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Comment by Veen | Hacker News Reader

If bullshitters rise to the top with very little work or knowledge, then perhaps being a bullshitter is the smart choice for people of a certain disposition.

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You're right that bullshit sells well. From OP, something about it runs in the family:

>socio-economically advantaged teenagers are more likely to be bullshitters than their disadvantaged peers.

I had the misfortune of seeing this up close in consulting in tech. Your customers are idiots, that's why they hired "experts." They don't know how to judge expertise (otherwise they wouldn't be hiring you). They hire based on emotions, recommendations and epaulettes because that's the best they can do.

All three of those are completely subjected to cronyism, in my observation.

My experience here made me a firm believer that institutions and businesses really need to be allowed to fail. The most epic stupidity (and toxic politics) always comes from the ones that were furthest from that principle.

And I'm never doing that again. There is nothing I can buy with paychecks from interacting with that toxic, idiotic side of humanity that makes it worth it.

> They don't know how to judge expertise (otherwise they wouldn't be hiring you).

I've had this realization many times that, in most cases, I likely sound exactly the same as the 5 BS artists that came before me, and there's very little I can do to distinguish myself outside of long-term relationship building and delivery.

Others before me have said the exact same things, just not delivered (or hosed up a project beyond belief). Me saying something may sound exactly the same as the previous X times - they've heard it all before.

I've got a few clients I've worked with for years - they trust me implicitly because I've delivered (and when I haven't, I've made good, pushed through, fixed stuff that needed fixing, etc). After years of experience, there's deep trust. When I say "XYZ", they have a high degree of confidence in my ability to deliver. Outside of spending years developing those relationships, I'm not sure how else you can get a level of confidence even close to that.

"Consulting doesn't work because you can't sell consulting to a competent organization and you can't deliver consulting to an incompetent one."

Hale's Law*

*i.e. me.

Perhaps for them in a narrow sense, but considering the damage they do, I'm to the point where I'd be willing to have companies pay them their inflated salaries just to stay home and not interfere.

You need to find the right balance between bullshitting and delivering . Elon Musk or Steve Jobs are first class bullshitters but they also back it up quite often (not always though).

and sometimes people just think you're bullshitting because they have no idea that you can actually deliver (or that anyone can deliver) but you know that you can (and perhaps even have done so).

Elon Musk and Steve Jobs are and were highly intelligent people. For them it is less about bullshitting but more about their dreams and goals.

I do not believe Elon Musk is bullshitting when giving timeframes, he knows what is possible technically, but fails to predict how long it takes to deliver

I don’t think there is any inverse relationship between intelligence and a tendency to bullshit. There are smart bullshitters and stupid ones. The stupid ones tend to be obvious. The very smart ones end up running countries and corporations.

Yes, that would be the problem.

Parent poster is saying we need to stop letting it be that easy for them.

Smart for the individual. Bad for the whole.

IMO people should think more of the whole, more often.

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