5 ms·

This reminds me of a person who somehow managed an invitation to give a presentation at UC Berkeley on database compression in 1993, with similar levels of snak

This reminds me of a person who somehow managed an invitation to give a presentation at UC Berkeley on database compression in 1993, with similar levels of snake-oil. I remember one of the funnier moments, a theme of the presentation was how there were more and more large data sets out there, including the Library of Congress. In a burst of enthusiasm, the presenter gushed about how they even had a Stradivarius violin in their collection. I turned to my friend and said, "well, I can imagine how to do data compression on that, but the decompression is going to be hard." The actual technology was just a variant of Lempel-Ziv, and the claims about lossless compression were just hiding the entropy by not counting a huge dictionary off to the side. Even so, there were claims that this result "extended information theory" and the patterns found could be the basis of learning. The presenter had climbed in their regional market, and gotten a puff piece in a business magazine, but obviously the grad students at UC Berkeley weren't buying it. The presenter's startup didn't go anywhere, but they have had a successful career, and are now a VP at Gartner. I guess the lesson is that there's a network that runs on technical expertise and ability to deliver results, and a parallel network that runs on bullshit and the ability to convince people. There's a lot of money and power in the second network, and it intersects with respected, established institutions. Grant seems to be playing that game masterfully, and the publicity from being publicly attacked at a "Black Hat" conference plays into his hands beautifully. Maybe Gartner will be hiring?

mathattack 7y ago
My experience with Gartner is similar to yours - much longer on slippery snake oil salespeople than content experts. They are supposedly a research org but what they produce looks copy and pasted from a 90s website.
Nextgrid 7y ago
I read your comment up to the last paragraph and was going to comment about “VP at Gartner” and how these consulting companies (and Accenture, Deloitte, etc) run on bullshit but your last paragraph sums it up perfectly. I wonder what can be done to nuke these BS companies out of existence. Anyone has ideas?
- paulriddle 7y ago
  These companies provide political value. I think of them as black boxes that don't really do anything to its input but give political weight to the arbitrary claim associated with the input. Want to cover your fuckup on a project? Hire Accenture for a few months to do something meaningless, like produce a report with all the problems in the project. Change nothing. Then say that clearly the project is more difficult than you've anticipated, you even retained a consultant that said this and that. More resources are required. You can do training sessions for people you want to advance or hold back. In both cases sessions would be meaningless and void of any real value, except that they assign attribute Foo to the group of people. Then you can say that only people with Foo can do Bar, moving those people forward in their career. Alternatively you can overcome some bureaucratic obstacle by claiming that you do Foo regularly, which is a requirement from some authority for some reason. I don't really know how this kind of politics works, but this is how I tend to think about it.
- overkalix 7y ago
  Speaking of Deloitte, they were the auditors when the Spanish bank Bankia (then a newly formed conglomerate of 6 saving banks, with Caja Madrid as the cornerstone) went public. A report was produced by Deloitte saying that the financial statements provided by the bank were accurate and that going public was a viable strategy. The moment the bank went public their valuation went down and months later the Spanish central governement had to inject 23 billion euros (of EU money) into the bank. We know now that that Deloitte's report was based not on actual independently collected and analyzed information but on "possible future scenarios" outlaid by Bankia's executives. In court, Deloitte's representatives argued that they really hadn't had access to the necessary information to produce the audit. So what did Deloitte's dozens of employees worked on for months? Why did they produce a report that couldn't possibly know if it was accurate? Bankia, Abengoa, Livent, Standard Chartered, Carillion... the pattern is always the same: "we can make it go any way you want".
  - harperlee 7y ago
    You are mixing 2 different tasks that create your confusion: - the tentative review of a proforma version of accounting used for the IPO, which Deloitte did not sign but where heavily discussed and to which Deloitte have access. - the formal audit of the financial statements, for which Deloitte did NOT give the ok (Francisco Celma, the responsible partner, did not sign), as it was not given all the information (but they did have items to work on, just not everything needed). Rodrigo Rato, then Bankia’s CEO, pushed Celma to sign without having reviewed all info; when he refused, Rato went forward with the IPO nonetheless. Also I think it is Celma in particular, and not Deloitte as a company, who is being sued (or is the one legally liable, irrespective of the suit; can’t really remember )
mcguire 7y ago
I'm not sure the division is that strong. Years ago, I repeatedly saw a talk from a wellish known academic about "compressed" SMS messages that were simply a prearranged code. This was shortly before text messages became very cheap, wireless networking became much more common, and phone processors were in the process of becoming much more powerful. Then there was the professor pushing their "Lego" model of network protocol development, whose example was encryption and compression blocks. There's less money in academia, but just as much publicity.
- itronitron 7y ago
  many, many CS research papers obfuscate their methods as a barrier to entry by making them sound more complicated than they are ... case in point any paper describing part of its computation as applying the 'Haar Wavelet Basis'

mathattack 7y ago

My experience with Gartner is similar to yours - much longer on slippery snake oil salespeople than content experts. They are supposedly a research org but what they produce looks copy and pasted from a 90s website.

Nextgrid 7y ago

I read your comment up to the last paragraph and was going to comment about “VP at Gartner” and how these consulting companies (and Accenture, Deloitte, etc) run on bullshit but your last paragraph sums it up perfectly. I wonder what can be done to nuke these BS companies out of existence. Anyone has ideas?

paulriddle 7y ago
These companies provide political value. I think of them as black boxes that don't really do anything to its input but give political weight to the arbitrary claim associated with the input. Want to cover your fuckup on a project? Hire Accenture for a few months to do something meaningless, like produce a report with all the problems in the project. Change nothing. Then say that clearly the project is more difficult than you've anticipated, you even retained a consultant that said this and that. More resources are required. You can do training sessions for people you want to advance or hold back. In both cases sessions would be meaningless and void of any real value, except that they assign attribute Foo to the group of people. Then you can say that only people with Foo can do Bar, moving those people forward in their career. Alternatively you can overcome some bureaucratic obstacle by claiming that you do Foo regularly, which is a requirement from some authority for some reason. I don't really know how this kind of politics works, but this is how I tend to think about it.
overkalix 7y ago
Speaking of Deloitte, they were the auditors when the Spanish bank Bankia (then a newly formed conglomerate of 6 saving banks, with Caja Madrid as the cornerstone) went public. A report was produced by Deloitte saying that the financial statements provided by the bank were accurate and that going public was a viable strategy. The moment the bank went public their valuation went down and months later the Spanish central governement had to inject 23 billion euros (of EU money) into the bank. We know now that that Deloitte's report was based not on actual independently collected and analyzed information but on "possible future scenarios" outlaid by Bankia's executives. In court, Deloitte's representatives argued that they really hadn't had access to the necessary information to produce the audit. So what did Deloitte's dozens of employees worked on for months? Why did they produce a report that couldn't possibly know if it was accurate? Bankia, Abengoa, Livent, Standard Chartered, Carillion... the pattern is always the same: "we can make it go any way you want".
- harperlee 7y ago
  You are mixing 2 different tasks that create your confusion: - the tentative review of a proforma version of accounting used for the IPO, which Deloitte did not sign but where heavily discussed and to which Deloitte have access. - the formal audit of the financial statements, for which Deloitte did NOT give the ok (Francisco Celma, the responsible partner, did not sign), as it was not given all the information (but they did have items to work on, just not everything needed). Rodrigo Rato, then Bankia’s CEO, pushed Celma to sign without having reviewed all info; when he refused, Rato went forward with the IPO nonetheless. Also I think it is Celma in particular, and not Deloitte as a company, who is being sued (or is the one legally liable, irrespective of the suit; can’t really remember )

mcguire 7y ago

I'm not sure the division is that strong. Years ago, I repeatedly saw a talk from a wellish known academic about "compressed" SMS messages that were simply a prearranged code. This was shortly before text messages became very cheap, wireless networking became much more common, and phone processors were in the process of becoming much more powerful. Then there was the professor pushing their "Lego" model of network protocol development, whose example was encryption and compression blocks. There's less money in academia, but just as much publicity.

itronitron 7y ago
many, many CS research papers obfuscate their methods as a barrier to entry by making them sound more complicated than they are ... case in point any paper describing part of its computation as applying the 'Haar Wavelet Basis'