7 ms·

This article resonates with me on many levels. I went from below $10/hr to 5x that and never experienced anything in between. The struggle is huge, and I keep h

This article resonates with me on many levels. I went from below $10/hr to 5x that and never experienced anything in between. The struggle is huge, and I keep having to look inside myself to figure out what "my people" is supposed to mean. A huge different that's obvious to me is the language we use. I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them. I'm often called brutally blunt, but really, I'm very tame compared to most people I grew up around. As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn.

athenot 9y ago
> it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog Follow the money. I'm always asking myself "what does this author have to gain from writing this, or holding that position?" It can happen that there is absolutely no financial motive, many times it's pure greed but often it's on a continuum that's a mix of both profit and helping people out. As an example it's common to find articles about technical problem and how {{top-organization}} solved it with {{state-of-the-art}} solution. The last paragraph is "oh by the way, we're hiring". While there's a profit motive in this form of content marketing, there's also genuine help being passed along. Business recommendations tend to be a bit more skewed towards the profit side, and financial recommendations… well those are a class of their own. A health dose of suspicion goes a long way to sort out the BS.
- hiuaql 9y ago
  You don't have to look to greed or malice, but simply the fact that people carry their unexamined biases with them when they speak their opinions. > > > it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog They aren't aware of the fog, they have the same subconscious biased perspective that makes the fog look like normal to them.
- godelski 9y ago
  There is also an ego aspect to it. When people have done well they think it is all skill. Look at people who were really successful on crypto and now give financial advise as if they were an economist. Or go to a casino and talk to someone after they win big. What they can gain is in the ego as well. Though I 100% agree, always follow the money. But never underestimate how often things are written with the purpose of saying "look how great I am, you should envy me."
wmeredith 9y ago
> I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them. What? This is just child abuse. Please expand on what circumstances in which this considered OK?
- lev99 9y ago
  In my mind child abuse is hurting a child for selfish reasons and discipline is punishment to cause behavioral changes. Some cultures allow for different severity of punishments. However the intent of the parent is very important when labeling child abuse.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Intent is important, but if there is intent to inflict pain, either as a means or an ends, it is abuse. Now, it's true that there are further meaningful intent-based distinctions you can make within the broad category of abuse, but that's somewhat beside the point.
    - zeveb 9y ago
      > if there is intent to inflict pain, either as a means or an ends, it is abuse. That doesn't sound correct to me. If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely, and the small pain is far less severe and more transient than the great and lasting pain of a nasty burn. Enjoying inflicting pain is definitely abuse, but inflicting it to prevent worse pain and suffering is IMHO not.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > . If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely No, you don't; if they are well below the age of reason, they are well below the age at which they will connect the hit with the reason for it. That's why you don't let kids that young around a stove in the first place, and if they do get loose around one, you restrain and remove them. This may involve incidental pain, but not intentional, instrumental pain.
_alias 9y ago
Do you have a good heuristic for bullshit detection? Anything to look out for?
- praptak 9y ago
  Enumerating badness and blacklisting it is a bad approach in security. I believe that this applies to detecting bullshit. It comes in many forms, including those that make you believe you are cutting through bullshit. Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.
- enord 9y ago
  Is it alluring? Does it fit within some nice narrative? Can it be explained inside a one-page newspaper article? Then it has enough going for it that it doesn't necessairly need to be true in order to propagate.
  - godelski 9y ago
    > Is it alluring? This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true. Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?
- cabalamat 9y ago
  Could the person saying something have a motive for lying?
- cryoshon 9y ago
  "whose goals get accomplished by believing this claim" is the biggest question to get into a habit of asking yourself. make it unconscious. make it follow every line of written text and every sentence you hear. you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit. advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need. then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb. if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit? remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success. this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.
ambicapter 9y ago
> As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn. Tell me more, please.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  Nearly every bit of advice you read on interviews and how to get a job never happens in the real world. You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on. You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    I'd say that's more of a selection bias that bullshit. The only companies blogging about interviewing are the few ones that actually have made a conscious decision to deviate from the norm (regardless of the reasons). It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented. Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.
  - simonh 9y ago
    The fact that so many tech professionals don’t have GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles, personal projects, etc is exactly why having those things helps you stand out. It’s definitely helped me, hugely, aside from just plain increasing my self confidence. I’m no web startup Silicon Valley brogrammer either, 50 something application support specialist in London.
dionidium 9y ago
> "The struggle is huge, and I keep having to look inside myself to figure out what "my people" is supposed to mean." For me, the weirdest part is the way in which the upper-middle class people I now associate and work with talk about "my people" (i.e. the working-class folks I grew up with). They mythologize them as the noble, hard-working, salt of the earth, when in reality, they clearly don't like most of their habits, their religion, their tastes, their opinions, their language, or much else about them. Poor and working-class people are described in archetypes, stereotypes, and as abstract ideas. But very little said matches what I know about actual poor people. They are always -- always -- praised when spoken of in the abstract. But when the conversation drifts toward the specific, it's pretty clear that they're not really big fans. I find myself simultaneously defending the behaviors of the working class while also walking upper-class liberals back a few steps on just how noble and hard-working -- they're always described as hard-working -- most actual poor people really are. They're just people.
- Retric 9y ago
  I work with plenty of people that may put in a "hard" 2-3 hours of actual work a day. Comparing effort and every poor person I grew up with actually worked really hard. If anything it's coded language for 'working hard is a great way to end up poor'. PS: Consider all the "hardworking" people here on HN. Yes, long hours may be expected, but effort has little direct benefit.
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    There’s a difference between working hard and working smart. One is the brute force solution. The other uses a heuristic to narrow the solution space.
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      I think the point here is that in white-collar workplaces long hours are mostly an abstract way of signaling that you take the job seriously, not exhausting in the way that long hours in a job demanding physical labor would be.
invalidOrTaken 9y ago
Bullshit is highly contextual. Often its valudity is dependent on other factors, which are assumed, usually unknowingly, by the author/speaker. If your assumptions/situation match those of the author/speaker---it will be good advice. If they don't---bullshit.
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>his article resonates with me on many levels. I went from below $10/hr This experience isn't exactly uncommon. Everyone who had a job during college in a state with a single digit minimum wage then got an entry level tech job in a high CoL area did this. That said, most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder when they do that which I think is what you were getting at.
- dizzystar 9y ago
  Yeah, that's what I mean. If your parents were already middle class, you aren't strictly broke earning that in the same sense as you parents were on welfare and you never stepped foot on a college campus.
  - dsfyu404ed 9y ago
    The college kids who have jobs so they have more pocket money to spend on lifestyle stuff (i.e. beer) is exactly who I'm talking about when I say "most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder" The college kids with work-study jobs in the kitchen, get financial aid, furnish their living spaces with office furniture the school discarded, and whatnot are the ones who move into a different social class when they enter the workforce. I think we're agreeing here.
troupe 9y ago
> A huge different that's obvious to me is the language we use. Meaning that people making $10 per hours use more or less coarse language than people making $50 per hour?
- dizzystar 9y ago
  Not really. The language in lower class is coarse, but it's also very blunt. For example, I was once told that it must be irritating to know myself by some working class, or I've been insulted by a food order. This is how they talk among each other. Heavy insults and expressing your opinion is unambiguous. In upper class, the language probably has more "fucks per minute," but there is a fluid dance that moves between honesty and somewhere else. Any compliment like "a great conversation" or "I like your clothes" is on a continuum rather than a discrete statement. That's a simple example, but everything sort of falls along these lines, and it's exhausting to parse it all.
tlb 9y ago
If people call you brutally blunt, you might be able to improve your career and relationships with some simple changes to the way you say things. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg is a great place to start. It's full of examples of people saying something that made other people angry and upset, then showing how they could say the same thing in a different way so that people listened and understood and often gave the person what they needed. Not by wrapping it in bullshit, but by connecting the request to relatable human needs.

athenot 9y ago

> it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog Follow the money. I'm always asking myself "what does this author have to gain from writing this, or holding that position?" It can happen that there is absolutely no financial motive, many times it's pure greed but often it's on a continuum that's a mix of both profit and helping people out. As an example it's common to find articles about technical problem and how {{top-organization}} solved it with {{state-of-the-art}} solution. The last paragraph is "oh by the way, we're hiring". While there's a profit motive in this form of content marketing, there's also genuine help being passed along. Business recommendations tend to be a bit more skewed towards the profit side, and financial recommendations… well those are a class of their own. A health dose of suspicion goes a long way to sort out the BS.

hiuaql 9y ago
You don't have to look to greed or malice, but simply the fact that people carry their unexamined biases with them when they speak their opinions. > > > it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog They aren't aware of the fog, they have the same subconscious biased perspective that makes the fog look like normal to them.
godelski 9y ago
There is also an ego aspect to it. When people have done well they think it is all skill. Look at people who were really successful on crypto and now give financial advise as if they were an economist. Or go to a casino and talk to someone after they win big. What they can gain is in the ego as well. Though I 100% agree, always follow the money. But never underestimate how often things are written with the purpose of saying "look how great I am, you should envy me."

wmeredith 9y ago

> I often wonder why no one's mother didn't fill the these people's mouth with dawn liquid soap and slap the child silly, but then I realize that honesty wasn't a life or death situation for them. What? This is just child abuse. Please expand on what circumstances in which this considered OK?

lev99 9y ago
In my mind child abuse is hurting a child for selfish reasons and discipline is punishment to cause behavioral changes. Some cultures allow for different severity of punishments. However the intent of the parent is very important when labeling child abuse.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Intent is important, but if there is intent to inflict pain, either as a means or an ends, it is abuse. Now, it's true that there are further meaningful intent-based distinctions you can make within the broad category of abuse, but that's somewhat beside the point.
  - zeveb 9y ago
    > if there is intent to inflict pain, either as a means or an ends, it is abuse. That doesn't sound correct to me. If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely, and the small pain is far less severe and more transient than the great and lasting pain of a nasty burn. Enjoying inflicting pain is definitely abuse, but inflicting it to prevent worse pain and suffering is IMHO not.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > . If a little get (well below the age of reason) reaches for the pretty red glowing burner atop the stove, you slap away his hand because the small pain of getting his hand slapped will serve to make a second attempt less likely No, you don't; if they are well below the age of reason, they are well below the age at which they will connect the hit with the reason for it. That's why you don't let kids that young around a stove in the first place, and if they do get loose around one, you restrain and remove them. This may involve incidental pain, but not intentional, instrumental pain.

_alias 9y ago

Do you have a good heuristic for bullshit detection? Anything to look out for?

praptak 9y ago
Enumerating badness and blacklisting it is a bad approach in security. I believe that this applies to detecting bullshit. It comes in many forms, including those that make you believe you are cutting through bullshit. Better form your own set of core non-bullshit beliefs and work from that.
enord 9y ago
Is it alluring? Does it fit within some nice narrative? Can it be explained inside a one-page newspaper article? Then it has enough going for it that it doesn't necessairly need to be true in order to propagate.
- godelski 9y ago
  > Is it alluring? This CANNOT be over stated. If it matches your own view you have to be even more wary of it than if it doesn't match your own view. If it fits in your own narrative then you want it to be true. If it doesn't fit then you don't want it to be true. Always consider your own bias. Does it provoke a strong emotion in you?
cabalamat 9y ago
Could the person saying something have a motive for lying?
cryoshon 9y ago
"whose goals get accomplished by believing this claim" is the biggest question to get into a habit of asking yourself. make it unconscious. make it follow every line of written text and every sentence you hear. you will find that the answer is never "mine" when reading something you didn't write, but it might sometimes be "theirs, and mine" if you are reading something that is not bullshit. advanced techniques include making finer distinctions in your answer to the question. but the question is all you really need. then there's what i call the "10 year old" rule of thumb. if a 10 year old of average cleverness wanted to manipulate their parents into an action by repeating the claims that you read, would their rhetoric be similar to the claims that you suspect are bullshit? remember, just like adults, 10 year olds add a lot of noise to their manipulative signals but they aren't very good at subterfuge because they can't disguise their intent despite adding noise. this thought experiment is for getting you to read between the lines rather than reading the lines literally and accepting them as truth-- as the ten year old desperately wants you to do so that their trick is a success. this thought experiment is enough to resolve almost every tough call of "is it bullshit or not" when other methods fail. don't make this one into a habit, keep it handy for conscious mulling over of tough cases of ambiguous intentions. and don't share it, some 10 year olds are smart enough to know this trick already and they might get offended.

ambicapter 9y ago

> As a real example, we often get articles on Hacker News that discusses the best way to hire, best way to land a job, best way to self-learn, and so on. It took me years to realize that these articles were all shaded in a heavy fog of bullshit, and it took me many years to realize that the posters who upvote and share these articles are not only aware of the heavy fog, but are able to read though the fog. If I was able to go back in time and tell my autodidact self on thing, it was to learn about bullshit, and it's something I always advise those who trying to self learn. Tell me more, please.

dizzystar 9y ago
Nearly every bit of advice you read on interviews and how to get a job never happens in the real world. You can imagine how scary it is to read all the super tough questions, going to the whiteboard, having to discuss passion projects, needing a solid github profile, knowing algorithms, data structures, strange math, and on and on. You start interviewing and you see that none of the above happens 99% of the time. You wasted 2 years learning a bunch of stuff when you really should have been interviewing six months after writing your first line of code.
- icebraining 9y ago
  I'd say that's more of a selection bias that bullshit. The only companies blogging about interviewing are the few ones that actually have made a conscious decision to deviate from the norm (regardless of the reasons). It's like if you were trying to evaluate the average math proficiency of the population by only reading blog posts about math. It would seem like everyone really knew math! Except of course, the only people who blog about math are the few that are into it. They're not bullshitting, they're just overrepresented. Not that I disagree with your original point, by the way; BS is rampant.
- simonh 9y ago
  The fact that so many tech professionals don’t have GitHub and Stack Overflow profiles, personal projects, etc is exactly why having those things helps you stand out. It’s definitely helped me, hugely, aside from just plain increasing my self confidence. I’m no web startup Silicon Valley brogrammer either, 50 something application support specialist in London.

dionidium 9y ago

> "The struggle is huge, and I keep having to look inside myself to figure out what "my people" is supposed to mean." For me, the weirdest part is the way in which the upper-middle class people I now associate and work with talk about "my people" (i.e. the working-class folks I grew up with). They mythologize them as the noble, hard-working, salt of the earth, when in reality, they clearly don't like most of their habits, their religion, their tastes, their opinions, their language, or much else about them. Poor and working-class people are described in archetypes, stereotypes, and as abstract ideas. But very little said matches what I know about actual poor people. They are always -- always -- praised when spoken of in the abstract. But when the conversation drifts toward the specific, it's pretty clear that they're not really big fans. I find myself simultaneously defending the behaviors of the working class while also walking upper-class liberals back a few steps on just how noble and hard-working -- they're always described as hard-working -- most actual poor people really are. They're just people.

Retric 9y ago
I work with plenty of people that may put in a "hard" 2-3 hours of actual work a day. Comparing effort and every poor person I grew up with actually worked really hard. If anything it's coded language for 'working hard is a great way to end up poor'. PS: Consider all the "hardworking" people here on HN. Yes, long hours may be expected, but effort has little direct benefit.
- ShabbosGoy 9y ago
  There’s a difference between working hard and working smart. One is the brute force solution. The other uses a heuristic to narrow the solution space.
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    I think the point here is that in white-collar workplaces long hours are mostly an abstract way of signaling that you take the job seriously, not exhausting in the way that long hours in a job demanding physical labor would be.

invalidOrTaken 9y ago

Bullshit is highly contextual. Often its valudity is dependent on other factors, which are assumed, usually unknowingly, by the author/speaker. If your assumptions/situation match those of the author/speaker---it will be good advice. If they don't---bullshit.

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

>his article resonates with me on many levels. I went from below $10/hr This experience isn't exactly uncommon. Everyone who had a job during college in a state with a single digit minimum wage then got an entry level tech job in a high CoL area did this. That said, most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder when they do that which I think is what you were getting at.

dizzystar 9y ago
Yeah, that's what I mean. If your parents were already middle class, you aren't strictly broke earning that in the same sense as you parents were on welfare and you never stepped foot on a college campus.
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  The college kids who have jobs so they have more pocket money to spend on lifestyle stuff (i.e. beer) is exactly who I'm talking about when I say "most people who do that don't suddenly find themselves among people who significantly higher up the social ladder" The college kids with work-study jobs in the kitchen, get financial aid, furnish their living spaces with office furniture the school discarded, and whatnot are the ones who move into a different social class when they enter the workforce. I think we're agreeing here.

troupe 9y ago

> A huge different that's obvious to me is the language we use. Meaning that people making $10 per hours use more or less coarse language than people making $50 per hour?

dizzystar 9y ago
Not really. The language in lower class is coarse, but it's also very blunt. For example, I was once told that it must be irritating to know myself by some working class, or I've been insulted by a food order. This is how they talk among each other. Heavy insults and expressing your opinion is unambiguous. In upper class, the language probably has more "fucks per minute," but there is a fluid dance that moves between honesty and somewhere else. Any compliment like "a great conversation" or "I like your clothes" is on a continuum rather than a discrete statement. That's a simple example, but everything sort of falls along these lines, and it's exhausting to parse it all.

tlb 9y ago

If people call you brutally blunt, you might be able to improve your career and relationships with some simple changes to the way you say things. Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg is a great place to start. It's full of examples of people saying something that made other people angry and upset, then showing how they could say the same thing in a different way so that people listened and understood and often gave the person what they needed. Not by wrapping it in bullshit, but by connecting the request to relatable human needs.