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

It&#x27;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&#x27;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.<p>In the last 15 years I&#x27;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.<p>I guess they fall into the &quot;just enough knowledge to be dangerous&quot; category.

Tangential but the comments about BS&#x2F;non-BS reminded me of this classic Henry Rollins quote (from an essay about weightlifting):<p>&gt;<i>&quot;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.&quot;</i>

When people see a BS-peddler they throw their hands in the air and say &quot;you can&#x27;t fool everyone all the time&quot;.<p>They are missing the point. You don&#x27;t need to fool everyone all the time, you just need to fool the right people long enough.<p>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.<p>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&#x27;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.

Macro investing.<p>&gt; 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.<p>The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros

I understand that this is mainly an attack on another blogger, but I still don&#x27;t like the tone of the article. I don&#x27;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.<p>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 &#x27;objectively&#x27; had a positive expectation (just playing devil&#x27;s advocate here)? Let&#x27;s look at another field OP mentioned where we should be able to say what&#x27;s objectively true, science. Hendrik Lorentz&#x27;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&#x27;t come along?<p>It seems that OP&#x27;s argument would have been far less convincing if he&#x27;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&#x27;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.

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)

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

Product management feels like the kind of profession where you can get away with BSing. It&#x27;s really hard to tell how much value you&#x27;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.

&gt; Seeing this desperate attempt by Tyler Cowen ...<p>I&#x27;m guessing that Tyler Cowen is on team crypto and the blog author is taking him to task w&#x2F;r&#x2F;t Cowen&#x27;s past writing on FTX? I don&#x27;t know the history. Cowen runs another blog called the Ethnic Dining Guide, &quot;All food is ethnic food&quot;. It&#x27;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 &quot;goat tacos&quot; as authentic and best. I asked the woman at the counter for &quot;goat tacos&quot; and she was perplexed, told me it&#x27;s beef, there&#x27;s never been any goat meat served there. The blog post was dated May 2022, here&#x27;s the wiki entry for the dish:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Birria" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Birria</a><p>&quot;traditionally made from goat meat, but occasionally made from beef, lamb, mutton or chicken&quot;<p>I don&#x27;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.<p>Back to the subject at hand, my spouse works in the space industry. He tells me there&#x27;s considerably less bullshit in his work compared to my own because you can&#x27;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&#x27;s not a &#x27;Learn launch vehicles in 60 days&#x27; type of books, courses vs what&#x27;s available for devs.

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&#x27;t know anything about how things work, and are completely unable to create anything. These people often wear bright pink shirts and such.<p>The guy who wears boring, practical, comfortable shoes is probably the guy who actually knows how to do things.

Corporations allow for infinite iterations of BSers because at the end of the day, if you&#x27;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.<p>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.

&gt;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<p>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. &quot;Defi&quot; also was not decentralized, not really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams (&quot;If you don&#x27;t know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield&quot;)<p>Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other recent blowups.<p>Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible

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.<p>I did like &quot;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.&quot;

I believe creating and developing science demands a higher than BS degree. While the degree itself might not confer any indication&#x2F;promise of ability to do science, the place where it takes happens (universities&#x2F;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.

The more senior the role within a company, the more people can thrive on BS alone.<p>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.

Marketing is the ideal field for BS, especially SEO. Few people know what you do, ever fewer can tell if it&#x27;s working or not, and it&#x27;s easy to find (or fake) stats to fit any story you want to give.<p>Journalism and media is a pretty good one there too, though obviously more with the tabloid&#x2F;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.

UX Designer. I have seen some horrible ones thrive - including a Director of Design - because the management can&#x27;t tell a good one from a bad one.

Their first field is sports... now, they aren&#x27;t wrong in that if you are the last player at the end of the bench on an NFL team, you are <i>still</i> a really amazing athlete and still going to get paid well. What strikes me though is the number of &quot;just ok&quot; 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&#x27;t deliver the goods.

I think that it&#x27;s interesting that it&#x27;s BS that&#x27;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.

This is a good article, but I don&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;re not creating literature.

I think to summarize.<p>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.<p>Say sports betting<p>As soon as one of the above ceases to be true, then BS enters the picture if you allow it too.

Why is Finance in the &quot;in-between&quot; category? Finance is the single biggest and most important field for thriving with B.S. If you&#x27;re an influencer, or a public personality, and you can convince people you&#x27;re good with money, that&#x27;s it: you&#x27;ve won, you&#x27;re rich.<p>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&#x27;re making highly contestable claims but it doesn&#x27;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).<p>As that last example in particular shows, if you can BS and get away with it, great wealth lies in store for you.

Surgery<p>sometimes people cover for a bad surgeon for financial&#x2F;political reasons, but there&#x27;s no fooling the anesthesiologist

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;451&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;451&#x2F;</a>

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

conveniently replaces Academia with Science. People are not paid for science, but for being academics<p>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.<p>In finance you can lose all your money. In literature , all your audience.