
Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? [pdf] - etxm
http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf
======
rmbryan
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.

~~~
jwilli
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
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.

------
Zaphods
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
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!

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

~~~
kgran
Your comment was published 20 minutes after the submission. If you were 17
pages at that point, it makes me wonder if you were just pointing out that you
found the paper somewhat insulting.

~~~
shanselman
I was skimming.

~~~
xhgdvjky
if you skimmed the questions in the survey, you might be a bullshitter

------
wsdfsayy
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
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
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
No way. Plenty of people drift through life getting other people to do work
for them.

~~~
allenu
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.

------
4ntonius8lock
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.

~~~
notahacker
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...]

------
scandox
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.

~~~
bigred100
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
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.

------
SimonPStevens
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
"I don't know" is such an underappreciated phrase (followed with action to
remedy that).

~~~
mg794613
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.

~~~
cr0sh
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.

~~~
mg794613
Yes it was clear that he acquired his other knowledge through hard work and
interest.

------
ngngngng
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?

------
georgeecollins
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.

------
motohagiography
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.

------
bluetomcat
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.

~~~
pimmen
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
What they actually wanted: a WordPress theme

------
mowingscooter
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.

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

------
imnotlost
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
Ah, why did you have to spoil a great cultural observation with a contemporary
political dig at the end?

~~~
imnotlost
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.

------
Sniffnoy
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
> 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.

------
gunnr15
Am I reading the data right? It has Canada as the top BS avg? Any ideas as to
why this would be?

------
powera
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".

------
Gpetrium
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

------
akulbe
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.

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

------
DonHopkins
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
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)

------
angry_octet
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.

------
n05tradamu5
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
This thread is totally surreal and meta enough to be _n-gate_ 's wet dream.

------
hi56793
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.

------
nscalf
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.

------
anthony_doan
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.

------
antipaul
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.

------
resters
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.

~~~
rramadass
Nice Analysis.

I think you may find the book; "Management: A Political Activity by Ted
Stephenson" useful. Everything plays out in the realm of "Politics" (in the
broad sense of the term) in pursuit of Power, Prestige and Wealth.

------
kuzehanka
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.

~~~
will_brown
>The notion of bullshitters needs to be brought to the front of our industry's
consciousness

The industry (tech, startups, VC money) do bring bullshit to the front of the
industry consciousness. I’ve never seen another industry push and promote
“fake it till you make it” so hard.

Democratizing this...disrupting that...we respect your privacy and
data...DAO/code is law...Self driving cars...uber is creating good jobs...Fyre
fest...VR/AR...Theranos

From top down the industry promotes bullshitters.

~~~
devonkim
A colleague of mine put the problem more succinctly “what other industry is
there where the top decision-makers have never done the basic work of the
company?” Most executives in finance have done some form of financial analysis
and reporting, construction company owners have almost always done a hard
day’s worth of labor, and a lot of directors have had to do some acting /
camera work and whatnot. In tech (especially enterprise business verticals)
your typical CEO outside Silicon Valley hasn’t ever written a line of code or
had to deliver a software project of substantial size. Many are salesmen,
marketers, consultants, politicians, etc. and the technology and how it works
is just an afterthought. It’s as if executing on the technology is a complete
afterthought to investors and frankly they may be right - the barrier to
succeed in most enterprise software is probably not your technology as much as
how entrenched you already are in the industry you’re working in. This
oftentimes bleeds over into supposed tech companies like IBM and HP - your
customer base and partners infects your company culture from the top down and
drives out engineers. Engineers are far too often excluded because “they’re
too pessimistic” and yet every other time I hear about dismissing engineers’
concerns I also hear about tanked projects where it’s a complete mess or
situations like the 737 Max. The thing is that the other half is a pretty good
gamble.

~~~
munificent
_> “what other industry is there where the top decision-makers have never done
the basic work of the company?”_

Isn't the answer... most industries? My understanding is that large companies
in all domains are heavily populated with executives and managers who came
straight out of business school and into a leadership position.

There are those who rise through the rank and file up to the executive
position too. I don't know the relative fractions are. But all of those kids
who get business and management degrees end up _somewhere_ , right?

~~~
DavidHm
Pre-experience business school (BSc) doesn't launch you straight into
leadership positions.

Post-experience business school (MBA) can do that (that's usually leadership
of 1-2 kids straight out of school), however to get an MBA you need work
experience ... which means yeah, you have done the entry work somewhere

Note: I am not saying that they have done "basic" work (as in: developing
code, flipping burgers etc.). But they definitely are not launched into
leadership position without ever having done anything.

~~~
dragonwriter
> which means yeah, you have done the entry work somewhere

Even if so, that somewhere doesn't have to be the same industry you go with
your first (usually not top-level) leadership position, and neither of those
may be the industry in which you end up moving into a top-level leadership
position.

~~~
mercer
The vast majority of managers I've had, whether product or program managers,
had very little understanding or experience with the job of programming.

In fact, i suspect more than half of them basically failed upwards. I can't be
sure about this, because in many cases I could only see the piss-poor job they
were currently doing, but I've experienced the incompetent junior-to-senior
manager pipeline up close often enough that I wouldn't be surprised these
senior managers were previously incompetent junior managers.

------
formalsystem
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...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312427581/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1)
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
No, if you are actually skilled, you take pride in what you do. I will not
give up and join the bullshitters.

------
ajross
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.

------
loganfrederick
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.

------
vertline3
Overestimation, overplacement, overprecision.

Three new words to absorb, to help identify B.S.

Page 3

------
plink
It would be precious if this entire study were prevaricated.

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

~~~
cm2012
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)

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

~~~
etxm
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.

------
Fede_V
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.

~~~
hirundo
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.

~~~
everdrive
I've previously encountered just this same sort personality. Being pretty
paranoid, it took a long wrenching journey for me to discover that he wasn't
being deceptive: he just didn't have a handle on the facts, or whether or not
he was competent.

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

------
magnetic
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)

------
dredmorbius
Where are the tables?

------
billman
I think this article maybe self referential.

------
rafaelturk
Extra points for using a ftp in the URL.

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

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

~~~
tathougies
I'm confused: [https://www.acu.edu.au/](https://www.acu.edu.au/) ?

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

------
darepublic
Code or gtfo?

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

------
radium3d
They short sell

------
jrochkind1
honestly i just came for the title

------
skookumchuck
> One caveat to consider is that the study subjects were adolescents.

I.e. the post title is completely misleading.

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

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

