17 ms·

Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf]

350 points by etxm 8y ago

cirgue 8y ago
Vices or virtues of the article aside, what a great title.
plink 8y ago
It would be precious if this entire study were prevaricated.
rmbryan 8y ago
It's important to note that this study focuses on data from 15-year-olds taking a math test. I assert that drawing broad conclusions based on that sample is suspect and may be, in fact, bullshit itself.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jwilli 8y ago
  I agree with your point. 15 year old boys are by no means a good sample for the population as a whole. I would argue 15 year old boys are in fact one of the worst samples for this study. Aren't boys going through puberty known to be reckless and shortsighted?
  - jackcosgrove 8y ago
    Exactly boys are cognitively less developed than girls at that age. The fact that the authors of the study did not control for this well-known fact suggests to me that the study is just more clickbait academic bullshit.
  - cwingrav 8y ago
    If you’re going to study something, study it where you can best measure it. Develop your tools and methods. Create theories on this and apply them to new, more difficult domains... hopefully get feedback and insights from the larger community as you progress. Science proceeds at a pace and through a process.
- normalhuman 8y ago
  The authors only claim to have strong results for the studied demographics, make further remarks about other possible biases, and argue these results provide some insight and encourage further research. This is perfectly fine. Not all fields have the luxury of perfectly controlled lab experiments. If we applied the methodological discipline of experimental physics to social sciences, we might as well give up now. In the abstract they say: "Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining teenagers’ propensity to claim expertise in three mathematics constructs that do not really exist." "we find substantial differences in young people’s tendency to bullshit across countries, genders and socio-economic groups" "Together this provides important new insight into who bullshitters are and the type of survey responses that they provide." In the conclusions they say: "There are of course limitations to this study, and many issues on the topic of bullshitting that remain unexplored. First, the PISA data analysed are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. We therefore do not know whether bullshitting is a stable trait that can be consistently observed for an individual over time, or if it is something that changes with age (and the factors associated with such change)." Their strongest claim appears to be: "Despite these limitations, we believe this paper has started to open an important new area of social science research"
  - notbob 7y ago
    > The authors only claim... Bullshit! The authors wrote an article entitled "Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?" That's the title of the piece. Not "some possibly generalizable observations about the behavior of 15 year olds" Sure, the paper's contents contain the massive CAVEAT EMPTORs, but that's exactly how bullshit works in academic writing. Bold titles, sweeping statements in introductions and conclusions. But enough profuse caveats sprinkled around that you can always say to anyone who takes a closer look "no see I mentioned exactly what I meant on page N"...
- Allower 8y ago
  You dont need such a poorly designed study for the conclusions to have merit on their own. Just open your eyes and ears. But maybe you are a bullshitter..
- OneWordSoln 8y ago
  To some extent, I agree. However, 15-year-olds are the direct result of their parents' attitudes and teachings so their foundations have largely been established by that point. Put another way: if children are raised by bullshitters who never cared if their children are also full of crap, then that 15-year-old will likely continue on that path forever, unless they have a serious epiphany. As an American, I am so disgusted by lies that I refused to bullshit my kids about Santa Claus. I informed them that it was utter bullshit but that they were not to ever tell other kids the truth because that was between them and their parents. It really gave my kids an entirely different perspective on American culture and the mass insanity (however benign it is considered) that entire cultures can adopt as the status quo. Personally I felt that weaving an absurd yarn about something so important for the overall culture in general and for the kids in particular was only going to damage my credibility with my kids later when they finally learned the truth, that truth being that I had foisted a ridiculous lie upon them since before they could remember. It is my conclusion that the vast majority of what people consider their precious traditions are nothing more than excuses to continue to act badly in the face of a lack of critical thinking.
- edgarvaldes 8y ago
  But the paper is very clear about that limitations.
- raygelogic 8y ago
  no it doesn't. it's 15-year-olds self-reporting on how familiar they are with mathematical topics, some of which are made up.
- Animats 8y ago
  That was a strange choice. Did they have cheap access to high school students? It's a recognized problem in psychology that much research is the study of college undergrads, because they're available for free. More recently, there's the use of Mechanical Turk for studies, which means the population studied is people really desperate to work for peanuts. Now a study of job applicants... that would be more interesting.
scandox 8y ago
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.
- myth_drannon 8y ago
  Immigrants scored higher on the bullshit scale(survival tactic?) and accordingly countries with high immigration rates scored higher as well.
- bigred100 8y ago
  I imagine a good bullshitter would also be a good antibullshitter (wait for a situation where one could conceivably bullshit, and, if someone tries, press them in a way that will reveal what they’re doing if they are bullshitting, and be harmless if they aren’t)
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    I also imagine the converse. A good antibullshitter can be a passable bullshitter. If you know which patterns peg your bogometer, you can avoid using them yourself in situations where you need to be believed. For instance, I know that logorrhea, babbling, and "the gallop" are strong indicators of deception. The bull can always shit faster than the farmer can shovel it. So when I want to be believed, I could pause after every point, and maybe take some strawmen from a partially-scripted faux-skeptic conspirator so I can knock them down.
- jeanlucas 8y ago
  Hey, it's quite common to each country to see themselves as the best in some things that everyone have. I've been around South America and each country has a word for "McGyverism" because they see themselves as resourceful. The funny part? Every one of them say they are the only one with a word just for it. Same goes with bullshit, people in Rio de Janeiro think they're best in bullshiterry in the world. NYers claim the same, and Chinese street vendors in Shenzhen area too. It's just normal for human groups to see themselves this ways and even take proud of it
wsdfsayy 8y ago
Literally everywhere? I don't think I've worked in a work environment to date where at least half of anyone in a management position was not a complete BSer. It honestly made me wonder if that's what it takes to move up.
- Veen 8y ago
  Clearly not if only half of management are bullshitters. It's also not exclusive to management: I've met plenty of rank-and-file developers who specialize in talking shite.
  - wsdfsayy 8y ago
    The difference is that if you're an IC you generally have to produce actual work that will be evaluated at some point. It's of course possible to BS your way into showing your manager you did more than you actually did or better than what you actually produced. If you're in management, then your job becomes mostly talking/meetings, which is much more conducive to "hand waving," which is probably why there are so many BSers who end up thriving in those roles.
    - Spooky23 8y ago
      No way. Plenty of people drift through life getting other people to do work for them.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - allenu 8y ago
        Bullshitters are good at presenting the work they're doing as very challenging even when it's trivial, so they can also just ride simple a task for a long time.
    - varjag 8y ago
      If there's a team of any substantial size, it's quite easy to BS your way in a contributor position for a year or two, and then hop to the next job.
kuzehanka 8y ago
The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything. The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed high in management hierarchies despite knowing nothing about the technologies they claim to be experts in. They're are the 'Agile coaches' who have never done actual scrum. The 'enterprise architects' who couldn't write fizzbuzz if their life depended on it. The 'thought leaders' who read a couple blogs about blockchain. They are a cancer to the entire industry. I don't expect C level leadership to be savvy enough to call them out for another 5-10 years, but something needs to be done about these types of people. They actively cause damage to the course of any business by setting unrealistic expectations about what technology can do, how much it costs, and how long it takes.
- Veen 8y ago
  If bullshitters rise to the top with very little work or knowledge, then perhaps being a bullshitter is the smart choice for people of a certain disposition.
  - noonespecial 8y ago
    Perhaps for them in a narrow sense, but considering the damage they do, I'm to the point where I'd be willing to have companies pay them their inflated salaries just to stay home and not interfere.
  - wallace_f 8y ago
    You're right that bullshit sells well. From OP, something about it runs in the family: >socio-economically advantaged teenagers are more likely to be bullshitters than their disadvantaged peers. I had the misfortune of seeing this up close in consulting in tech. Your customers are idiots, that's why they hired "experts." They don't know how to judge expertise (otherwise they wouldn't be hiring you). They hire based on emotions, recommendations and epaulettes because that's the best they can do. All three of those are completely subjected to cronyism, in my observation. My experience here made me a firm believer that institutions and businesses really need to be allowed to fail. The most epic stupidity (and toxic politics) always comes from the ones that were furthest from that principle. And I'm never doing that again. There is nothing I can buy with paychecks from interacting with that toxic, idiotic side of humanity that makes it worth it.
shanselman 8y ago
I'm 17 pages in and I am wondering if the paper itself is bullshit and that's the joke.
- frickinLasers 8y ago
  Please explain
- jesusofsuburbia 8y ago
  The paper seems to provide an insight to 15-year-olds' bullshit... but I'm not sure if this also applies to our society as a whole
- HerpilyDerpily 8y ago
  If it's not bullshit, then I definitely need a ELI5 explanation of this: https://imgur.com/38CXnRx https://imgur.com/38CXnRx
  - frickinLasers 8y ago
    This is my interpretation as someone who has never seen this type of study and is giving the authors the benefit of the doubt: Take Table 3. The outcome "O_ij" for each student's "views of abilities" is the scale score (split into self-efficacy and problem solving). The table shows bullshitters think they're awesome, giving positive scores (higher than the mean). Bullshitters were previously categorized into four groups by asking questions about what math terms they were familiar with, including terms that don't exist (maybe they were familiar with 0,1,2, or 3 of the fake terms) Control for other factors by adding levers for achievement, socio-economic status, gender and school. These are the capital letters, set by test scores, etc. Students from each school will have a different u_j, probably higher for higher-performing schools B.S. is probably a matrix of ones, or 1-4, or something. Perform a regression (let a computer do some matrix math to solve for unknown variables), using all of the students as data points. Each student will end up with a different set of italic letters indicating how much the capital letters influence their outcome, with students who are similar in one aspect sharing similar (or equal, depending on how they set up the problem) values for that italicized letter. For table 3, it looks like the study claims students who have been identified as bullshitters end up with higher beta values ("regression results"). It's possible this explanation is bullshit, though.
Zaphods 8y ago
It's interesting the definition of bullshit in this study: > ‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. compared to the definition that the philosopher Harry Fankfurt came to in his book On Bullshit, and that this study references: > bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded. The key difference being, these teenagers might still have regard for the truth, they think they know it and believe they know it. But they're still bullshitters under the definition used in this study. Intention seems to have been discarded in this study when I think it plays a very big part, especially among teens. The specific context of a situation might mean certain individuals are inclined to overclaim vs others because they have different reasons to.
- michelpp 8y ago
  On Bullshit is one of my favorite books from long ago, thanks for reminding me about it, I just found my old copy and looking forward to digging through it again!
busterarm 8y ago
Lower coefficient of bullshit in areas where people are likely to say "u wot m8"? Can't say I'm surprised.
SimonPStevens 8y ago
I consider myself to be an anti-bullshitter. I once said in a job interview that I knew nothing about the technology they were hiring for, but I was pretty sure I could take a decent stab at it. I was telling the truth. I got the job.
- Reedx 8y ago
  "I don't know" is such an underappreciated phrase (followed with action to remedy that).
  - tonyedgecombe 8y ago
    Politicians that use it are extremely rare.
    - senderista 8y ago
      Ditto “I was wrong”
  - mg794613 8y ago
    We had an interviewee (is that a word?) today who said that he didn't know and to me that was a reason to hire him.
    - duiker101 8y ago
      Maybe it is a word, but I think candidate is a more generally accepted term
      - mg794613 7y ago
        Ah thank you, I know that word and now I have no idea why I made it difficult for myself :D
    - cr0sh 8y ago
      I'd say quite possibly so...if he also followed that up with "...but I could find out." (or something similar). Saying "I don't know" is one thing - it's good to admit one's lack of knowledge. Being able to then follow it up with the will to expand their knowledge - that is valuable IMHO.
Fede_V 8y ago
If you've never experienced it before, the first time you work with someone who is a pathological liar and bullshitter is a completely disorienting experience. Normal people just don't lie that brazenly and with so little remorse - so you walk out of meetings wondering if perhaps you just misunderstood because there's no way someone would straight up lie that way. Interestingly, both of the worst bullshitters I've ever met were in academia - and the business world has been a breath of fresh air in comparison. When I used to work in computational biology, I met several senior professors who lead big labs who had absolutely no understanding of any of the methods used by the grad students in their group.
- hypertexthero 8y ago
  This book was a very interesting read: https://content.psychopathcode.com/preface.html https://content.psychopathcode.com/preface.html
- specialist 8y ago
  The reverse is also true. I had read about trust being crucial to innovation, teamwork, execution. But had never experienced it. Then I got paired with a marketing manager who was fantastic. We truly had a trust-based relationship. Everyone joked that we acted like a married couple (in a good way). That experience kinda ruined me. Once I learned what trust in a competent person feels like, I had a hard time suspending disbelief, and zero inclination to play the game with bullshitters.
- hirundo 8y ago
  Sometimes a bullshitter consistently peddles untruths, but is unaware of it, and so isn't a liar, just mistaken. I grew up with an older brother like that. He regularly spouted pure bullshit that to him was Truth. That became clear once when I was struggling with math homework. He looked at the problem, pronounced that he understood it and could solve it easily. So I handed him the pencil. He didn't know he was bullshitting so didn't make an excuse or acknowledge that I'd called a bluff. He took the pencil and sat down, then stared at the book and the problem for 20 minutes. Then shrugged, got up, and walked away. But he really thought he could do it so he did try. Since then he's made a living in a retail construction trade and hasn't changed. He'll visit a homeowner who will explain the problem. He'll confidently and convincingly explain how he can solve it, and get the job. Then he'll utterly fail and ignore the resulting problems, and not understand why the customer gets upset. His last name, and so mine, is dirt in the city where he works, which he seems to be unaware of. But another sucker is born every minute so he moves on. As a tradesman he is crap but as a salesman he's golden, largely because he honestly believes in his own competence. Growing up with that has inoculated me against this mode of bullshit so it's been a blessing. I suppose it's like the benefit of raising a kid in an environment that's not too clean.
anthony_doan 8y ago
I've seen a class of people who are so insecure with their choice of technology that they have to put down rivals technology. I'm fine with objective contrast but I think the generalizations and lack of data with opinion pass as fact is a terrible behavior to have in this industry. It creates tribalism and it doesn't do anything remotely constructive but to put other people who chose different technology down.
loganfrederick 8y ago
Extending other comments here about bullshitters being prevalent in management, I would love to see this research extended to the economic impact on bullshit, both positive and negative outcomes.
nscalf 8y ago
Bullshitting is really a booming business. Regardless of what your views are on him, when you juxtapose what the US president says and what is real, he's a bullshitter.
vertline3 8y ago
Overestimation, overplacement, overprecision. Three new words to absorb, to help identify B.S. Page 3
teslaberry 8y ago
read it, study is bullshit because it's too narrowly focussed on a few tests of 'bullshittery' and avoids the big question of how good some bullshitters are about being persuasive in areas OTHER THAN MATH, where KNOW complexities are able to be obfuscated or ambiguous. for example, financial advisors bullshiting about financial advise. is a far more complex thing to study than teenagers lying about expertise in fake maths and how likely someone is to nakedly lie about mapping skills. this isn't semantics: the best bullshitters pick and choose what they bullshit about , and for this reason, often go undetected or rather, REWARDED for their bullshit. shit on that apple and tell me how you like it later.
formalsystem 8y ago
I think we need to take the right message from this. BS seems to be a necessary evil and instead of lamenting the fall of intellectualism, I would encourage techies to focus on their craft, writing and speaking in that order. The other day I was reading https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427581/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427581/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... and the TL;DR was that most of the modern art movement was brewed out of a PR machine which did involve some artistic skill but was mostly lots of BS. So lesson to us programmers would be spend more time cultivating a brand on Twitter and Github. Over longer timelines and repeated games the techies will have more influence than the BSers who just know how to write and speak.
- mg794613 8y ago
  No, if you are actually skilled, you take pride in what you do. I will not give up and join the bullshitters.
- projektir 8y ago
  Isn't this exactly the problem we currently have? Everyone is so focused on training their BS skills that nobody is real anymore?
Lapsa 8y ago
read only title and comments. paper is wrong - it's just different origins, aims and perspective.
mowingscooter 8y ago
I recently put up a job post for a COO position for my company and the number of bullshitters with MBAs bragging about their accomplishments on blockchain has been astronomical. It’s amazing to me that bullshitting comes so naturally to some people that I almost wanted to interview them just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.
darepublic 8y ago
Code or gtfo?
gunnr15 8y ago
Am I reading the data right? It has Canada as the top BS avg? Any ideas as to why this would be?
billman 8y ago
I think this article maybe self referential.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
radium3d 8y ago
They short sell
antipaul 8y ago
In this paper, did the bullshitters actually turn out to be smarter than the non-bullshitters? Is this in the PDF? I didn’t read it thoroughly.
motohagiography 8y ago
The life skill secret is not how to bullshit, it's being able to tell whether someone knows when they are bullshitting, or if they don't even know when they are. Are they a Joker (who knows) or a Clown (who doesn't). Jokers you can get in on the gag with. Clowns you have to avoid, because a clown is just a clown.
imnotlost 8y ago
The US has a long history as the land of the bullshitter - the snake-oil sales men, the Psychics and Tarot card readers, the self-help authors, the "business coaches", MLM... the list is endless. And people love it so much they'll gladly get into debt for it and even vote for the king of Bullshit for president.
- lr4444lr 8y ago
  Ah, why did you have to spoil a great cultural observation with a contemporary political dig at the end?
  - imnotlost 8y ago
    But it's not political, really. Both parties have different politicians shoveling different bullshit to different people. Same game, different target audience. That's not to say genuine people/products/value doesn't exist but you have to dig through so much bullshit to find any of it.
osehgol 8y ago
if this 34 page paper ends in 'this paper is bullshit', ima gonna cry
bluetomcat 8y ago
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 pride for his work.
- ilikehurdles 8y ago
  This is the issue. If your marketing, product, and hiring lingo is all self-aggrandizing BS, then your organization will come to reflect that same style. Tech companies are creating BS, communicating BS, and rewarding BS, so is it really such a surprise that the workers themselves have live/breath/eat BS in order to succeed? Those who don't embrace are seen as not fitting in to that organization's "corporate culture".
- pimmen 8y ago
  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!
  - anitil 7y ago
    What they actually wanted: a WordPress theme
- bartread 8y ago
  Not to mention the fact that if you really are searching for a "blockchain expert to influence the team" there's a higher chance the job itself is bullshit, because valid use cases for blockchain seem quite limited, which I suspect would put off many non-bullshitters. People at work half-jokingly ask me when we're going to integrate blockchain into our platform because they know that, even though it'd sound good in the marketing literature and sales pitches, we have so far discovered no practical use for it and don't want to waste time and energy[1]. [1] Not just the team's energy: solving a problem at scale with blockchain is likely to be hugely inefficient in terms of infrastructure and power consumption.
usgroup 8y ago
Funnier still is that I suspect that “bullshitters” are probably well represented in this thread; pitchforks in hand, and bashing “bullshitters” like everyone else.
woranl 8y ago
The society rewards those “fake it until you make it” con. Sometimes it makes me wonder if the truth still matter anymore.
ajross 8y ago
Absolutely fascinating to me that this is voted up to the top of HN without anyone present talking about the elephant in the room on this particular issue of chronic bullshitters being more successful than they should be.
magnetic 8y ago
This is explained in part by the Dunning-Kruger effect (which ties into the Impostor Syndrome). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
ngngngng 8y ago
In the past few months i've become increasingly aware that many successful people around me completely full of shit. They manage to get millions in investor capital or run financially successful businesses for years with horrible ideas and business practices. (selling coffee on the blockchain, changing business direction so often engineers can't finish their projects). I'm trying to use this to build enough confidence for me to start my business ideas and pitch to investors. If these idiots can do it, why can't I?
4ntonius8lock 8y ago
I dislike bullshitters and I've unfortunately had to work with many. I read the paper and something that really stuck out at me is how bullshitters were more likely to actually try and understand the problem than non bullshitters. Page 25: I think about what might have caused the problem and what I can do to solve it Non bullshitters: 85% Bullshitters: 90% I study a map and work out the best route Non bullshitters: 55% Bullshitters: 71% Interestingly, the non-bullshitters were more likely to try and put off the work to someone else: I leave it to my brother to worry about how to get there Non bullshitters: 34% Bullshitters: 27% Another shocking thing for me was that bullshitters viewed themselves as having more perseverance and perfectionism: When confronted with a problem, I give up easily Non bullshitters: 17% Bullshitters: 8% When confronted with a problem, I do more than what is expected of me Non bullshitters: 28% Bullshitters: 45% I really didn't expect this. It's got me thinking.
- eslaught 8y ago
  I don't find this surprising at all. People who lie, first lie to themselves. In many cases I suspect they're being entirely genuine and don't see where they fall short of their own self-assessment.
- zzbzq 8y ago
  But the bullshitters are proven to be bullshitting the survey...
- notahacker 8y ago
  The "bullshitter" metric actually used is highly correlated with people trying to choose the "correct" answer to the questions. I'm not sure that people trying to conform to the correct answer in a survey/test is particularly well correlated with what most people would consider "bullshitters" in life though (the guy selling vaporware with fake testimonials, the guy who can confidently talk at great length on a subject without actually saying anything meaningful, the guy that's having lots and lots of sex with amazing girls every night but they all go to another school) who are being creative rather than conformist in how they present themselves. [FWIW it probably also picks up a fair few kids who ticked their familiarity with 'proper numbers' because they studied proper and improper fractions quite recently and understood it very well, though those who [also] asserted familiarity with "subjunctive scaling" have fewer excuses...]
blobbers 8y ago
Sorry - is this paper bullshit? Can't tell if they're just funking with us.
Allower 8y ago
A.k.a M.B.A.'s
rafaelturk 8y ago
Extra points for using a ftp in the URL.
resters 8y ago
I think the word bullshitting is a harmfully imprecise way to describe what is actually several problems: Naive over-confidence: People who lack the experience necessary to update their beliefs to more reasonable ones. I'd argue that this is both a good thing and a bad thing. When it works out well (Tesla) there are still people who are angry that it happened and call bullshit on it. Most examples of truly uncommon vision will be characterized as this sort of bullshit by skeptics, who are sometimes (in hindsight) wrong and sometimes right. "Alpha" culture: Companies/teams where leadership is confused with stereotypical alpha behavior such as dominance, brashness, and artificial confidence/decisiveness. This one is predominantly negative, as it shuts down important thought and enquiry. To make matters worse, it creates a filter where the culture is blind to leadership that is not couched in stereotypical alpha behaviors. This is often referred to as bro culture. Lying: Some people lie strategically about things that are important to a business or team. They do this often to serve their own goals at the expense of company goals. When looking at this one we must ask what incentives allow it to seem like a winning strategy for anyone? In my opinion it occurs when there is not a culture of trust to begin with. Intimidation: This is similar to bro/alpha culture, but is more sinister, and has more to do with problem individuals behaving in antisocial ways and trying to opportunistically use pecking order, law of the jungle approaches to get what they want out of the situation. This resembles "bullshit" because it is a form of tactical speech that is not based in truth and is meant to create a desirable outcome for the person doing it. It is always harmful to a group dynamic and is often hard to detect because sometimes someone observing the situation will think that the person who is tactically intimidating others is more of a natural leader, or will interpret the successfully intimidated peoples' behavior as timid or un-leader-like. Company-wide lies: All companies have an origin story, and some are more true than others. But when there is a big lie that starts at the top, it creates many opportunities for people in the organization to exploit information asymmetries to their own benefit. Since it is based on a lie, the information asymmetries exist due to politics and are not based on truth, so being observant and truth-oriented is not helpful in understanding when someone is trying to act opportunistically. This one is really bad, and the consequences are very broad and include everything from hiring or firing people based on dishonest metrics to leading to resumé inaccuracies, fudged metrics, and (worst of all) major strategic blind spots.
- 7y ago
powera 8y ago
There is one point in the article - that "teenage boys are bigger bullshitters than teenage girls" - which I have independently verified. When conducting surveys using Google Surveys (surveys.google.com) on fact-based questions (such as asking what country is Aleppo in), men are ALWAYS more likely to select a random option, and women are almost always more likely to select "I don't know".
peter_retief 8y ago
I probably fall in a group of an occasional bs, big on estimation, get lost sometimes
jrochkind1 8y ago
honestly i just came for the title
DonHopkins 8y ago
Why do all Ted Talks and KickStarter Promos sound the same to me? Do I have Bullshit Agnosia? It's like there's this certain style of Archetypal Motivational Making The World A Better Place Inspiration Porn Bullshit that they're all striving for, and they all use the exact same music and slogans and rhythm and inflection.
- RankingMember 8y ago
  Your comment reminded me of this clip (Silicon Valley): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps
georgeecollins 8y ago
Here's my counter theory of "bullshitters" that I imagine will be very unpopular on this forum. (Can you disagree without down voting?) Programmers (Engineers who really spend most their day programming) do intellectually difficult, solitary work. The quality of their work is often difficult to measure because its often easier to write your own code than really spend a lot of time figuring out someone else's code. So if you write code that works, you are hero. You are effective at doing something hard. But because of this, many programmers I have worked with who admittedly are really smart, think they are head and shoulders above their peers, particularly those who aren't writing code. Being your own judge of the quality of your work distorts your perspective. People who spend a lot of time programming are sometimes not outgoing or people who prefer interpersonal interactions over technical problems. If they are, they often become managers. If they are managers long enough they inevitably lose touch with the nuts and bolts of what the technical team is doing. They talk about things without understanding them nearly as well as the people on the front line of implementation. In the eyes of the people doing the technical work they can be seen as "bullshiters" who are less capable and less effective than the engineers.
mathattack 8y ago
The article seems to be catching overconfidence (a human bias) as opposed to BS (a disregard for truth). Or am I missing it?
- cm2012 8y ago
  I mean, if you say you know a made up branch of math very well - isn't that BS? That's what the researchers tested (they asked students to rate themselves in 16 branches of mathematics, 3 were completely made up)
hi56793 8y ago
I'm not sure if this is helping anyone except making people who are not bullshitters more paranoid and the bullshitters be-hated. The bullshitters in the startup world don't get big because nobody realizes that they are talking a lot of bullshit but because those who collaborate with them are at least as greedy as they are. (I was also drinking the kool aid for some time.) So the core problem is greed and not bullshit, and this is also what makes it toxic. FWIW even the most credible and knowledgeable people are able to fan out bullshit, everybody does this every now and then.
n05tradamu5 8y ago
It seems like "bullshit", in the way that it is measured in this paper, is an analog to confidence and risk taking. The groups that were most likely to bullshit (high socio-economic status, male, immigrant, North American) are generally groups who have been exposed to strategic risk taking that has paid off. "Bullshitters", in the context of this paper, seem to be the ones who are willing to put their hands up and have the confidence to explore ideas and concepts that are at the fringes of their skill and knowledge sets. This is very different than the colloquial idea of a bullshitter.
johnnycab 8y ago
This thread is totally surreal and meta enough to be n-gate's wet dream.
tasuki 8y ago
I like how one of the authors is from "Australian Catholic University". An expert on bullshitting?
- tathougies 8y ago
  I'm confused: https://www.acu.edu.au/ https://www.acu.edu.au/ ?
Sniffnoy 8y ago
There's one thing here that I don't really get here. Take a look at this paragraph, on page 18: > There are two primary threats to the validity of our interpretation of the results above. [...] A second possibility is that young people’s responses are reflecting social desirability bias; that they are providing responses that they believe will be viewed as positively by others (e.g. that they know various mathematics concepts, that they work hard at school etc). Both of these possibilities could lead to a spurious correlation between our bullshit index and the various other psychological traits investigated in the previous sub-section. Huh?? What on earth does "bullshit" mean if not, y'know, giving socially-desirable answers rather than correct ones? (I mean, that's basically roughly how Frankfurt defined it.) Social desirability bias isn't a separate thing interfering with your measurement of bullshit; social desirability bias is bullshit (or rather, a cause of it). I am quite confused as to how the authors are conceptualizing "bullshit" if their notion of it apparently excludes social desirability bias as a separate thing. That seems to me to be quite different from what anyone else means. I think some explanation is really required here.
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > Huh?? What on earth does "bullshit" mean if not, y'know, giving socially-desirable answers rather than correct ones? They are saying that social desirability bias in responding to the questions that are used to measure correlates of the bullshit scale could distort the correlations, not that social desirability bias on the questions used to measure the bullshit scale distorts the bullshit measurements. Loosely, they are explaining a reason for concern that bullshitters might tend to bullshit more than other people, in a systematic direction, about traits with which the study is trying to assess the relationship to bullshitting, which might make the results bullshit.
CodiePetersen 8y ago
I have to admit I was wondering after the first couple pages if I was being bullshitted by reading it. Really good though.
- etxm 8y ago
  I had the same feeling right around: > 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.
angry_octet 8y ago
The worst part is when your bullshit detector is screaming, but other people (especially managers lacking the technical background) just can't see it. The bullshitter will often seek to have meetings with mgmt without any other technical people around, or only the most docile who feel reluctant to call out bullshit. 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.
Gpetrium 8y ago
I think there are different kinds of BSer that people meet and that in a lot of cases they are just bundled together to facilitate our understanding of why they exist. 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
dredmorbius 7y ago
Where are the tables?
akulbe 7y ago
I think there's something missing in this discussion. Do you know everything before you start $JOB? Do you have absolutely every last skill required to get the job done? I can only speak for myself here. I know I haven't. There have been cases where I only checked half the boxes for a job I was interviewing for. I'm certainly not the only one that's been in such a scenario. Impostor syndrome runs strong and screams loud in my ears. I own it. I live with it. If I (or anyone else for that matter) were to only apply to jobs or pick up tasks where I knew everything required, I suspect I and a lot of other people wouldn't be doing much. Does that make me a bullshitter? Where does one cross the line from authentic to bullshitter? I'm not going to stop doing hard things, things I don't know everything about, just because I'm afraid of what someone will think of me. I don't recommend anyone take that approach. Do hard things. Sell yourself. Be confident. And I'm speaking to myself, as well as to anyone else who cares to listen.
skookumchuck 7y ago
> One caveat to consider is that the study subjects were adolescents. I.e. the post title is completely misleading.

350 points by etxm 8y ago

cirgue 8y ago

Vices or virtues of the article aside, what a great title.

plink 8y ago

It would be precious if this entire study were prevaricated.

rmbryan 8y ago

It's important to note that this study focuses on data from 15-year-olds taking a math test. I assert that drawing broad conclusions based on that sample is suspect and may be, in fact, bullshit itself.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jwilli 8y ago
I agree with your point. 15 year old boys are by no means a good sample for the population as a whole. I would argue 15 year old boys are in fact one of the worst samples for this study. Aren't boys going through puberty known to be reckless and shortsighted?
- jackcosgrove 8y ago
  Exactly boys are cognitively less developed than girls at that age. The fact that the authors of the study did not control for this well-known fact suggests to me that the study is just more clickbait academic bullshit.
- cwingrav 8y ago
  If you’re going to study something, study it where you can best measure it. Develop your tools and methods. Create theories on this and apply them to new, more difficult domains... hopefully get feedback and insights from the larger community as you progress. Science proceeds at a pace and through a process.
normalhuman 8y ago
The authors only claim to have strong results for the studied demographics, make further remarks about other possible biases, and argue these results provide some insight and encourage further research. This is perfectly fine. Not all fields have the luxury of perfectly controlled lab experiments. If we applied the methodological discipline of experimental physics to social sciences, we might as well give up now. In the abstract they say: "Despite this being a well-known and widespread social phenomenon, relatively few large-scale empirical studies have been conducted into this issue. This paper attempts to fill this gap in the literature by examining teenagers’ propensity to claim expertise in three mathematics constructs that do not really exist." "we find substantial differences in young people’s tendency to bullshit across countries, genders and socio-economic groups" "Together this provides important new insight into who bullshitters are and the type of survey responses that they provide." In the conclusions they say: "There are of course limitations to this study, and many issues on the topic of bullshitting that remain unexplored. First, the PISA data analysed are cross-sectional rather than longitudinal. We therefore do not know whether bullshitting is a stable trait that can be consistently observed for an individual over time, or if it is something that changes with age (and the factors associated with such change)." Their strongest claim appears to be: "Despite these limitations, we believe this paper has started to open an important new area of social science research"
- notbob 7y ago
  > The authors only claim... Bullshit! The authors wrote an article entitled "Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives?" That's the title of the piece. Not "some possibly generalizable observations about the behavior of 15 year olds" Sure, the paper's contents contain the massive CAVEAT EMPTORs, but that's exactly how bullshit works in academic writing. Bold titles, sweeping statements in introductions and conclusions. But enough profuse caveats sprinkled around that you can always say to anyone who takes a closer look "no see I mentioned exactly what I meant on page N"...
Allower 8y ago
You dont need such a poorly designed study for the conclusions to have merit on their own. Just open your eyes and ears. But maybe you are a bullshitter..
OneWordSoln 8y ago
To some extent, I agree. However, 15-year-olds are the direct result of their parents' attitudes and teachings so their foundations have largely been established by that point. Put another way: if children are raised by bullshitters who never cared if their children are also full of crap, then that 15-year-old will likely continue on that path forever, unless they have a serious epiphany. As an American, I am so disgusted by lies that I refused to bullshit my kids about Santa Claus. I informed them that it was utter bullshit but that they were not to ever tell other kids the truth because that was between them and their parents. It really gave my kids an entirely different perspective on American culture and the mass insanity (however benign it is considered) that entire cultures can adopt as the status quo. Personally I felt that weaving an absurd yarn about something so important for the overall culture in general and for the kids in particular was only going to damage my credibility with my kids later when they finally learned the truth, that truth being that I had foisted a ridiculous lie upon them since before they could remember. It is my conclusion that the vast majority of what people consider their precious traditions are nothing more than excuses to continue to act badly in the face of a lack of critical thinking.
edgarvaldes 8y ago
But the paper is very clear about that limitations.
raygelogic 8y ago
no it doesn't. it's 15-year-olds self-reporting on how familiar they are with mathematical topics, some of which are made up.
Animats 8y ago
That was a strange choice. Did they have cheap access to high school students? It's a recognized problem in psychology that much research is the study of college undergrads, because they're available for free. More recently, there's the use of Mechanical Turk for studies, which means the population studied is people really desperate to work for peanuts. Now a study of job applicants... that would be more interesting.

scandox 8y ago

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.

myth_drannon 8y ago
Immigrants scored higher on the bullshit scale(survival tactic?) and accordingly countries with high immigration rates scored higher as well.
bigred100 8y ago
I imagine a good bullshitter would also be a good antibullshitter (wait for a situation where one could conceivably bullshit, and, if someone tries, press them in a way that will reveal what they’re doing if they are bullshitting, and be harmless if they aren’t)
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  I also imagine the converse. A good antibullshitter can be a passable bullshitter. If you know which patterns peg your bogometer, you can avoid using them yourself in situations where you need to be believed. For instance, I know that logorrhea, babbling, and "the gallop" are strong indicators of deception. The bull can always shit faster than the farmer can shovel it. So when I want to be believed, I could pause after every point, and maybe take some strawmen from a partially-scripted faux-skeptic conspirator so I can knock them down.
jeanlucas 8y ago
Hey, it's quite common to each country to see themselves as the best in some things that everyone have. I've been around South America and each country has a word for "McGyverism" because they see themselves as resourceful. The funny part? Every one of them say they are the only one with a word just for it. Same goes with bullshit, people in Rio de Janeiro think they're best in bullshiterry in the world. NYers claim the same, and Chinese street vendors in Shenzhen area too. It's just normal for human groups to see themselves this ways and even take proud of it

wsdfsayy 8y ago

Literally everywhere? I don't think I've worked in a work environment to date where at least half of anyone in a management position was not a complete BSer. It honestly made me wonder if that's what it takes to move up.

Veen 8y ago
Clearly not if only half of management are bullshitters. It's also not exclusive to management: I've met plenty of rank-and-file developers who specialize in talking shite.
- wsdfsayy 8y ago
  The difference is that if you're an IC you generally have to produce actual work that will be evaluated at some point. It's of course possible to BS your way into showing your manager you did more than you actually did or better than what you actually produced. If you're in management, then your job becomes mostly talking/meetings, which is much more conducive to "hand waving," which is probably why there are so many BSers who end up thriving in those roles.
  - Spooky23 8y ago
    No way. Plenty of people drift through life getting other people to do work for them.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - allenu 8y ago
      Bullshitters are good at presenting the work they're doing as very challenging even when it's trivial, so they can also just ride simple a task for a long time.
  - varjag 8y ago
    If there's a team of any substantial size, it's quite easy to BS your way in a contributor position for a year or two, and then hop to the next job.

kuzehanka 8y ago

The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's consciousness. Our industry is one where the impostor complex is rife and anyone who sounds confident must know what they're talking about, since even the PhD's aren't half as confident in their field of expertise as a bullshitter is at anything. The tech industry is increasingly inundated with these types of people who manage to get placed high in management hierarchies despite knowing nothing about the technologies they claim to be experts in. They're are the 'Agile coaches' who have never done actual scrum. The 'enterprise architects' who couldn't write fizzbuzz if their life depended on it. The 'thought leaders' who read a couple blogs about blockchain. They are a cancer to the entire industry. I don't expect C level leadership to be savvy enough to call them out for another 5-10 years, but something needs to be done about these types of people. They actively cause damage to the course of any business by setting unrealistic expectations about what technology can do, how much it costs, and how long it takes.

Veen 8y ago
If bullshitters rise to the top with very little work or knowledge, then perhaps being a bullshitter is the smart choice for people of a certain disposition.
- noonespecial 8y ago
  Perhaps for them in a narrow sense, but considering the damage they do, I'm to the point where I'd be willing to have companies pay them their inflated salaries just to stay home and not interfere.
- wallace_f 8y ago
  You're right that bullshit sells well. From OP, something about it runs in the family: >socio-economically advantaged teenagers are more likely to be bullshitters than their disadvantaged peers. I had the misfortune of seeing this up close in consulting in tech. Your customers are idiots, that's why they hired "experts." They don't know how to judge expertise (otherwise they wouldn't be hiring you). They hire based on emotions, recommendations and epaulettes because that's the best they can do. All three of those are completely subjected to cronyism, in my observation. My experience here made me a firm believer that institutions and businesses really need to be allowed to fail. The most epic stupidity (and toxic politics) always comes from the ones that were furthest from that principle. And I'm never doing that again. There is nothing I can buy with paychecks from interacting with that toxic, idiotic side of humanity that makes it worth it.

shanselman 8y ago

I'm 17 pages in and I am wondering if the paper itself is bullshit and that's the joke.

frickinLasers 8y ago
Please explain
jesusofsuburbia 8y ago
The paper seems to provide an insight to 15-year-olds' bullshit... but I'm not sure if this also applies to our society as a whole
HerpilyDerpily 8y ago
If it's not bullshit, then I definitely need a ELI5 explanation of this: https://imgur.com/38CXnRx https://imgur.com/38CXnRx
- frickinLasers 8y ago
  This is my interpretation as someone who has never seen this type of study and is giving the authors the benefit of the doubt: Take Table 3. The outcome "O_ij" for each student's "views of abilities" is the scale score (split into self-efficacy and problem solving). The table shows bullshitters think they're awesome, giving positive scores (higher than the mean). Bullshitters were previously categorized into four groups by asking questions about what math terms they were familiar with, including terms that don't exist (maybe they were familiar with 0,1,2, or 3 of the fake terms) Control for other factors by adding levers for achievement, socio-economic status, gender and school. These are the capital letters, set by test scores, etc. Students from each school will have a different u_j, probably higher for higher-performing schools B.S. is probably a matrix of ones, or 1-4, or something. Perform a regression (let a computer do some matrix math to solve for unknown variables), using all of the students as data points. Each student will end up with a different set of italic letters indicating how much the capital letters influence their outcome, with students who are similar in one aspect sharing similar (or equal, depending on how they set up the problem) values for that italicized letter. For table 3, it looks like the study claims students who have been identified as bullshitters end up with higher beta values ("regression results"). It's possible this explanation is bullshit, though.

Zaphods 8y ago

It's interesting the definition of bullshit in this study: > ‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. compared to the definition that the philosopher Harry Fankfurt came to in his book On Bullshit, and that this study references: > bullshit is speech intended to persuade without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false, but rather only cares whether their listener is persuaded. The key difference being, these teenagers might still have regard for the truth, they think they know it and believe they know it. But they're still bullshitters under the definition used in this study. Intention seems to have been discarded in this study when I think it plays a very big part, especially among teens. The specific context of a situation might mean certain individuals are inclined to overclaim vs others because they have different reasons to.

michelpp 8y ago
On Bullshit is one of my favorite books from long ago, thanks for reminding me about it, I just found my old copy and looking forward to digging through it again!

busterarm 8y ago

Lower coefficient of bullshit in areas where people are likely to say "u wot m8"? Can't say I'm surprised.

SimonPStevens 8y ago

I consider myself to be an anti-bullshitter. I once said in a job interview that I knew nothing about the technology they were hiring for, but I was pretty sure I could take a decent stab at it. I was telling the truth. I got the job.

Reedx 8y ago
"I don't know" is such an underappreciated phrase (followed with action to remedy that).
- tonyedgecombe 8y ago
  Politicians that use it are extremely rare.
  - senderista 8y ago
    Ditto “I was wrong”
- mg794613 8y ago
  We had an interviewee (is that a word?) today who said that he didn't know and to me that was a reason to hire him.
  - duiker101 8y ago
    Maybe it is a word, but I think candidate is a more generally accepted term
    - mg794613 7y ago
      Ah thank you, I know that word and now I have no idea why I made it difficult for myself :D
  - cr0sh 8y ago
    I'd say quite possibly so...if he also followed that up with "...but I could find out." (or something similar). Saying "I don't know" is one thing - it's good to admit one's lack of knowledge. Being able to then follow it up with the will to expand their knowledge - that is valuable IMHO.

Fede_V 8y ago

If you've never experienced it before, the first time you work with someone who is a pathological liar and bullshitter is a completely disorienting experience. Normal people just don't lie that brazenly and with so little remorse - so you walk out of meetings wondering if perhaps you just misunderstood because there's no way someone would straight up lie that way. Interestingly, both of the worst bullshitters I've ever met were in academia - and the business world has been a breath of fresh air in comparison. When I used to work in computational biology, I met several senior professors who lead big labs who had absolutely no understanding of any of the methods used by the grad students in their group.

hypertexthero 8y ago
This book was a very interesting read: https://content.psychopathcode.com/preface.html https://content.psychopathcode.com/preface.html
specialist 8y ago
The reverse is also true. I had read about trust being crucial to innovation, teamwork, execution. But had never experienced it. Then I got paired with a marketing manager who was fantastic. We truly had a trust-based relationship. Everyone joked that we acted like a married couple (in a good way). That experience kinda ruined me. Once I learned what trust in a competent person feels like, I had a hard time suspending disbelief, and zero inclination to play the game with bullshitters.
hirundo 8y ago
Sometimes a bullshitter consistently peddles untruths, but is unaware of it, and so isn't a liar, just mistaken. I grew up with an older brother like that. He regularly spouted pure bullshit that to him was Truth. That became clear once when I was struggling with math homework. He looked at the problem, pronounced that he understood it and could solve it easily. So I handed him the pencil. He didn't know he was bullshitting so didn't make an excuse or acknowledge that I'd called a bluff. He took the pencil and sat down, then stared at the book and the problem for 20 minutes. Then shrugged, got up, and walked away. But he really thought he could do it so he did try. Since then he's made a living in a retail construction trade and hasn't changed. He'll visit a homeowner who will explain the problem. He'll confidently and convincingly explain how he can solve it, and get the job. Then he'll utterly fail and ignore the resulting problems, and not understand why the customer gets upset. His last name, and so mine, is dirt in the city where he works, which he seems to be unaware of. But another sucker is born every minute so he moves on. As a tradesman he is crap but as a salesman he's golden, largely because he honestly believes in his own competence. Growing up with that has inoculated me against this mode of bullshit so it's been a blessing. I suppose it's like the benefit of raising a kid in an environment that's not too clean.

anthony_doan 8y ago

I've seen a class of people who are so insecure with their choice of technology that they have to put down rivals technology. I'm fine with objective contrast but I think the generalizations and lack of data with opinion pass as fact is a terrible behavior to have in this industry. It creates tribalism and it doesn't do anything remotely constructive but to put other people who chose different technology down.

loganfrederick 8y ago

Extending other comments here about bullshitters being prevalent in management, I would love to see this research extended to the economic impact on bullshit, both positive and negative outcomes.

nscalf 8y ago

Bullshitting is really a booming business. Regardless of what your views are on him, when you juxtapose what the US president says and what is real, he's a bullshitter.

vertline3 8y ago

Overestimation, overplacement, overprecision. Three new words to absorb, to help identify B.S. Page 3

teslaberry 8y ago

read it, study is bullshit because it's too narrowly focussed on a few tests of 'bullshittery' and avoids the big question of how good some bullshitters are about being persuasive in areas OTHER THAN MATH, where KNOW complexities are able to be obfuscated or ambiguous. for example, financial advisors bullshiting about financial advise. is a far more complex thing to study than teenagers lying about expertise in fake maths and how likely someone is to nakedly lie about mapping skills. this isn't semantics: the best bullshitters pick and choose what they bullshit about , and for this reason, often go undetected or rather, REWARDED for their bullshit. shit on that apple and tell me how you like it later.

formalsystem 8y ago

I think we need to take the right message from this. BS seems to be a necessary evil and instead of lamenting the fall of intellectualism, I would encourage techies to focus on their craft, writing and speaking in that order. The other day I was reading https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427581/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427581/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b... and the TL;DR was that most of the modern art movement was brewed out of a PR machine which did involve some artistic skill but was mostly lots of BS. So lesson to us programmers would be spend more time cultivating a brand on Twitter and Github. Over longer timelines and repeated games the techies will have more influence than the BSers who just know how to write and speak.

mg794613 8y ago
No, if you are actually skilled, you take pride in what you do. I will not give up and join the bullshitters.
projektir 8y ago
Isn't this exactly the problem we currently have? Everyone is so focused on training their BS skills that nobody is real anymore?

Lapsa 8y ago

read only title and comments. paper is wrong - it's just different origins, aims and perspective.

mowingscooter 8y ago

I recently put up a job post for a COO position for my company and the number of bullshitters with MBAs bragging about their accomplishments on blockchain has been astronomical. It’s amazing to me that bullshitting comes so naturally to some people that I almost wanted to interview them just to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

darepublic 8y ago

Code or gtfo?

gunnr15 8y ago

Am I reading the data right? It has Canada as the top BS avg? Any ideas as to why this would be?

billman 8y ago

I think this article maybe self referential.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

radium3d 8y ago

They short sell

antipaul 8y ago

In this paper, did the bullshitters actually turn out to be smarter than the non-bullshitters? Is this in the PDF? I didn’t read it thoroughly.

motohagiography 8y ago

The life skill secret is not how to bullshit, it's being able to tell whether someone knows when they are bullshitting, or if they don't even know when they are. Are they a Joker (who knows) or a Clown (who doesn't). Jokers you can get in on the gag with. Clowns you have to avoid, because a clown is just a clown.

imnotlost 8y ago

The US has a long history as the land of the bullshitter - the snake-oil sales men, the Psychics and Tarot card readers, the self-help authors, the "business coaches", MLM... the list is endless. And people love it so much they'll gladly get into debt for it and even vote for the king of Bullshit for president.

lr4444lr 8y ago
Ah, why did you have to spoil a great cultural observation with a contemporary political dig at the end?
- imnotlost 8y ago
  But it's not political, really. Both parties have different politicians shoveling different bullshit to different people. Same game, different target audience. That's not to say genuine people/products/value doesn't exist but you have to dig through so much bullshit to find any of it.

osehgol 8y ago

if this 34 page paper ends in 'this paper is bullshit', ima gonna cry

bluetomcat 8y ago

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 pride for his work.

ilikehurdles 8y ago
This is the issue. If your marketing, product, and hiring lingo is all self-aggrandizing BS, then your organization will come to reflect that same style. Tech companies are creating BS, communicating BS, and rewarding BS, so is it really such a surprise that the workers themselves have live/breath/eat BS in order to succeed? Those who don't embrace are seen as not fitting in to that organization's "corporate culture".
pimmen 8y ago
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!
- anitil 7y ago
  What they actually wanted: a WordPress theme
bartread 8y ago
Not to mention the fact that if you really are searching for a "blockchain expert to influence the team" there's a higher chance the job itself is bullshit, because valid use cases for blockchain seem quite limited, which I suspect would put off many non-bullshitters. People at work half-jokingly ask me when we're going to integrate blockchain into our platform because they know that, even though it'd sound good in the marketing literature and sales pitches, we have so far discovered no practical use for it and don't want to waste time and energy[1]. [1] Not just the team's energy: solving a problem at scale with blockchain is likely to be hugely inefficient in terms of infrastructure and power consumption.

usgroup 8y ago

Funnier still is that I suspect that “bullshitters” are probably well represented in this thread; pitchforks in hand, and bashing “bullshitters” like everyone else.

woranl 8y ago

The society rewards those “fake it until you make it” con. Sometimes it makes me wonder if the truth still matter anymore.

ajross 8y ago

Absolutely fascinating to me that this is voted up to the top of HN without anyone present talking about the elephant in the room on this particular issue of chronic bullshitters being more successful than they should be.

magnetic 8y ago

This is explained in part by the Dunning-Kruger effect (which ties into the Impostor Syndrome). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

ngngngng 8y ago

In the past few months i've become increasingly aware that many successful people around me completely full of shit. They manage to get millions in investor capital or run financially successful businesses for years with horrible ideas and business practices. (selling coffee on the blockchain, changing business direction so often engineers can't finish their projects). I'm trying to use this to build enough confidence for me to start my business ideas and pitch to investors. If these idiots can do it, why can't I?

4ntonius8lock 8y ago

I dislike bullshitters and I've unfortunately had to work with many. I read the paper and something that really stuck out at me is how bullshitters were more likely to actually try and understand the problem than non bullshitters. Page 25: I think about what might have caused the problem and what I can do to solve it Non bullshitters: 85% Bullshitters: 90% I study a map and work out the best route Non bullshitters: 55% Bullshitters: 71% Interestingly, the non-bullshitters were more likely to try and put off the work to someone else: I leave it to my brother to worry about how to get there Non bullshitters: 34% Bullshitters: 27% Another shocking thing for me was that bullshitters viewed themselves as having more perseverance and perfectionism: When confronted with a problem, I give up easily Non bullshitters: 17% Bullshitters: 8% When confronted with a problem, I do more than what is expected of me Non bullshitters: 28% Bullshitters: 45% I really didn't expect this. It's got me thinking.

eslaught 8y ago
I don't find this surprising at all. People who lie, first lie to themselves. In many cases I suspect they're being entirely genuine and don't see where they fall short of their own self-assessment.
zzbzq 8y ago
But the bullshitters are proven to be bullshitting the survey...
notahacker 8y ago
The "bullshitter" metric actually used is highly correlated with people trying to choose the "correct" answer to the questions. I'm not sure that people trying to conform to the correct answer in a survey/test is particularly well correlated with what most people would consider "bullshitters" in life though (the guy selling vaporware with fake testimonials, the guy who can confidently talk at great length on a subject without actually saying anything meaningful, the guy that's having lots and lots of sex with amazing girls every night but they all go to another school) who are being creative rather than conformist in how they present themselves. [FWIW it probably also picks up a fair few kids who ticked their familiarity with 'proper numbers' because they studied proper and improper fractions quite recently and understood it very well, though those who [also] asserted familiarity with "subjunctive scaling" have fewer excuses...]

blobbers 8y ago

Sorry - is this paper bullshit? Can't tell if they're just funking with us.

Allower 8y ago

A.k.a M.B.A.'s

rafaelturk 8y ago

Extra points for using a ftp in the URL.

resters 8y ago

I think the word bullshitting is a harmfully imprecise way to describe what is actually several problems: Naive over-confidence: People who lack the experience necessary to update their beliefs to more reasonable ones. I'd argue that this is both a good thing and a bad thing. When it works out well (Tesla) there are still people who are angry that it happened and call bullshit on it. Most examples of truly uncommon vision will be characterized as this sort of bullshit by skeptics, who are sometimes (in hindsight) wrong and sometimes right. "Alpha" culture: Companies/teams where leadership is confused with stereotypical alpha behavior such as dominance, brashness, and artificial confidence/decisiveness. This one is predominantly negative, as it shuts down important thought and enquiry. To make matters worse, it creates a filter where the culture is blind to leadership that is not couched in stereotypical alpha behaviors. This is often referred to as bro culture. Lying: Some people lie strategically about things that are important to a business or team. They do this often to serve their own goals at the expense of company goals. When looking at this one we must ask what incentives allow it to seem like a winning strategy for anyone? In my opinion it occurs when there is not a culture of trust to begin with. Intimidation: This is similar to bro/alpha culture, but is more sinister, and has more to do with problem individuals behaving in antisocial ways and trying to opportunistically use pecking order, law of the jungle approaches to get what they want out of the situation. This resembles "bullshit" because it is a form of tactical speech that is not based in truth and is meant to create a desirable outcome for the person doing it. It is always harmful to a group dynamic and is often hard to detect because sometimes someone observing the situation will think that the person who is tactically intimidating others is more of a natural leader, or will interpret the successfully intimidated peoples' behavior as timid or un-leader-like. Company-wide lies: All companies have an origin story, and some are more true than others. But when there is a big lie that starts at the top, it creates many opportunities for people in the organization to exploit information asymmetries to their own benefit. Since it is based on a lie, the information asymmetries exist due to politics and are not based on truth, so being observant and truth-oriented is not helpful in understanding when someone is trying to act opportunistically. This one is really bad, and the consequences are very broad and include everything from hiring or firing people based on dishonest metrics to leading to resumé inaccuracies, fudged metrics, and (worst of all) major strategic blind spots.

7y ago

powera 8y ago

There is one point in the article - that "teenage boys are bigger bullshitters than teenage girls" - which I have independently verified. When conducting surveys using Google Surveys (surveys.google.com) on fact-based questions (such as asking what country is Aleppo in), men are ALWAYS more likely to select a random option, and women are almost always more likely to select "I don't know".

peter_retief 8y ago

I probably fall in a group of an occasional bs, big on estimation, get lost sometimes

jrochkind1 8y ago

honestly i just came for the title

DonHopkins 8y ago

Why do all Ted Talks and KickStarter Promos sound the same to me? Do I have Bullshit Agnosia? It's like there's this certain style of Archetypal Motivational Making The World A Better Place Inspiration Porn Bullshit that they're all striving for, and they all use the exact same music and slogans and rhythm and inflection.

RankingMember 8y ago
Your comment reminded me of this clip (Silicon Valley): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-GVd_HLlps

georgeecollins 8y ago

Here's my counter theory of "bullshitters" that I imagine will be very unpopular on this forum. (Can you disagree without down voting?) Programmers (Engineers who really spend most their day programming) do intellectually difficult, solitary work. The quality of their work is often difficult to measure because its often easier to write your own code than really spend a lot of time figuring out someone else's code. So if you write code that works, you are hero. You are effective at doing something hard. But because of this, many programmers I have worked with who admittedly are really smart, think they are head and shoulders above their peers, particularly those who aren't writing code. Being your own judge of the quality of your work distorts your perspective. People who spend a lot of time programming are sometimes not outgoing or people who prefer interpersonal interactions over technical problems. If they are, they often become managers. If they are managers long enough they inevitably lose touch with the nuts and bolts of what the technical team is doing. They talk about things without understanding them nearly as well as the people on the front line of implementation. In the eyes of the people doing the technical work they can be seen as "bullshiters" who are less capable and less effective than the engineers.

mathattack 8y ago

The article seems to be catching overconfidence (a human bias) as opposed to BS (a disregard for truth). Or am I missing it?

cm2012 8y ago
I mean, if you say you know a made up branch of math very well - isn't that BS? That's what the researchers tested (they asked students to rate themselves in 16 branches of mathematics, 3 were completely made up)

hi56793 8y ago

I'm not sure if this is helping anyone except making people who are not bullshitters more paranoid and the bullshitters be-hated. The bullshitters in the startup world don't get big because nobody realizes that they are talking a lot of bullshit but because those who collaborate with them are at least as greedy as they are. (I was also drinking the kool aid for some time.) So the core problem is greed and not bullshit, and this is also what makes it toxic. FWIW even the most credible and knowledgeable people are able to fan out bullshit, everybody does this every now and then.

n05tradamu5 8y ago

It seems like "bullshit", in the way that it is measured in this paper, is an analog to confidence and risk taking. The groups that were most likely to bullshit (high socio-economic status, male, immigrant, North American) are generally groups who have been exposed to strategic risk taking that has paid off. "Bullshitters", in the context of this paper, seem to be the ones who are willing to put their hands up and have the confidence to explore ideas and concepts that are at the fringes of their skill and knowledge sets. This is very different than the colloquial idea of a bullshitter.

johnnycab 8y ago

This thread is totally surreal and meta enough to be n-gate's wet dream.

tasuki 8y ago

I like how one of the authors is from "Australian Catholic University". An expert on bullshitting?

tathougies 8y ago
I'm confused: https://www.acu.edu.au/ https://www.acu.edu.au/ ?

Sniffnoy 8y ago

There's one thing here that I don't really get here. Take a look at this paragraph, on page 18: > There are two primary threats to the validity of our interpretation of the results above. [...] A second possibility is that young people’s responses are reflecting social desirability bias; that they are providing responses that they believe will be viewed as positively by others (e.g. that they know various mathematics concepts, that they work hard at school etc). Both of these possibilities could lead to a spurious correlation between our bullshit index and the various other psychological traits investigated in the previous sub-section. Huh?? What on earth does "bullshit" mean if not, y'know, giving socially-desirable answers rather than correct ones? (I mean, that's basically roughly how Frankfurt defined it.) Social desirability bias isn't a separate thing interfering with your measurement of bullshit; social desirability bias is bullshit (or rather, a cause of it). I am quite confused as to how the authors are conceptualizing "bullshit" if their notion of it apparently excludes social desirability bias as a separate thing. That seems to me to be quite different from what anyone else means. I think some explanation is really required here.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> Huh?? What on earth does "bullshit" mean if not, y'know, giving socially-desirable answers rather than correct ones? They are saying that social desirability bias in responding to the questions that are used to measure correlates of the bullshit scale could distort the correlations, not that social desirability bias on the questions used to measure the bullshit scale distorts the bullshit measurements. Loosely, they are explaining a reason for concern that bullshitters might tend to bullshit more than other people, in a systematic direction, about traits with which the study is trying to assess the relationship to bullshitting, which might make the results bullshit.

CodiePetersen 8y ago

I have to admit I was wondering after the first couple pages if I was being bullshitted by reading it. Really good though.

etxm 8y ago
I had the same feeling right around: > 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.

angry_octet 8y ago

The worst part is when your bullshit detector is screaming, but other people (especially managers lacking the technical background) just can't see it. The bullshitter will often seek to have meetings with mgmt without any other technical people around, or only the most docile who feel reluctant to call out bullshit. 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.

Gpetrium 8y ago

I think there are different kinds of BSer that people meet and that in a lot of cases they are just bundled together to facilitate our understanding of why they exist. 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

dredmorbius 7y ago

Where are the tables?

akulbe 7y ago

I think there's something missing in this discussion. Do you know everything before you start $JOB? Do you have absolutely every last skill required to get the job done? I can only speak for myself here. I know I haven't. There have been cases where I only checked half the boxes for a job I was interviewing for. I'm certainly not the only one that's been in such a scenario. Impostor syndrome runs strong and screams loud in my ears. I own it. I live with it. If I (or anyone else for that matter) were to only apply to jobs or pick up tasks where I knew everything required, I suspect I and a lot of other people wouldn't be doing much. Does that make me a bullshitter? Where does one cross the line from authentic to bullshitter? I'm not going to stop doing hard things, things I don't know everything about, just because I'm afraid of what someone will think of me. I don't recommend anyone take that approach. Do hard things. Sell yourself. Be confident. And I'm speaking to myself, as well as to anyone else who cares to listen.

skookumchuck 7y ago

> One caveat to consider is that the study subjects were adolescents. I.e. the post title is completely misleading.