremely rare and non-existent, and global poverty is at an all-time low. It looks increasingly like North Korea may be among the very last of the failed state hold-outs. Even Cuba looks like it's set to change considerably for the better in the coming years.
- 9y ago

stingraycharles 9y ago

> In my view, calling upon employers to have the courage to be genuine, to think and talk in more authentic ways... will give birth to yet another management fad. It already exists, it’s called “radical honesty”. http://firstround.com/review/humans-hate-being-spun-how-to-practice-radical-honesty-from-the-woman-who-defined-netflixs-culture/ http://firstround.com/review/humans-hate-being-spun-how-to-p...

hitekker 9y ago
Oh man. The subtle spinning of her tenure at Netflix and the omission of her involuntary firing makes the irony rather palpable.
sidlls 9y ago
The best thing about the Netflix culture deck linked in that article is how much "bullshit" it contains. The part about "adequate performance gets a generous severance" is especially amusing, since most measures of performance are also bullshit. It's also "we only work with the best" re-worded.

temporallobe 9y ago

As usual, the really interesting bits are in the comments. I especially find "bullshit jobs" -> Basic Income especially true. I've always thought the same thing for as long as I've had a professional career. I worked in the aerospace industry as my first programming job and saw so much bullshit flying left and right, and identified that at least 60% of my coworkers and 80% of my bosses did exactly nothing but bullshit like reporting and summarizing on things that were already reported or summarized, or creating useless documentation that had to be created because of some arbitrary standards. We were very top-heavy and at one point I saw a hilarious org chart where there were more managers than engineers. Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. Now, 20ish years later, I'm pretty damn jaded and the bullshit has only increased, but now it's just more cleverly disguised in management methodologies like "SCRUM" and "Agile", with all of that deeply-imbedded culture and terminology baked into our everyday tools like the Atlassian toolset (Jira, Kahnban boards, etc.). Bullshit is here to stay, but in a sense it saves us from our own incompetence.

javajosh 9y ago
I see Scrum/etc as a program for people. It implies certain values, and defines new words, but in that sense it's like any program (in the machine sense). You may not like it, but it's hardly bullshit in the sense of the article.
incompatible 9y ago
The idea that a lot of people are wasting a lot of their time on bullshit doesn't imply that there's nothing useful that they could be doing instead.
asveikau 9y ago
> Then one day I thought to myself that this whole project was basically equivalent to wealth redistribution and was not at all the meritocracy I had envisioned it to be. This is precisely why I have loathed the cult of "pay per performance". Bonuses, salary bumps and promotions become a sort of (I wish this were an exaggeration of terms but it isn't) conspiracy to pass wealth and prestige to buddies. But they fill it with phony paperwork and propaganda about how the buddies have been objectively evaluated and are all top performers. If you are an honest worker doing good things but not in a management in-crowd, this can have crippling effects on morale.

coldtea 9y ago

>Concluding that we need an "anti-bullshit movement" to get rid of bullshit is missing the forest for the trees. Bullshit is organizational self-deception. Comfortable statements intended to insulate leaders and followers from uncomfortable problems. In other words, bullshit isn't abnormal; it's natural. A reflex to maintain the status quo while the surrounding environment decays. Sure, but that's assuming we need those organizations, and we need them to continue to operate as they do. And if not that, it at least assumes that some companies don't overdo this thing.