12 ms·

Fields where it matters, fields where you can thrive on BS alone, and in between

93 points by johndcook 4y ago

noirdujour 4y ago
I think that it's interesting that it's BS that's the focus. Are there many fields where you can thrive on non-BS alone? You could be a great sports player, but without some amount of BS you might not get noticed or believed.
JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago
I think to summarize. BS is not in the picture as long as you are alone, not interacting with anybody and betting on a far away outcome which you cannot influence. Say sports betting As soon as one of the above ceases to be true, then BS enters the picture if you allow it too.
seydor 4y ago
conveniently replaces Academia with Science. People are not paid for science, but for being academics You can BS your way even to High journals as an academic. You cannot fall, unless you are cancelled. There is little downside once you made your way in. In finance you can lose all your money. In literature , all your audience.
- DennisP 4y ago
  The key to surviving on BS in finance is getting other people to pay you fees for investing their money.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    Surely that wouldn't work for long, at least unless you're lucky and get decent returns
    - cowmoo728 4y ago
      I get the sense that the vast majority of professional investors are just being swept around by the tides of the market. Over the past 70 years in the United States, that has generally been upward. Until they get dashed against the rocks, but the professional consequences are so low that they can pick themselves up and start again once the tides are better. People attribute so much individual human agency to financial professionals, but 99.9% of them are at the mercy of forces outside of their control, like technological advancement, population growth, federal reserve policy, and globalization.
    - jjeaff 4y ago
      It works exceptionally well based on data. You can pull up almost all of the actively managed mutual funds on something like morning star and compare them to an sp500 or total market index fund. Once you pull the time horizon out to 30 years, you will basically see zero funds that outperform the indexes. Most underperform based on just performance. But all of them underperform once you take the fees into account. So basically every actively managed fund is being run by someone who is faking it.
      - zmachinaz 4y ago
        The selling point is not absolute return, but uncorrelated return. If that is really the case, is a different story ...
        DennisP 4y ago
        Hedge funds are supposed to be uncorrelated, but I don't think many long-only equity funds make that claim. They just count it a win if they do better than the market (which often happens, but seldom continues). Then there are the financial advisors. Last time I talked to one, the selling point was nothing but "trust us, we have a team of Ph.Ds."
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      Let's say you get paid a 2% management fee (on funds under management) and a 20% incentive fee (levied only on gains). What keeps you from investing half your clients making bets in one direction, and the other half making bets in the opposite? If you do this, what total fees do you collect? How long can you follow this strategy?
euroderf 4y ago
When the proof is in the pudding: "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." (Frank Lloyd Wright)
- CoolGuySteve 4y ago
  It's funny because Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings almost all have leaky roofs but he kept building them to the point that flat roofs with odd joins are an inseparable part of his aesthetic.
  - Animatronio 4y ago
    You're probably thinking of Fallingwater, but most of FLW's buildings have conventional (sloped) roofs. Gehry and Calatrava on the other hand are known for leaky roofs (and walls, and windows, etc).
angarg12 4y ago
When people see a BS-peddler they throw their hands in the air and say "you can't fool everyone all the time". They are missing the point. You don't need to fool everyone all the time, you just need to fool the right people long enough. I believe tech falls in the in between category. We all know that one person who is actually incompetent, but somehow has enchanted management. He might climb the ranks or get the good graces for a short time, jumping ship just at the right time. Sure, in the long term everyone will realize this game, but the long term might not matter much. If you worked at the right time (let's say a long and strong bull market), player your cards right and got lucky, you might cash out and retire early before everyone gets wary of your BS.
- strangattractor 4y ago
  Take a look at half the brochures for investment funds and it becomes evident. Somehow returns from 2008 get left out - or 2020 when COVID hit. Money managers are already gearing up to tout their returns once this recession starts to wind down.
- 0000011111 4y ago
  Failing up as they say.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  You should realize if you've experienced this is probably not because they "enchanted management" as some sort of master manipulator playing 4D chess, but rather that management is so inept at their job that they can't tell the difference between a useful employee and a useless one.
  - codethief 4y ago
    > they can't tell the difference between a useful employee and a useless one Man, you're portraying it as if it were easy to judge your employees. But it's not.
    - readonlybarbie 4y ago
bitbang 4y ago
https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/
coffeebeqn 4y ago
In finance you can absolutely thrive on BS. In fact the vast majority of finance jobs are BS and produce below average returns for their clients with very much above average fees. They even have their own astrology (TA)
buescher 4y ago
Detecting BS is going to matter even more now that we have ChatGPT - expect discussions of just what is BS to have a lot of currency. I did like "it’s easy to promise things, especially if you have a good rep; you have to be careful not to promise things you can’t deliver."
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  Alas, ChatGPT will be a bullshit generator extraordinaire for the sociopath / politicker / bullshitter with juuuust enough knowledge.
  - buescher 4y ago
    The future is going to be great!
paulsutter 4y ago
>Cowen in his above-linked post doesn’t want to believe that crypto is fundamentally flawed—and maybe he’s right that it’s a great thing, it’s not like I’m an expert—but it’s funny that he doesn’t even consider that it might be a problem, given the scandal he was writing about I read the linked post. Cowen makes no statement that crypto is a great thing. Nor does the FTX scandal reflect on cryptocurrency, it was simply a scam. "Defi" also was not decentralized, not really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams ("If you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield") Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other recent blowups. Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible
- rrradical 4y ago
  This is the author's point: Cowen's list of status losers includes "Appearing with blonde models", but not crypto itself. It's not that Cowen is defending crypto in that post specifically, it's that he's looking in every possible direction except at crypto. As if the FTX debacle had absolutely nothing to do with it.
  - paulsutter 4y ago
    FTX were definitely the most polished fraudsters and hucksters in the crypto community. That's saying a lot, given that the finest fraudsters and hucksters in the world competed to out-swindle, out-cheat, and out-hoodwink each other daily in the crypto community But that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is math, code, and gigawatts
jamesgreenleaf 4y ago
This is a good article, but I don't think Philip K Dick is a good example of either BS or the in-between. The literary equivalent of getting by with BS is the shallow, derivative work ghostwritten for a celebrity that's been preloaded onto the NYT best seller list, then trotted around all the vapid talk shows for promotion. They might have great sales, and plenty of people might read their book, but they're not creating literature.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
c7b 4y ago
I understand that this is mainly an attack on another blogger, but I still don't like the tone of the article. I don't see the need for the strong language, and actually, if you try to replace it with something more civil, the cracks in the argument are becoming apparent. What is BS? Being objectively wrong? How would we know that someone is objectively wrong or right eg in Finance (one of the fields mentioned)? Markets can stay irrational for longer than someone is alive - what does it mean for markets to be irrational from their perspective? Merton and Scholes received the Nobel Prize for their finance theories, yet the hedge fund they ran explicitly based on those theories collapsed spectacularly. Does this conclusively prove that their theory was BS, or were they just unlucky to catch a low probability event with a strategy that 'objectively' had a positive expectation (just playing devil's advocate here)? Let's look at another field OP mentioned where we should be able to say what's objectively true, science. Hendrik Lorentz's theories on how light travels through ether were objectively wrong (for all we know), yet they lead to special relativity. Does this make him a BS artist or not? Would the answer change if Einstein hadn't come along? It seems that OP's argument would have been far less convincing if he'd bothered to try to be exact about his definitions instead of relying on the gut feeling that we all know what BS means. If the argument seems appealing, then the reason for that might lie more in the mind of the reader (who wouldn't like to rise above supposed BS artists?) than in insights about the world. Which makes me sad to say, because I generally had a high impression of Gelman.
- ksenzee 4y ago
  No need to rely on a gut feeling: it's in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines bullshit as "to talk nonsense to, especially with the intention of deceiving or misleading." So it's not being objectively wrong, it's peddling nonsense. The term has come into popular use even among people who don't swear much, because it's precise and evocative.
  - c7b 4y ago
    Ok, I'll take that. Still not sure about the argument under that definition, though. There are disciplines where 'talking nonsense with the intention to deceive' would objectively be a smart strategy, eg Poker. However, Poker should fall under the 'no-BS' fields according to OP (he lists sports, and expressly mentions chess there; any sort of trash-talking in any sport would also fall under that definition, and trash-talking athletes can still be successful - it's quite common in martial arts eg). My guess is that the OP would argue that Poker or martial arts still are 'no-BS' fields, we just need a better definition of BS. But that just shows that the argument doesn't work with this definition, and the onus is still on the OP of providing a definition that works for his argument (or we have to conclude that his argument doesn't work).
redleggedfrog 4y ago
It's going to be an unpopular opinion, but software development is an awesome field for BSers. Because most of the people you answer to don't know the details of what you do, you can totally make stuff up, explain failures with magic or noise, and pump yourself up by claiming something you did was more difficult than it was, combined with talking like you know everything - the more confident the better. You often get to make your own estimates as well, so moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week. In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires. Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. Every last of one them. I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" category.
- flashgordon 4y ago
  Add to this the amount of aversion to risk and to getting your hands dirty by pumping out code. It is so weird to see SWEs wanting to get into BFUDs before writing a line of disposable code (at least at big cos). Though I am sensing the perf process incentivizes this (impact and artifacts at all costs).
- ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
  Managers dont have the time to figure out if someone did something well or poorly. The code works and so they move on. Certain people leave a trail of bad code with nice looking syntax. Working directly with them, it will be obvious, but otherwise forget it, you will never figure it out. All it takes is them speaking well in meetings/good at project planning/BSing some design. The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.
  - johngalt_ 4y ago
    I think there is a difference between bad and good places. I have worked in bad places where things worked exactly as you described. Fortunately times have changed, and places I work now care about quality. Most of the time managers used to be engineers and they either know and care about it, or they care and rely on input from other engineers to understand what is going on under the hood.
julianeon 4y ago
Why is Finance in the "in-between" category? Finance is the single biggest and most important field for thriving with B.S. If you're an influencer, or a public personality, and you can convince people you're good with money, that's it: you've won, you're rich. You might be bad but not malicious (Jim Cramer), you might be bad and malicious (Logan Paul), you might be some other thing where you're making highly contestable claims but it doesn't matter because investors throw their money at you (Elon Musk), you might even be in that same industry and a plain old fraud who got caught (Nikola, Trevor Milton). As that last example in particular shows, if you can BS and get away with it, great wealth lies in store for you.
- friend_and_foe 4y ago
  If you're making financial decisions based on your ideas you'll fail if you're a bullshitter. If you're just giving people advice, not putting your money where your moyth is, sure, but then you're not really doing finance, you're just bullshitting full time.
chaostheory 4y ago
> Sports: Chess cheating aside, if you don’t got it, you don’t got it. He forgot about aids such as steroids.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago
  Steroids won't make a champion out of somebody who is a loser in that sport. You still have to "have it". Steroids make a champion out of a person who is already champion material, or very close to it.
kaycebasques 4y ago
Macro investing. > Playing the markets is about as real as a game can get. There is, of course, a divergence between expectations and outcomes, but the outcome has an inexorable quality about it. In most social situations---in politics and in personal and business relations---it is possible to deceive oneself and others. In the financial markets, the actual results do not leave much room for illusions. The financial markets are very unkind to the ego: those who have illusions about themselves have to pay a heavy price in the literal sense. It turns out that a passionate interest in the truth is a good quality for financial success. The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
- elmomle 4y ago
  And yet I know some personal wealth managers who are just about the most noxious people I've run across--their success is entirely due to connections, they're all about minimizing how much Uncle Sam "steals" from them, and they will talk your ear off about how undocumented immigrants are freeloaders. They're the very definition of being born on third base and thinking you've hit a triple. This isn't to say that you're incorrect about macro investing, just that there are niches in such fields in which plenty of incompetent BS peddlers flourish.
  - kaycebasques 4y ago
    IMO Soros covers this in the sentence about social situations
  - fallingknife 4y ago
    This is not a good example. If you are in the tax avoidance game you better know the rules like the back of your hand. Because if you cross the line, all the BS in the world isn't going to save you from the consequences.
- plasticchris 4y ago
  Ironic then that the Soros fund is down 66 percent over the past year.
molsongolden 4y ago
Tangential but the comments about BS/non-BS reminded me of this classic Henry Rollins quote (from an essay about weightlifting): >"The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."
petilon 4y ago
UX Designer. I have seen some horrible ones thrive - including a Director of Design - because the management can't tell a good one from a bad one.
gronky_ 4y ago
The more senior the role within a company, the more people can thrive on BS alone. If an entry level employee is terrible, it will be obvious in a matter of days. It takes years for bad hires at the VP level and above to be recognized.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
Product management feels like the kind of profession where you can get away with BSing. It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding. Easy to claim that the wins were thanks to you, and the losses just happened to be market conditions or luck of the draw.
- codethief 4y ago
  > It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding. Maybe for the higher-ups, the vice presidents and the CPO. But ask a single (experienced) engineer and you will get a pretty clear picture of whether the PM is adding value or not.
  - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
    What would you say are ways in which an experienced engineer could tell if the PM is adding value or not?
    - ETHisso2017 4y ago
      ChatGPT would like to know this answer
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      Are there anomalously few bullshit problems compared to other places you have worked? Is there weirdly little paperwork? Do other teams doing roughly similar work have ongoing problems that you just don’t have? Do you have weirdly few, oddly productive meetings?
      - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
        Got it. If I'm understanding correctly, most of those qualities revolve around helping run a tight, low on overhead process where everybody is clear around priorities and what everybody else is working on?
darod 4y ago
Corporations allow for infinite iterations of BSers because at the end of the day, if you're found out, you can always re-face, re-market, and rebrand. Also, once they get a win and a bag of cash is in their hand, now they have capital to help iterate and push their BS. Need to buy more time and you have cash on hand, run the FTX effective altruism playbook and throw some cash at charities and media.
- amelius 4y ago
  Also with cash people will think you did something right, therefore they believe you. See a certain president.
poulsbohemian 4y ago
Their first field is sports... now, they aren't wrong in that if you are the last player at the end of the bench on an NFL team, you are still a really amazing athlete and still going to get paid well. What strikes me though is the number of "just ok" players, especially quarterbacks, who get paid as though they are a future hall-of-famer... and then fall very, very flat. Case in point - Zach Wilson had a big pro day that built up his hype, and thus got drafted high, but has been outplayed by no-name guys. A non-quarterback, Jadevon Clowney, had a monster hit in a college game that garnered significant interest - but frankly, a pretty pedestrian career. I could probably cite about ten more quarterbacks who got paid big money as though they were going to be superstars, but ended up being middling players and had relatively short careers. Somebody like a Brock Osweiler comes to mind - it was the sports equivalent of a pump-and-dump. I would argue that these players are the equivalent of thriving on BS - they had a moment or they had a hype machine around them, but didn't deliver the goods.
10g1k 4y ago
In both government and corporate worlds, people with long pointy leather shoes (I call them clown shoes) are invariably big talkers who are good at social climbing but don't know anything about how things work, and are completely unable to create anything. These people often wear bright pink shirts and such. The guy who wears boring, practical, comfortable shoes is probably the guy who actually knows how to do things.
CM30 4y ago
Marketing is the ideal field for BS, especially SEO. Few people know what you do, ever fewer can tell if it's working or not, and it's easy to find (or fake) stats to fit any story you want to give. Journalism and media is a pretty good one there too, though obviously more with the tabloid/internet blogging side than with the more respected outlets. Very easy to fake stories and sources, and if cases like Stephen Glass are to be believed, you can get away with it for years even then.
devchix 4y ago
> Seeing this desperate attempt by Tyler Cowen ... I'm guessing that Tyler Cowen is on team crypto and the blog author is taking him to task w/r/t Cowen's past writing on FTX? I don't know the history. Cowen runs another blog called the Ethnic Dining Guide, "All food is ethnic food". It's considered to be a legit restaurant review blog, or so I thought until recently, when I went to a place where he praised the "goat tacos" as authentic and best. I asked the woman at the counter for "goat tacos" and she was perplexed, told me it's beef, there's never been any goat meat served there. The blog post was dated May 2022, here's the wiki entry for the dish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birria "traditionally made from goat meat, but occasionally made from beef, lamb, mutton or chicken" I don't know how he got it so wrong, if he takes his food review seriously, did he eat there at all, did he know what he was eating, or just read the first line of the wiki. So the proxy for being unreliable is leaning against him. Back to the subject at hand, my spouse works in the space industry. He tells me there's considerably less bullshit in his work compared to my own because you can't really fake your way into fooling people you know how to build a component of a satellite, or rockets. There seems to be a lot of charlatan in dev and IT. There's not a 'Learn launch vehicles in 60 days' type of books, courses vs what's available for devs.
abhayhegde 4y ago
I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree. While the degree itself might not confer any indication/promise of ability to do science, the place where it takes happens (universities/labs) offers a conducive environment to engage oneself in science. Be it funding, motivating peer group or networking opportunities, the exposure one gets from only a BS degree is astronomically less.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  > I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree. Tell it to Freeman Dyson. In philosophy you could tell it to Derek Parfit. There are quite literally tens of thousands of people with higher degrees than them in their fields who achieved nothing comparable.
  - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    And there are billions of people without higher degrees who have achieved nothing comparable.
    - barry-cotter 4y ago
      They weren’t trying to though. People generally get Physics and Philosophy doctorates hoping to contribute something to human knowledge. If you never had any ambition to do that you can’t have failed to come close to equaling Dyson or Parfit because you were never trying to.
dogmatism 4y ago
Surgery sometimes people cover for a bad surgeon for financial/political reasons, but there's no fooling the anesthesiologist

93 points by johndcook 4y ago

I think that it's interesting that it's BS that's the focus. Are there many fields where you can thrive on non-BS alone? You could be a great sports player, but without some amount of BS you might not get noticed or believed.

JumpinJack_Cash 4y ago

I think to summarize. BS is not in the picture as long as you are alone, not interacting with anybody and betting on a far away outcome which you cannot influence. Say sports betting As soon as one of the above ceases to be true, then BS enters the picture if you allow it too.

seydor 4y ago

conveniently replaces Academia with Science. People are not paid for science, but for being academics You can BS your way even to High journals as an academic. You cannot fall, unless you are cancelled. There is little downside once you made your way in. In finance you can lose all your money. In literature , all your audience.

DennisP 4y ago
The key to surviving on BS in finance is getting other people to pay you fees for investing their money.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  Surely that wouldn't work for long, at least unless you're lucky and get decent returns
  - cowmoo728 4y ago
    I get the sense that the vast majority of professional investors are just being swept around by the tides of the market. Over the past 70 years in the United States, that has generally been upward. Until they get dashed against the rocks, but the professional consequences are so low that they can pick themselves up and start again once the tides are better. People attribute so much individual human agency to financial professionals, but 99.9% of them are at the mercy of forces outside of their control, like technological advancement, population growth, federal reserve policy, and globalization.
  - jjeaff 4y ago
    It works exceptionally well based on data. You can pull up almost all of the actively managed mutual funds on something like morning star and compare them to an sp500 or total market index fund. Once you pull the time horizon out to 30 years, you will basically see zero funds that outperform the indexes. Most underperform based on just performance. But all of them underperform once you take the fees into account. So basically every actively managed fund is being run by someone who is faking it.
    - zmachinaz 4y ago
      The selling point is not absolute return, but uncorrelated return. If that is really the case, is a different story ...
      - DennisP 4y ago
        Hedge funds are supposed to be uncorrelated, but I don't think many long-only equity funds make that claim. They just count it a win if they do better than the market (which often happens, but seldom continues). Then there are the financial advisors. Last time I talked to one, the selling point was nothing but "trust us, we have a team of Ph.Ds."
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    Let's say you get paid a 2% management fee (on funds under management) and a 20% incentive fee (levied only on gains). What keeps you from investing half your clients making bets in one direction, and the other half making bets in the opposite? If you do this, what total fees do you collect? How long can you follow this strategy?

euroderf 4y ago

When the proof is in the pudding: "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines." (Frank Lloyd Wright)

CoolGuySteve 4y ago
It's funny because Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings almost all have leaky roofs but he kept building them to the point that flat roofs with odd joins are an inseparable part of his aesthetic.
- Animatronio 4y ago
  You're probably thinking of Fallingwater, but most of FLW's buildings have conventional (sloped) roofs. Gehry and Calatrava on the other hand are known for leaky roofs (and walls, and windows, etc).

angarg12 4y ago

When people see a BS-peddler they throw their hands in the air and say "you can't fool everyone all the time". They are missing the point. You don't need to fool everyone all the time, you just need to fool the right people long enough. I believe tech falls in the in between category. We all know that one person who is actually incompetent, but somehow has enchanted management. He might climb the ranks or get the good graces for a short time, jumping ship just at the right time. Sure, in the long term everyone will realize this game, but the long term might not matter much. If you worked at the right time (let's say a long and strong bull market), player your cards right and got lucky, you might cash out and retire early before everyone gets wary of your BS.

strangattractor 4y ago
Take a look at half the brochures for investment funds and it becomes evident. Somehow returns from 2008 get left out - or 2020 when COVID hit. Money managers are already gearing up to tout their returns once this recession starts to wind down.
0000011111 4y ago
Failing up as they say.
mrguyorama 4y ago
You should realize if you've experienced this is probably not because they "enchanted management" as some sort of master manipulator playing 4D chess, but rather that management is so inept at their job that they can't tell the difference between a useful employee and a useless one.
- codethief 4y ago
  > they can't tell the difference between a useful employee and a useless one Man, you're portraying it as if it were easy to judge your employees. But it's not.
  - readonlybarbie 4y ago

bitbang 4y ago

https://xkcd.com/451/ https://xkcd.com/451/

coffeebeqn 4y ago

In finance you can absolutely thrive on BS. In fact the vast majority of finance jobs are BS and produce below average returns for their clients with very much above average fees. They even have their own astrology (TA)

buescher 4y ago

Detecting BS is going to matter even more now that we have ChatGPT - expect discussions of just what is BS to have a lot of currency. I did like "it’s easy to promise things, especially if you have a good rep; you have to be careful not to promise things you can’t deliver."

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
Alas, ChatGPT will be a bullshit generator extraordinaire for the sociopath / politicker / bullshitter with juuuust enough knowledge.
- buescher 4y ago
  The future is going to be great!

paulsutter 4y ago

>Cowen in his above-linked post doesn’t want to believe that crypto is fundamentally flawed—and maybe he’s right that it’s a great thing, it’s not like I’m an expert—but it’s funny that he doesn’t even consider that it might be a problem, given the scandal he was writing about I read the linked post. Cowen makes no statement that crypto is a great thing. Nor does the FTX scandal reflect on cryptocurrency, it was simply a scam. "Defi" also was not decentralized, not really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams ("If you don't know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield") Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other recent blowups. Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible

rrradical 4y ago
This is the author's point: Cowen's list of status losers includes "Appearing with blonde models", but not crypto itself. It's not that Cowen is defending crypto in that post specifically, it's that he's looking in every possible direction except at crypto. As if the FTX debacle had absolutely nothing to do with it.
- paulsutter 4y ago
  FTX were definitely the most polished fraudsters and hucksters in the crypto community. That's saying a lot, given that the finest fraudsters and hucksters in the world competed to out-swindle, out-cheat, and out-hoodwink each other daily in the crypto community But that has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is math, code, and gigawatts

jamesgreenleaf 4y ago

This is a good article, but I don't think Philip K Dick is a good example of either BS or the in-between. The literary equivalent of getting by with BS is the shallow, derivative work ghostwritten for a celebrity that's been preloaded onto the NYT best seller list, then trotted around all the vapid talk shows for promotion. They might have great sales, and plenty of people might read their book, but they're not creating literature.

deleted 4y ago
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c7b 4y ago

I understand that this is mainly an attack on another blogger, but I still don't like the tone of the article. I don't see the need for the strong language, and actually, if you try to replace it with something more civil, the cracks in the argument are becoming apparent. What is BS? Being objectively wrong? How would we know that someone is objectively wrong or right eg in Finance (one of the fields mentioned)? Markets can stay irrational for longer than someone is alive - what does it mean for markets to be irrational from their perspective? Merton and Scholes received the Nobel Prize for their finance theories, yet the hedge fund they ran explicitly based on those theories collapsed spectacularly. Does this conclusively prove that their theory was BS, or were they just unlucky to catch a low probability event with a strategy that 'objectively' had a positive expectation (just playing devil's advocate here)? Let's look at another field OP mentioned where we should be able to say what's objectively true, science. Hendrik Lorentz's theories on how light travels through ether were objectively wrong (for all we know), yet they lead to special relativity. Does this make him a BS artist or not? Would the answer change if Einstein hadn't come along? It seems that OP's argument would have been far less convincing if he'd bothered to try to be exact about his definitions instead of relying on the gut feeling that we all know what BS means. If the argument seems appealing, then the reason for that might lie more in the mind of the reader (who wouldn't like to rise above supposed BS artists?) than in insights about the world. Which makes me sad to say, because I generally had a high impression of Gelman.

ksenzee 4y ago
No need to rely on a gut feeling: it's in the dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines bullshit as "to talk nonsense to, especially with the intention of deceiving or misleading." So it's not being objectively wrong, it's peddling nonsense. The term has come into popular use even among people who don't swear much, because it's precise and evocative.
- c7b 4y ago
  Ok, I'll take that. Still not sure about the argument under that definition, though. There are disciplines where 'talking nonsense with the intention to deceive' would objectively be a smart strategy, eg Poker. However, Poker should fall under the 'no-BS' fields according to OP (he lists sports, and expressly mentions chess there; any sort of trash-talking in any sport would also fall under that definition, and trash-talking athletes can still be successful - it's quite common in martial arts eg). My guess is that the OP would argue that Poker or martial arts still are 'no-BS' fields, we just need a better definition of BS. But that just shows that the argument doesn't work with this definition, and the onus is still on the OP of providing a definition that works for his argument (or we have to conclude that his argument doesn't work).

redleggedfrog 4y ago

It's going to be an unpopular opinion, but software development is an awesome field for BSers. Because most of the people you answer to don't know the details of what you do, you can totally make stuff up, explain failures with magic or noise, and pump yourself up by claiming something you did was more difficult than it was, combined with talking like you know everything - the more confident the better. You often get to make your own estimates as well, so moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week. In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires. Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on. Every last of one them. I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be dangerous" category.

flashgordon 4y ago
Add to this the amount of aversion to risk and to getting your hands dirty by pumping out code. It is so weird to see SWEs wanting to get into BFUDs before writing a line of disposable code (at least at big cos). Though I am sensing the perf process incentivizes this (impact and artifacts at all costs).
ldjkfkdsjnv 4y ago
Managers dont have the time to figure out if someone did something well or poorly. The code works and so they move on. Certain people leave a trail of bad code with nice looking syntax. Working directly with them, it will be obvious, but otherwise forget it, you will never figure it out. All it takes is them speaking well in meetings/good at project planning/BSing some design. The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.
- johngalt_ 4y ago
  I think there is a difference between bad and good places. I have worked in bad places where things worked exactly as you described. Fortunately times have changed, and places I work now care about quality. Most of the time managers used to be engineers and they either know and care about it, or they care and rely on input from other engineers to understand what is going on under the hood.

julianeon 4y ago

Why is Finance in the "in-between" category? Finance is the single biggest and most important field for thriving with B.S. If you're an influencer, or a public personality, and you can convince people you're good with money, that's it: you've won, you're rich. You might be bad but not malicious (Jim Cramer), you might be bad and malicious (Logan Paul), you might be some other thing where you're making highly contestable claims but it doesn't matter because investors throw their money at you (Elon Musk), you might even be in that same industry and a plain old fraud who got caught (Nikola, Trevor Milton). As that last example in particular shows, if you can BS and get away with it, great wealth lies in store for you.

friend_and_foe 4y ago
If you're making financial decisions based on your ideas you'll fail if you're a bullshitter. If you're just giving people advice, not putting your money where your moyth is, sure, but then you're not really doing finance, you're just bullshitting full time.

chaostheory 4y ago

> Sports: Chess cheating aside, if you don’t got it, you don’t got it. He forgot about aids such as steroids.

ARandomerDude 4y ago
Steroids won't make a champion out of somebody who is a loser in that sport. You still have to "have it". Steroids make a champion out of a person who is already champion material, or very close to it.

kaycebasques 4y ago

Macro investing. > Playing the markets is about as real as a game can get. There is, of course, a divergence between expectations and outcomes, but the outcome has an inexorable quality about it. In most social situations---in politics and in personal and business relations---it is possible to deceive oneself and others. In the financial markets, the actual results do not leave much room for illusions. The financial markets are very unkind to the ego: those who have illusions about themselves have to pay a heavy price in the literal sense. It turns out that a passionate interest in the truth is a good quality for financial success. The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

elmomle 4y ago
And yet I know some personal wealth managers who are just about the most noxious people I've run across--their success is entirely due to connections, they're all about minimizing how much Uncle Sam "steals" from them, and they will talk your ear off about how undocumented immigrants are freeloaders. They're the very definition of being born on third base and thinking you've hit a triple. This isn't to say that you're incorrect about macro investing, just that there are niches in such fields in which plenty of incompetent BS peddlers flourish.
- kaycebasques 4y ago
  IMO Soros covers this in the sentence about social situations
- fallingknife 4y ago
  This is not a good example. If you are in the tax avoidance game you better know the rules like the back of your hand. Because if you cross the line, all the BS in the world isn't going to save you from the consequences.
plasticchris 4y ago
Ironic then that the Soros fund is down 66 percent over the past year.

molsongolden 4y ago

Tangential but the comments about BS/non-BS reminded me of this classic Henry Rollins quote (from an essay about weightlifting): >"The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you’re a god or a total bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds."

petilon 4y ago

UX Designer. I have seen some horrible ones thrive - including a Director of Design - because the management can't tell a good one from a bad one.

gronky_ 4y ago

The more senior the role within a company, the more people can thrive on BS alone. If an entry level employee is terrible, it will be obvious in a matter of days. It takes years for bad hires at the VP level and above to be recognized.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago

Product management feels like the kind of profession where you can get away with BSing. It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding. Easy to claim that the wins were thanks to you, and the losses just happened to be market conditions or luck of the draw.

codethief 4y ago
> It's really hard to tell how much value you're truly adding. Maybe for the higher-ups, the vice presidents and the CPO. But ask a single (experienced) engineer and you will get a pretty clear picture of whether the PM is adding value or not.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
  What would you say are ways in which an experienced engineer could tell if the PM is adding value or not?
  - ETHisso2017 4y ago
    ChatGPT would like to know this answer
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Are there anomalously few bullshit problems compared to other places you have worked? Is there weirdly little paperwork? Do other teams doing roughly similar work have ongoing problems that you just don’t have? Do you have weirdly few, oddly productive meetings?
    - 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y ago
      Got it. If I'm understanding correctly, most of those qualities revolve around helping run a tight, low on overhead process where everybody is clear around priorities and what everybody else is working on?

darod 4y ago

Corporations allow for infinite iterations of BSers because at the end of the day, if you're found out, you can always re-face, re-market, and rebrand. Also, once they get a win and a bag of cash is in their hand, now they have capital to help iterate and push their BS. Need to buy more time and you have cash on hand, run the FTX effective altruism playbook and throw some cash at charities and media.

amelius 4y ago
Also with cash people will think you did something right, therefore they believe you. See a certain president.

poulsbohemian 4y ago

Their first field is sports... now, they aren't wrong in that if you are the last player at the end of the bench on an NFL team, you are still a really amazing athlete and still going to get paid well. What strikes me though is the number of "just ok" players, especially quarterbacks, who get paid as though they are a future hall-of-famer... and then fall very, very flat. Case in point - Zach Wilson had a big pro day that built up his hype, and thus got drafted high, but has been outplayed by no-name guys. A non-quarterback, Jadevon Clowney, had a monster hit in a college game that garnered significant interest - but frankly, a pretty pedestrian career. I could probably cite about ten more quarterbacks who got paid big money as though they were going to be superstars, but ended up being middling players and had relatively short careers. Somebody like a Brock Osweiler comes to mind - it was the sports equivalent of a pump-and-dump. I would argue that these players are the equivalent of thriving on BS - they had a moment or they had a hype machine around them, but didn't deliver the goods.

10g1k 4y ago

In both government and corporate worlds, people with long pointy leather shoes (I call them clown shoes) are invariably big talkers who are good at social climbing but don't know anything about how things work, and are completely unable to create anything. These people often wear bright pink shirts and such. The guy who wears boring, practical, comfortable shoes is probably the guy who actually knows how to do things.

CM30 4y ago

Marketing is the ideal field for BS, especially SEO. Few people know what you do, ever fewer can tell if it's working or not, and it's easy to find (or fake) stats to fit any story you want to give. Journalism and media is a pretty good one there too, though obviously more with the tabloid/internet blogging side than with the more respected outlets. Very easy to fake stories and sources, and if cases like Stephen Glass are to be believed, you can get away with it for years even then.

devchix 4y ago

> Seeing this desperate attempt by Tyler Cowen ... I'm guessing that Tyler Cowen is on team crypto and the blog author is taking him to task w/r/t Cowen's past writing on FTX? I don't know the history. Cowen runs another blog called the Ethnic Dining Guide, "All food is ethnic food". It's considered to be a legit restaurant review blog, or so I thought until recently, when I went to a place where he praised the "goat tacos" as authentic and best. I asked the woman at the counter for "goat tacos" and she was perplexed, told me it's beef, there's never been any goat meat served there. The blog post was dated May 2022, here's the wiki entry for the dish: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birria "traditionally made from goat meat, but occasionally made from beef, lamb, mutton or chicken" I don't know how he got it so wrong, if he takes his food review seriously, did he eat there at all, did he know what he was eating, or just read the first line of the wiki. So the proxy for being unreliable is leaning against him. Back to the subject at hand, my spouse works in the space industry. He tells me there's considerably less bullshit in his work compared to my own because you can't really fake your way into fooling people you know how to build a component of a satellite, or rockets. There seems to be a lot of charlatan in dev and IT. There's not a 'Learn launch vehicles in 60 days' type of books, courses vs what's available for devs.

abhayhegde 4y ago

I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree. While the degree itself might not confer any indication/promise of ability to do science, the place where it takes happens (universities/labs) offers a conducive environment to engage oneself in science. Be it funding, motivating peer group or networking opportunities, the exposure one gets from only a BS degree is astronomically less.

barry-cotter 4y ago
> I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree. Tell it to Freeman Dyson. In philosophy you could tell it to Derek Parfit. There are quite literally tens of thousands of people with higher degrees than them in their fields who achieved nothing comparable.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  And there are billions of people without higher degrees who have achieved nothing comparable.
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    They weren’t trying to though. People generally get Physics and Philosophy doctorates hoping to contribute something to human knowledge. If you never had any ambition to do that you can’t have failed to come close to equaling Dyson or Parfit because you were never trying to.

dogmatism 4y ago

Surgery sometimes people cover for a bad surgeon for financial/political reasons, but there's no fooling the anesthesiologist