6 ms·

Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf]

73 points by murtio 6y ago

dang 6y ago
A thread from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130
anm89 6y ago
`On Bullshit` is one of my favorite things I've ever read but it's frustrating that this paper simultaneously cites `On Bullshit` while immediately defining bullshit in a way that does not conform almost at all with the `On Bullshit` This article starts out by defining bullshitters and therefore bullshit as: "‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. " They at least somewhat remedy this by mentioning the better partial definition used in `On Bullshit` which is shared with the word "humbug": "deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings or attitudes”" The important difference is that bullshit is not lies, and you do not have to "have little experience or skill" on a topic to spread bullshit on that topic, all you need is a disregard for the truth, in favor of whatever is convenient to you which could overlap with the truth or not. In this way this definition is almost directly in opposition to Frankfurt's which makes me think this paper is a bunch of bullshit. edit: Frankfurt's own words on his definition of bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&feature=youtu.be&t=125 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&feature=youtu.be...
- shard 6y ago
  I was disappointed by Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". I felt he spent 9/10th of the book on academically defining different aspects of bullshit, and only getting into the details of the effects and ways to deal with bullshit in the last few pages. Basically it was a book which carved out a boundary for his definition of "bullshit", which made it read like a philosophy text with little application in the real world.
haram_masala 6y ago
I've discussed and recommended this article at length with various associates and colleagues, though I haven't actually read it and have no idea what it's talking about.
- cheschire 6y ago
  Sounds ready for most news aggregators. Just gotta be good at clickbait titles.
yarg 6y ago
I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an entire team. In many cases this is an impossible problem to solve - with non-technical executives sitting above the non-technical managers; a layer-cake of bullshitters blind to bullshitters with a vested interest (born of self-preservation) in remaining so.
- itisit 6y ago
  For every really-faking-it-until-they-make-it junior dev there's a goldbricking veteran spending 80% of company time on a side pursuit.
  - jasperry 6y ago
    It's not "company time", it's time in a human being's life.
    - logicslave 6y ago
      Amazing how easy it is to forget this
    - itisit 6y ago
      Both, and they coincide during business hours, at the least.
  - dusted 6y ago
    If their 20% justifies their salary, which it does by the fact they've not been fired, then I don't see your point.
- digitalsushi 6y ago
  How is the knowing developer, not with the lead title, able to survive on a team like this? I tried escaping - from my bumpkin locale to Boston, a 3 hour trip every morning and 3 hours back, until I couldn't handle it five months later and went tail back to the same team with the same issues. Here, I'm still hopeful to eventually figure this out.
booleandilemma 6y ago
I’ve worked with a few people they could do case studies on.
jknoepfler 6y ago
I think the elephant in the room for this study is the high bullshit scores of immigrants. If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you understand something, you're probably used to having to figure it out offline - but you might say "yes" anyway, for a myriad of reasons. Something I find disingenuous in this study is the failure to follow up on competency. "High bullshit index" individuals claim with higher frequency to be able to calculate the petrol consumption of a car, and are confident in their popularity. Are they wrong? Immigrants are more likely to bullshit when they are confronted with language they don't understand - but they are also highly experienced at figuring out things they don't understand after the fact. I found it queer that the tasks asked about where relatively mathematical, and the domain they used to measure bullshit was also mathematical... if the checklist of "could you find the gcd of two numbers" "could you find all the complex roots of this polynomial" etc. were interpreted as "if you were prompted (in good faith) on a homework assignment to do this task, are you confident you could do it?" (this is a much more ecologically valid situation than being asked to do something meaningless or impossible), then the answer learned through hard experience might correctly be "yes", despite the respondent "not actually knowing what they were talking about". Food for thought anyway. I think the article takes an exceptionally otherizing stance towards would be bullshitters. (And uses some... hopefully ironic? ... rhetoric. "We all know a bullshitter" is the classic fallacy of appealing to popular belief).
- robocat 6y ago
  > the high bullshit scores of immigrants I think that statement is far too broad: I can think of some fairly bullshit free cultures, like many Scandinavian countries. I can also think of people from specific religions that I generally find to be bullshitty, versus people from the same country but a different religion that appear to me to be much more honest. Also a lot of people I meet from the USA appear to me to be extremely bullshit oriented compared to New Zealanders... Perhaps that is due to my own selection bias because of the type of people that emigrate or travel to New Zealand, or because I tend to meet businessmen?
  - jknoepfler 6y ago
    Did you read the paper? They literally measure this. I was quoting a stat from the paper. The point of my comment was to think critically about how they interpret their findings, in light of their very own findings.
mightytravels 6y ago
Software is the prototype for actual bulshitter vapor ware modus operandi. I wonder why?
- humanrebar 6y ago
  In many other roles, bullshit can actually get you somewhere, especially if persuasion is part of the job. In other situations it's not just bullshit but fraud, so we consider it another category. Software itself is unforgiving of bullshit. If it's buggy as hell, you can't just talk your way out of it. It's also opaque enough that it's difficult to definitively distinguish between incompetence, bullshit, straight-up lying, and just failing at a difficult problem (if only because of insufficient resources). It takes a significant amount of work to make that kind of distinction and that work doesn't necessarily translate from project to project.
geoffmunn 6y ago
As a developer, I've found that the Agile methodology is great for weeding out bullshitters. A decently run sprint planning session with a retrospective at the end will highlight who didn't actually do anything. The killer feature is that these people volunteered the amount of effort for the work and then have to explain why nothing got done. They eventually leave the team once they realise they've been discovered.
- Mc91 6y ago
  We spend our retros whinging about other teams that (are supposed to) support us.
- zimpenfish 6y ago
  Having worked at many places with many bullshitters who have successfully conned the Agile process for weeks (sometimes months), I'd have to disagree. (Indeed, I have done it once myself when I was trying to leave but they were dragging their feet about signing the paperwork.)
  - Thorentis 6y ago
    The only way I've seen people con it, is where the people doing the tasks are also trusted with scoping and estimating it. You need to have multiple people "sign off" on or buy into the scoping and estimation process. E.g. One person does an "investigation" task (e.g. Look into feasibility / difficulty of x). This should be somebody with enough experience to give a good rough estimate. Their estimate can them be discussed at the next sprint planning session, and everybody should agree on the final estimate (story points, or size label, however you do your sprints). Then, if the bullshitter gets to the end of the sprint and says they didn't complete a 1-2 day task in 10 days, you can start asking why. They do this consistently across 2-3 sprints, you know something is up. Assume they're more junior than their job title and try giving them easier tasks. Still not getting much done? They're a bullshitter. Fire them / raise with their manager.
    - afarrell 6y ago
smcg 6y ago
The paper only surveyed teenagers... Smells like BS to me
dusted 6y ago
In his seminal essay-turned-book On Bullshit,Frankfurt (2005) ... Other philosophers have since expanded on his work, most notably G. A. Cohen in his essay “Deeper into Bullshit”(Cohen 2002)... Time travel or me not understanding what those numbers mean ?

73 points by murtio 6y ago

dang 6y ago

A thread from last year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130

`On Bullshit` is one of my favorite things I've ever read but it's frustrating that this paper simultaneously cites `On Bullshit` while immediately defining bullshit in a way that does not conform almost at all with the `On Bullshit` This article starts out by defining bullshitters and therefore bullshit as: "‘Bullshitters’ are individuals who claim knowledge or expertise in an area where they actually have little experience or skill. " They at least somewhat remedy this by mentioning the better partial definition used in `On Bullshit` which is shared with the word "humbug": "deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings or attitudes”" The important difference is that bullshit is not lies, and you do not have to "have little experience or skill" on a topic to spread bullshit on that topic, all you need is a disregard for the truth, in favor of whatever is convenient to you which could overlap with the truth or not. In this way this definition is almost directly in opposition to Frankfurt's which makes me think this paper is a bunch of bullshit. edit: Frankfurt's own words on his definition of bullshit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&feature=youtu.be&t=125 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&feature=youtu.be...

shard 6y ago
I was disappointed by Frankfurt's "On Bullshit". I felt he spent 9/10th of the book on academically defining different aspects of bullshit, and only getting into the details of the effects and ways to deal with bullshit in the last few pages. Basically it was a book which carved out a boundary for his definition of "bullshit", which made it read like a philosophy text with little application in the real world.

haram_masala 6y ago

I've discussed and recommended this article at length with various associates and colleagues, though I haven't actually read it and have no idea what it's talking about.

cheschire 6y ago
Sounds ready for most news aggregators. Just gotta be good at clickbait titles.

yarg 6y ago

I've seen too many bullshitters in the software industry - people whose technical capabilities extend only as far as their ability to convince non-technical managers that they know what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen these people be promoted to positions where they can do serious damage, no longer a mere developer not knowing what the hell you're meant to be able to do - but a lead developer crippling an entire team. In many cases this is an impossible problem to solve - with non-technical executives sitting above the non-technical managers; a layer-cake of bullshitters blind to bullshitters with a vested interest (born of self-preservation) in remaining so.

itisit 6y ago
For every really-faking-it-until-they-make-it junior dev there's a goldbricking veteran spending 80% of company time on a side pursuit.
- jasperry 6y ago
  It's not "company time", it's time in a human being's life.
  - logicslave 6y ago
    Amazing how easy it is to forget this
  - itisit 6y ago
    Both, and they coincide during business hours, at the least.
- dusted 6y ago
  If their 20% justifies their salary, which it does by the fact they've not been fired, then I don't see your point.
digitalsushi 6y ago
How is the knowing developer, not with the lead title, able to survive on a team like this? I tried escaping - from my bumpkin locale to Boston, a 3 hour trip every morning and 3 hours back, until I couldn't handle it five months later and went tail back to the same team with the same issues. Here, I'm still hopeful to eventually figure this out.

booleandilemma 6y ago

I’ve worked with a few people they could do case studies on.

jknoepfler 6y ago

I think the elephant in the room for this study is the high bullshit scores of immigrants. If you're a non-native language speaker and someone asks if you understand something, you're probably used to having to figure it out offline - but you might say "yes" anyway, for a myriad of reasons. Something I find disingenuous in this study is the failure to follow up on competency. "High bullshit index" individuals claim with higher frequency to be able to calculate the petrol consumption of a car, and are confident in their popularity. Are they wrong? Immigrants are more likely to bullshit when they are confronted with language they don't understand - but they are also highly experienced at figuring out things they don't understand after the fact. I found it queer that the tasks asked about where relatively mathematical, and the domain they used to measure bullshit was also mathematical... if the checklist of "could you find the gcd of two numbers" "could you find all the complex roots of this polynomial" etc. were interpreted as "if you were prompted (in good faith) on a homework assignment to do this task, are you confident you could do it?" (this is a much more ecologically valid situation than being asked to do something meaningless or impossible), then the answer learned through hard experience might correctly be "yes", despite the respondent "not actually knowing what they were talking about". Food for thought anyway. I think the article takes an exceptionally otherizing stance towards would be bullshitters. (And uses some... hopefully ironic? ... rhetoric. "We all know a bullshitter" is the classic fallacy of appealing to popular belief).

robocat 6y ago
> the high bullshit scores of immigrants I think that statement is far too broad: I can think of some fairly bullshit free cultures, like many Scandinavian countries. I can also think of people from specific religions that I generally find to be bullshitty, versus people from the same country but a different religion that appear to me to be much more honest. Also a lot of people I meet from the USA appear to me to be extremely bullshit oriented compared to New Zealanders... Perhaps that is due to my own selection bias because of the type of people that emigrate or travel to New Zealand, or because I tend to meet businessmen?
- jknoepfler 6y ago
  Did you read the paper? They literally measure this. I was quoting a stat from the paper. The point of my comment was to think critically about how they interpret their findings, in light of their very own findings.

mightytravels 6y ago

Software is the prototype for actual bulshitter vapor ware modus operandi. I wonder why?

humanrebar 6y ago
In many other roles, bullshit can actually get you somewhere, especially if persuasion is part of the job. In other situations it's not just bullshit but fraud, so we consider it another category. Software itself is unforgiving of bullshit. If it's buggy as hell, you can't just talk your way out of it. It's also opaque enough that it's difficult to definitively distinguish between incompetence, bullshit, straight-up lying, and just failing at a difficult problem (if only because of insufficient resources). It takes a significant amount of work to make that kind of distinction and that work doesn't necessarily translate from project to project.

geoffmunn 6y ago

As a developer, I've found that the Agile methodology is great for weeding out bullshitters. A decently run sprint planning session with a retrospective at the end will highlight who didn't actually do anything. The killer feature is that these people volunteered the amount of effort for the work and then have to explain why nothing got done. They eventually leave the team once they realise they've been discovered.

Mc91 6y ago
We spend our retros whinging about other teams that (are supposed to) support us.
zimpenfish 6y ago
Having worked at many places with many bullshitters who have successfully conned the Agile process for weeks (sometimes months), I'd have to disagree. (Indeed, I have done it once myself when I was trying to leave but they were dragging their feet about signing the paperwork.)
- Thorentis 6y ago
  The only way I've seen people con it, is where the people doing the tasks are also trusted with scoping and estimating it. You need to have multiple people "sign off" on or buy into the scoping and estimation process. E.g. One person does an "investigation" task (e.g. Look into feasibility / difficulty of x). This should be somebody with enough experience to give a good rough estimate. Their estimate can them be discussed at the next sprint planning session, and everybody should agree on the final estimate (story points, or size label, however you do your sprints). Then, if the bullshitter gets to the end of the sprint and says they didn't complete a 1-2 day task in 10 days, you can start asking why. They do this consistently across 2-3 sprints, you know something is up. Assume they're more junior than their job title and try giving them easier tasks. Still not getting much done? They're a bullshitter. Fire them / raise with their manager.
  - afarrell 6y ago

smcg 6y ago

The paper only surveyed teenagers... Smells like BS to me

dusted 6y ago

In his seminal essay-turned-book On Bullshit,Frankfurt (2005) ... Other philosophers have since expanded on his work, most notably G. A. Cohen in his essay “Deeper into Bullshit”(Cohen 2002)... Time travel or me not understanding what those numbers mean ?