That is fundamentally different from people who just make up random shit that sounds good to whoever has money, without any idea or plans to materialise it or whether it's even possible.
You do raise a good point with Uber/theranos/dao.
That is fundamentally different from people who just make up random shit that sounds good to whoever has money, without any idea or plans to materialise it or whether it's even possible.
You do raise a good point with Uber/theranos/dao.
The problem is that when "making it" is a huge long-shot (most tech ideas) and "faking it" is really easy (most tech ideas) then you end up with a whole lot of fakes that never make and a bunch of people who either need to come to grips with the fact that they are basically frauds or who will simply spin it as a "learning experience" and use their failure to promote themselves as having "made it", since who has ever made it without making a few mistakes, right?
Accountability is the big problem, but I also think that the superficiality of relationships is another big contributor. It's the same as accountability, really, just on a different scale and it's done before the "fraud".
I once went through an LGA (large group awareness) program where a part of it was about having small teams and buddies keeping each other accountable to their personal goals. There was a phrase that came out of that when people who were supposed to be holding each others accountable would both fail in their goals because neither wanted to call the other person out for fear of being called out themselves, or out of a sense of hypocrisy for giving someone shit when they had not finishing their own goals.
This was called "Cosigning each others bullshit" and I think it's what happens more often than not in high level business/political dealings. We'd have a lot less high-profile fraud/incompetence cases if more people had the courage to keep other people honest before it got to that point.
this is why we have so many hero myths/stories, to valorize those few people brave enough to pay those costs for the rest of us. that esteem bestowed is one of the few ways we can repay the costs (if only incompletely) that "heroes" incur for us.
Bullshitters never really followed this. It's the Trump game. Keep talking, making stuff up, while moving faster in the direction you want. And it's too hard to keep up, so implicitly people believe portions of it.
That's actually an interesting case because, although he didn't have MS BASIC at that point, he knew he'd be able to deliver it by the time he needed it. So, was he really faking it?