alt Hacker NewsThe Rise of the Bullshittery
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TIL HN still doesn't support rfc3492, 23 years after it was published, and so this domain is not rendered correctly on the site. :( (It should appear as: マリウス.com )
Using a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.
Haven't thoroughly read this article but these passages from C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) immediately come to mind:
Once upon a time academic reputations were generally ex-
pected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, mono-
graphs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly
works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic col-
leagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so
in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence
or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older
academic world did not contain privileged positions of compe-
tence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged compe-
tence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his own
personal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him
by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such
doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have
worked, as craftsmen.
However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the
business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means
of competence which must be distinguished from his personal
competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished.
A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library,
an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing
machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand
dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such
minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any
scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will
laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not
—few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a
secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and
of career—which secure clique membership makes much more
likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige
increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn in-
creases the chance to produce a reputation.Speaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn
Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.
I have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined. My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing. Bullshittery of the finest quality.
I think the converse of this is also true. People who do something good are derided for being unprofessional for not adhering to some cosmetic standard.
You can hardly blame people who make fancy websites for projects which look cool but you can't tell what it is they have to offer. If the alternative is a plain simple 'here it is, it does this' followed by a pile-on of armchair critics who have already decided on the quality of your project because your page lacks razzmatazz.
>an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts. Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents
This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.
In an attention economy the thing that pays is capturing attention - a terrifyingly finite thing that determines our lived experiences.
Rewarding people who are good that this is a compounding mistake.
>started rewarding people who know how to look like they do [know what they are doing].
These days I'm wondering whether even that matters anymore. Fastest way to get rich these days seems to be insider trading, scams, onlyfans, leveraging addictions etc.
I find especially painful the tradeoff between productivity and visibility. Every minute I spend trying to advertise my project is a minute I'm not spending making it better.
loving the overlay you get when you open it in a tab and then tab away
I think at least one approach that can work is de-globalization of social media into smaller, reputation/trust-ranked social networks. Discord is pretty good in this regard.
Because I live in the UK, I’m often told this narrative of social decay, about how everything is getting worse and no one cares about doing anything properly. I disagree; I think it’s always been like this, and our feeling of disappointment persists because our expectation of improvement grows faster than actual improvement.
LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate for that platform. The people posting that nonsense don’t actually believe it.
The game is tedious, and if you don’t play you lose. It was like this before the Internet, too: my father limited his earning potential by being bad at networking, whereas my grandfather did went so far as to join the Freemasons to climb the corporate ladder to the top.
In "Failure Is Not an Option", Gene Kranz, who ran Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s, brings up tolerance for bullshit. Someone tried to bullshit him about something. He put his arm around them and walked them out of mission control. They were never in that room again.
We need more leaders like that.
I simply cannot click such a domain name
Very apt parallel between LinkedIn and late night infomercials.
This is the bullshittery in its mature form, which doesn’t consist of individual lies, or individual scams, but a steady-state ecosystem in which a large share of professional output is produced to be seen by other people producing output, and in which the connection to anything resembling a real customer, a real problem, or a real outcome has gone slack.
Wait, what? Being two or more steps removed from "a real customer" makes your job bullshit?
> the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do.
Yes, this is a totally new phenomenon which has never ever been the case at literally every point in human history.
I blame the ML engineers who work on these recommendation systems. They chase simplistic objectives like CTR, time spent, and so on, which can be gamed by this kind of content. This creates huge positive feedback loops in which popular content becomes even more popular and forms “metas,” while models train on clickstream data they themselves have influenced. They could try to fix this, but they won’t, because no one is asking them to
Those that can Do, those that can't Bullshit.
The bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.
> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false
thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters
BSOD now stands for bullshit on demand... thanks to AI
>The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you.
Been noticing this new phenotype of tech bro who writes with an air of superiority, subtly belittling all those beneath him. Also ardently believes in
- bullshit jobs
- enshittification
- kubernetes being a psyop
- tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since
[dead]
> If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn.
It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media.
But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the LinkedIn lunatics they see posting AI thought leader posts twice a day are completely average and everyone is like this, except them of course.
Very few people post to the LinkedIn feed. Those who do are usually playing a game of some sort. If you go to the LinkedIn feed and draw conclusions, know that you're drawing conclusions about a vocal minority of wannabe business influencers. These people exist, but LinkedIn is a circus sideshow to the world of business. Not the main attraction.