
Bullshitters: Who Are They and What Do We Know about Their Lives? (2019) [pdf] - murtio
http://ftp.iza.org/dp12282.pdf
======
anm89
`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...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1RO93OS0Sk&feature=youtu.be&t=125)

~~~
shard
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.

------
yarg
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.

~~~
wrnr
I think it's unfair to only blame developers for this bad culture in our
industry. At every layer of the stack the same things happen. At my local
government they reformed child benefits and needed a new IT system to handle
it, of-course we ended up with the over-engineered enterprise architecture of
micro-services running on kubernetes, communicating over an event bus with
CQRS, continuous integration and continuous deployment all day everyday,
managed priorities with using agile on a scrum board, for a specification that
did not exist because the law hadn't been finalised until half way through the
project, all to get people money on their account. But did anybody in charge
bother fixing the situation where their are 5 different commercial and not-
for-profit institutions handling the money, acting as intermediaries and thus
profiting off the tax benefits for people to help them raise their children,
No.

~~~
birdyrooster
micro services on kubernetes is hardly over engineering things. its
lightweight, fast and is easy to implement with.

~~~
colinb
Is your real name Lillian Hellman? Regrettably, in this instance, I am not
Mary McCarthy.

------
haram_masala
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
Sounds ready for most news aggregators. Just gotta be good at clickbait
titles.

------
dusted
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 ?

------
geoffmunn
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.

~~~
zimpenfish
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
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
> 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.

Another contributing cause of this can be that they have gotten into the habit
of accepting other people's bullshit.

Example:

Bob says "I don't think I understand enough about X to do task T well".

Sue, (partly worried what people would think of her if she negotiated similar
time for learning) feels great discomfort hearing Bob's self-deprecating*
statement. Motivated to escape this discomfort, she 'helpfully' tells him that
he is just suffering from impostor syndrome.

(Bullshit: It might be true, but the function to produce the statement did not
take real-world evidence as a parameter)

Bob mostly-believes this and doesn't feel confident that it is wise to
allocate his time to learn X. He should 'just get it done'.

Bob starts working on task T and feels frustrated and confused. Bob starts
asking questions on slack that anyone with a solid understanding of X would
know are irrelevant. He does not get helpful answers.

Bob, hearing that he's trying to 'understand the universe' doesn't see a way
forward but to put more time into task T. He stays up late working on it
ineffectively.

Bob goes into standup having accomplished very little and gained little
understanding. Bob's duty to his team and his health is to confidently state
this truth. Bob is sleep-deprived and ashamed of his lack of progress. He
feels motivated to escape this discomfort. He says the task will be done by
standup tomorrow.

(Bullshit: It might be true, but the function to produce the statement did not
take real-world evidence as a parameter)

Bob stays up late again. Bob accomplishes little.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLBO7L5G2DQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLBO7L5G2DQ)

10 days later, Bob still does not really understand how to make progress on
his task.

\----------------

Bob gets fired shortly thereafter. He has multiple hypotheses for what he
should have done better, but none he is confident in. At his next job, he is
on hyper-vigilant alert for a similar situation. When he encounters it, the
memory of getting fired and the uncertainty of what to do makes him feel
deeply uncomfortable. Discomfort-avoidance leads him to get on hackernews
rather than focus on his work.

\----------------

* "I have gaps in my skills and am capable of learning" is a healthy problem to have. "I am unqualified to judge when I need more understanding of something to move forward" is an unhealthy problem.

Thus, we should exercise a duty of care to the truth when telling people that
they have Impostor Syndrome.

~~~
Thorentis
To be honest this seems more like a Bob problem than a Sue problem. "Just get
on with it" (or some variation thereof, whether reference to imposter
syndrome, stiff upper lip, etc) is thrown about all the time in all
workplaces. If you are genuinely struggling or don't know what to do then it
is your professional responsibility to make the right people know about it.

If Bob did stress this very strongly with Sue, and Sue was the person in
charge of allocating tasks, then yes of course Sue is to blame. Giving people
tasks they can't do is bad.

Perhaps Sue thinks that Bob should be able to figure it out within the 10 days
and doesn't need more than that to both investigate and complete the task? If
there is a large knowledge imbalance and Sue knows a lot more about the task
than Bob then maybe she should take on that task instead.

So many variables!

~~~
afarrell
> If Bob did stress this very strongly with Sue, and Sue was the person in
> charge of allocating tasks, then yes of course Sue is to blame. Giving
> people tasks they can't do is bad.

The trouble is if Bob doesn't know he can do it or not. It can be very hard to
tell if you're actually confused about something or if you are just making
excuses.

Sadly, if the latter, there really is only one way to stop making excuses.

\--------

Note: While I am feeling very distressed these days. I want to reassure y'all
that I am not going to stop making excuses. There are too many people who love
and care about me dearly whom I know would be devastated.

~~~
afarrell
(Also, I don't think I actually make excuses very frequently at all.
Occasionally I deceive myself, but far more often than that I give reasons
that reflect a reality which is genuinely absurd in ways that are unfair to
the listener yet still true.)

------
dang
A thread from last year:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19749130)

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

~~~
humanrebar
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.

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

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

------
jknoepfler
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
> 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?

~~~
a1369209993
> Perhaps that is due to my own selection bias because of the type of people
> that emigrate or travel

Tangentially to the point, I'm going to hazard a guess that "people who travel
to other cultures" are going to be more bullshit-oriented than average, due to
factors jknoepfler referenced above, eg "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".

