The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex | Hacker News Reader

The Creative World’s Bullshit Industrial Complex

99u.adobe.com

174 pointsvitabenes97 comments

Reading about Galileo, Newton, and others when I was young, I felt that they came from means or had the means to do 'deep' work. Until you have the means, the Bullshit Industrial Complex seems like the rational path to follow. It gets attention which gets you paid.

I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. But there is greater external validation in saying you work at FAANG vs. I'm working on some highly technical topic only .01% of people will ever care about.

Edit: I 'ass'umed why people don't do quiet research/building when they have the money but would love to hear first hand reasons.

A lot of FAANG programmers are people who "work to live". Even with the financial means, the freedom to do what they want isn't necessarily something they value very heavily. Instead, it's a steady 9 to 5 and they have time for family, friends, and hobbies, and they're content with that.

Also important to note though: while FAANG pays well, it doesn't pay so well that you can consistently retire at 35 unless you pay very close attention to your wealth management.

If I had financial independence, I'd try to become a teacher. Unfortunately, even fully vested, I'm a good ways out from financial independence.

I think I picture "freedom to do what I want" as a studio apartment with a laptop, an internet connection and a library card needing something like $30K a year. So I think for every year I make $150K I can take ~3 years off.

Everyones situation is different.

Hope you get to teach some day.

Your going to live in a studio doing nothing but hack on a laptop for the rest of your life? No other things to do discover or try? No people in your life?

Studio, laptop, internet cost money. Human relationships are free. Some hobbies are free or low cost. You would not be buying the latest gadgets, seeking out the best restaurants and visiting the 100 places you must see before you die. It's a trade off.

It's costs money to do things with people. Friends want too go places, do things, activities. I can't imagine you'll be hosting guests in your studio eating beans and rice. Life can be so much more interesting.

>Friends want too go places, do things, activities.

No, mostly they are too busy working.

Just to give a different perspective, I am budgeting for a not-ascetic but also not-extravagant lifestyle (cook at home, buy nicer clothes less often, buy cars new but stick to low maintenance budget models, etc.), dual-income family, kid(s), one or two trips a year (one to travel, another to visit family), some hobbies with equipment costs, a chronic medical condition I was diagnosed with at 25 that is minimal impact right now but will almost certainly get expensive when I'm retirement age, some ongoing memberships like for state parks, etc.

Factoring in taxes, it adds up to more than I'd like but less than I would intuitively assume.

When I was 19 all I wanted was enough money to buy mt dew, pizza, a couple programming books, whatever the newest laptop was, and an internet connection.

Not sure what happened there.

What happened was adults pay their own bills.

As someone in their 30s, married and preparing for kids, what has surprised me is how much all of the little things add up. Not the sheer dollar amount, but rather just how many bills you can get in a single month and how many little bits of infrastructure are required for a stable baseline day to day living.

The answer for me was “enough that I have to actively dedicate time to managing them.”

I think most young FIRE people think that way. I certainly did too, in my early 20s. Then 3 years become 10, 15, 20, and you accumulate an actual life in the meantime (sometimes kids, sometimes pets, sometimes spouses, sometimes hobbies, etc), and the mere thought of living in a studio with a library card becomes a prison. Compounds when you realize you'll no longer have the same energy to "do what you want" when you're 40/50/60, so even maintaining that bare minimum living would be unsustainable.

> I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects. But there is greater external validation in saying you work at FAANG vs. I'm working on some highly technical topic only .01% of people will ever care about.

Something that's weighed on my mind for the past 6 years: when I graduated CMU, in a speech the head of the CS department told us [paraphrased] to work on things that matter and to be a force for good in the world.

I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money.

I guess if I could get paid to do anything I'd probably do something silly like write a new programming language built for expressing mathematical proofs. These exist, but I've always been interested in starting from the UX side (how do I like to write proofs on paper) and working from there to a formal language; instead of the cutting edge research that is often the other way around (here's homotopy type theory, now let's unify it with modern math)

Now the question: even if I had the means to do this while continuing to pay my mortgage, would this be doing any good for the world? Would anybody care about the end result? Would I regret it after 20 years?

Edit: I guess the crux of the issue is, it's hard to optimize for being a force for good because the world is big and complicated. But it's quite easy to optimize for making more money, you just go down the list of top paying employers on levels.fyi and filter the ones you don't like.

sounds like an excellent way to make mathematical proofs more accessible to the masses!

Potentially! But it would likely be years of effort and research to get something usable, which may end up being a dead end. It's simultaneously a tantalizing and torturous proposition.

whether the project is a success or not it seems you would get a lot out of the process. Sometimes you have an idea of what you would like to do and only by going down the path do you realize what you should be doing.

Even if the project isn't successful, it's a required part of innovating. it's a real contribution.

This is where grad school shines for this sort of stuff. You have mentorship that can steer you along toward doing something relevant and making a worthy contribution that wouldn't be a wasted exercise on your part.

If you come in off the cuff thinking "Proofs need fixed," you are probably going to end up reinventing the wheel at best since you lack any context to what has already been done in the field.

Thanks for taking the time to explain your thoughts. It's fascinating to see how others reason.

Is doing good for the world external validation? I'm not sure.

The article author argues that a lot of people create bullshit which is the opposite of valuable (time consuming and attention grabbing). Maybe your work wouldn't be valuable but it also wouldn't be a net negative.

"Edit: I guess the crux of the issue is, it's hard to optimize for being a force for good because the world is big and complicated. But it's quite easy to optimize for making more money, you just go down the list of top paying employers on levels.fyi and filter the ones you don't like."

Why I am reading this as: Is more easy to make money than being force for good? Because hey, the world is big and complicated. Or "hey making the world better place is not monetary rewarding endeavor, let's move fast and break things.

Chasing big work is not related to money. It is related to creating meaning outside egoistic need of fulfilling some billionaires vision of success.

Creating big work is a personal choice. And obviously is not popular or advertised.

Can you expand on what you define as "big work"?

> Why I am reading this as: Is more easy to make money than being force for good?

That's a wholly accurate version of what I wrote. It's been quite easy to climb my salary by about double in 6 years, with potentially more rises on the horizon. I'm just about as clueless now as I was then about how to make the world a better place.

> I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money.

One rarely considered need is for an innovative new social network to clean up (and maybe even kill off, like StackOverflow did to ExpertsExchange) the others that have made such a mess of things.

What you do and also what you don't do (but could do) will always be good for some and bad for others (neutral for the rest). In that sense there is no "force for good", only a good for: Yourself, a specific group, the majority, etc.

Now, I have also pondered about this topic of doing altruistic work full time one day if I get the chance and it is nice to see a discussion (even just a small one) about it.

I don't really fear regretting it afterwards as the attempt also counts in my opinion, as long as you don't accidentally cause more harm than good in the process. In that sense, wouldn't you instead regret it to never have tried it if you could have?

> when I graduated CMU, in a speech the head of the CS department told us [paraphrased] to work on things that matter and to be a force for good in the world.

> I never felt like I've accomplished that. I also don't know what I would work on if I did have the means to chase some deep work without worrying about money.

Oh hey, I remember something like that when I graduated too, CMU 2015, and I remember walking away thinking the same thing: "well, how the hell am I supposed to do that?"

Turns out I had a lot of work to do. I spent the next 6 years reading philosophy and psychoanalysis to try and figure out my own shit and understand the world better, which I felt I had learned almost none of at CMU (that said, there's some benefit to being a blank slate, in that I can follow my intuition rather than imitating my professors, but lack of mentorship makes it hard to get started). Being able to support myself through development work was significant in giving me the stability and flexibility to pursue that sort of research in my free time.

This was a big influence for me quitting my job at big corporate and joining a small startup founded by a friend (at the cost of a big salary hit), and eventually I want to move on from that and work on more self-directed activities that even more closely relate my (still developing!) philosophical views and my abilities. But it took a very long time for me to "find myself" and what I believed, even on a very basic level. I had no idea of any of that after graduating, besides some gut feelings about the current moment in political discourse (which themselves took several years to understand fully).

I always wonder about a lot of my peers, who didn't seem to take the same path, and instead continue working their jobs without thinking too hard. Will they find themselves 20 years down the road unsatisfied with where they ended up? Or will they not think too hard about it, and enjoy their day to day lives without much tension, besides the occasional political event? It sometimes seems more a matter of temperament than anything. But it is weird to see the "best and brightest" end up working for a company like Palantir because "we're all nerds here!", without taking any sort of stance on the value of their work.

Interesting... after reading a bunch of all kinds of philosophy, my outlook in life ended up being roughly, eh, 45% Camus, 25% Rand, 15% Epictetus and 15% Stirner. The best thing about reading the philosophy for me was precisely that I lost any lingering doubts I had about meaning of life, (intellectual, non-visceral) fear of death, and w.r.t. work in particular, any "moral" outlook whatsoever. The latter was rather disappointing, cause that was a lot of reading to do to arrive at "I think morality is EVEN MORE irrelevant than I thought before" ;)

Huh. My own goal in philosophy was to explore various doubts, things that didn't quite make sense, and it ended up opening a huge space of new ideas for me as I started to peel back the layers of ideas I took for granted. I feel less confident know in knowing "what's true" or "what's right" but much more confident in my ability to understand and think through various arguments and ideas. Notions like "the meaning of life" and "morality" took on new shades of meaning for me, or perhaps became ideas that I could no longer consider "as wholes" but that demand understanding in terms of their parts, i.e. to be studied formally rather than in terms of content.

I also went in attempting to resolve my emotional difficulties and become more open to the world and to others, which led me deep into psychoanalytic theory. A lot of the results there involved a lessening sense of shame about my own experiences, which made me more open to sharing with and receiving from others.

Anyway, I guess to some extent one gets out of philosophy what they go into it seeking.

Want a lower risk ? Be more humble. Join some group that is doing things that matter, contribute there and you'll surely do good.

Honestly, its easier than it seems on the outside. You want to work for something that is doing good, and you want to do do good work that is actually relevant for fear of working on the wrong problem without realizing it until you've sunk so much time. It sounds to me like grad school and academia would be a perfect environment for you then and I recommend you apply if you are interested.

In grad school you will recieve a stipend which will help bills a bit. You will research different departments and see what the field is going and apply where you are interested. You will end up working for a professor trying to achieve one of the aims on their already funded grant from the federal government. The aim might actually be painted in quite broad strokes or have some methods to get you started at least, and you are free to go off the reservation and work on this aim how you think it should be worked on. Your professor, if they are any good, will nurture your efforts and help provide theoretical insights, supply you with relevant literature if you need help with that, and connect you with other researchers that have the talents you need to form beautiful collaborations. You will publish papers and feel good when some of them are cited by other researchers. You could even continue and do a stint as a post doc with another research group and develop more skills, and eventually find yourself interviewing for faculty positions if you want to pen the grant to the federal government yourself, and train another generation as you've been trained.

Making something that other people are freely willing to pay for is a very good proxy for doing good.

Counterpoint: heroin

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Heroin can deal with pain that morphine cannot. Heroin is a blessing for people dealing with terminal pain, for example.

An awful lot of evil is done in this world in the name of doing what's best for others against their will.

In some cases, people will pay you for making things that help them hurt or exploit other people. It could be argued that this constitutes making the world a worse place.

For example, you could get paid by criminals to make ransomware or by an ad company to flood users with ads or by a cryptocurrency company for building tools that facilitate money laundering and tax evasion or by a government to create a database of dissidents and protesters or by a toy company to use ML to generate fake reviews...

> people will pay you for making things that help them hurt or exploit other people

I should think that running a criminal business was outside the scope of what I was talking about.

Some of them are not at all criminal. The war machine is always looking for a few good men.

What about social media? The division, damage to politics and mental health, those are also forms of harm even though they are legal. What about fossil fuels?

> The division, damage to politics and mental health, those are also forms of harm even though they are legal.

What happens when those in power decide that your views are harmful and should be suppressed?

I think there's competing issues here, there's an aspect of "I want to prove myself" by creating something really good and unique that I can be proud of. There's also the "do good" aspect of potentially creating something that's a "force for good". Doing either one of those is hard, doing both at the same time is probably very very hard. You both need to chase down a good idea but also execute it well.

If you want to do good for the world, honestly finding a charity that would benefit from your cash and making a donation would do that. But that won't scratch your nagging itch to make something you can be proud of.

For that, perhaps saving up enough money to allow you to quit or take a sabbatical if one is possible to work on the thing you want to is a better idea. Would it be better for your career? Perhaps not, but it might scratch that itch and that might be better for you as a person.

Discussions like this are fuzzy because no one here has defined "good".

I guess part of the reason a speech encouraging people to be a "force for good" is inspiring is that it challenges each person to examine what they themself think is good.

The part about "doing something that matters" is also important. What matters?

People want to actualize themselves, to reach their potential.

People want to enable other people to reach their potential.

There's a movement called "effective altruism", who ask exactly this question. You don't have to agree with everything they are saying, but thinking about goodness extremely pragmatically and almost numerically does have merit I think.

Increasing computer literacy might be a really strong way you can improve things in your own community. NGOs are also notoriously tight on money, and have huge problems finding good Software Engineers, because they can't pay competitive rates.

Having worked for a while in that space, I do think it can be quite satisfying!

Wish granted (in my case).

Actually, I didn't really have a choice. No one wants to work with a 55-year-old developer, so I was forced into early retirement.

Best thing that ever happened to me. I started spending my nest egg a bit earlier than planned, but it will be fine.

I have no intentions of ever working for anyone, ever again. Good riddance.

I wish you the very best, at your windmill-tilting. I've done OK, with mine.

Congrats on retiring to what you want to do! What are your plans?

I have already accomplished a fair bit, on the "side work" that I did over the years.

I'm currently working with a nonprofit team, and developing an app, aimed at recovering drug addicts. I have some fairly relevant prior art in this field, having designed a worldwide infrastructure platform.

>I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research

A lot of the most interesting research stuff is happening in FAANGs though where there are more resources and direction for research. I'd love to be able to do something useful outside of it, but I don't think there's more opportunities to do impactful research in academia or on your own than in a FAANG

Idk if you need to be so cynical about motivation. It takes a lot of money to just quit young and do nothing but what you want. Buy a house, travel, have hobbies, family. You need millions in your back account to do these things. So we continue to work. How much money do you think people are making and how much do you think people need?

> It takes a lot of money to just quit young and do nothing but what you want

No it doesn't. You can do so with very little money, but doing so requires sacrificing other aspects of your life

Expecting people do sacrifice everything kind of goes against this cynical take that people are only working to feed their egos

There is a large spectrum between quitting young and doing some of the things you want and quitting young and doing nothing but what you want. There are plenty of people that travel in extremely economical ways. People don't have to live in million dollar homes. Most hobbies don't require a 7 figure bank account to maintain over the course of their life.

BUT...generally people will come to live at their means(and sometimes above with the abundance of credit in today's world). Ultimately it becomes difficult to back out of a lavish life and the paychecks become the only way to sustain it.

That's not sustainable. You need millions to retire today. That's why people are working. Not to feed their ego like the poster suggests.

People don't work today so that they can save millions for retirement. Most households are lucky to scrape together thousands in a given year. Most people get to retirement and can barely even make that work.

At the higher pay end of the spectrum I am sure SOME people work at FAANGS to say they work at FAANGS, this is just statistics. On a larger scale, I agree, people don't work to flaunt who they work for.

I work at a large engineering firm. Even if you do get the big pay days it doesn't mean you can suddenly retire. You still have to put in a good 10-15 years to get reliable financial independence.

I say that in the light of that I'd much rather be working on personal projects or projects which deal in resource efficiency/conservation/telemetry, but these gigs don't pay as well.

I wish all programmers with a healthy bank account and vested stock quit their FAANG jobs and did research or worked on personal projects.

I think "deep" building requires specific resources that having been a programmer may or may not give you.

The purpose of PhD programs, in particular, is to prepare a person to do original research in an existing field. While these may have some unnecessary hazing, a significant part of their difficulty is that leaping to one's own original research or building is hard. One has to navigate avoid both excessively small steps and vacuous (or unprovable) big ideas.

Someone without a PhD needs to apply some similar level of discipline imo if they're going accomplish an important thing. For a few people, that might be an easier rout but for most, I suspect it's even more difficult - at least if you honestly avoid both the trivial and vacuously ill-defined.

PS: I am indeed doing the "quit job and follow what you love" thing so I think a view of how challenging that can be.

Another option for those with FAANG (or other) money: Personally fund other people who are already doing research or "deep" work. Perhaps first people you already know, and then strangers on the internet who are asking for funding. These other people doing research or deep work are likely to have the qualities and knowledge to effectively direct the usage of funds in a manner that progresses their work; also see the comment by 'joe_the_user.

(There is currently no shortcut for determining who to fund, as it ultimately comes down to a synthesis of intuition/taste and empiricism. Current funding systems are overly biased toward a form of empiricism, i.e. an implicit assumption that past results signal and legitimate the potential for continued future performance. Deciding on the basis of one's own intuition and taste is one approach to correct for overreliance on externalized empiricism.)

You're still playing their game, you're living your life by their rules. Once you realize there aren't any rules and "success" is being satisfied with your own life then you may begin to forge a different path. Sadly, very few people go this route, but the few I know who have are profoundly content.

I would love to just focus on dozens of problems / interesting areas to myself, but those of us without healthy bank accounts don't really have that luxury.

I really wish there was a sponsorship model of some sort where folks that just love programming for the sake of it could be sponsored by those wealthy enough not to worry about money anymore.

While there are still a lot of interesting problem areas within a typical workplace, sometimes the interests one has within programming don't necessarily align with the workplace's needs, making it so that to work on the interesting stuff in your own time, which gets harder as "life" happens and bills become plentiful.

I too though read about those famous folks in science and noticed how they had either financial sponsors, or were themselves already wealthy, and that allowed them to pursue their own learning paths in earnest, where I would say that isn't an option for the vast majority of us today (it also circles back to general opportunity...there are so many smart and intelligent people out there that may never get the chance to reach their full potential due to the lack of opportunity and instead have to focus on more basic needs, etc.).

Being quiet and slowly building mastery and expertise doesn’t pay off much at first. So many creatives must make a calculation: Do I want the short term, could-go-viral-at-any-second thrill of being a vocal expert in my field? Or am I more content playing the long game?

I’ve been playing the long game for longer than “social media” has been a word. It helps to have a lot of financial resources that I can burn while I continue to labor in obscurity.

I have no desire to position myself as An Expert, nor to do the shit involved in chasing social media success (I like big slow projects made to satisfy myself, not quick stuff you can crank out daily and repeatedly pivot towards whatever gets the most traction), but I sure can see how that’s super tempting. If I didn’t have the financial cushions I do I’d have swallowed my pride and taken that bullshit path long ago just to try and survive.

> Group 1: People actually shipping ideas, launching businesses, doing creative work, taking risks and sharing first-hand learnings.

> Group 2: People writing about group 1 in clear, concise, accessible language.

> [And here rests the line of bullshit demarcation…]

> Group 3: People aggregating the learnings of group 2, passing it off as first-hand wisdom.

> Group 4: People aggregating the learnings of group 3, believing they are as worthy of praise as the people in group 1.

> Groups 5+: And downward...

Generalize this and reinforce it through a system of upvotes/downvotes and you have every the fate of every topical subreddit of any considerable size.

It's bullshit all the way up. The nature of business necessitates info asymmetry, means you'll never find an honest group 1 individual (or a popular group 2), they're always angling, hyping, or associating with symbols as they trained themselves to. The closest there is to a philosopher businessman is probably Seneca, but maybe he was just a moralising game theorist ahead of his time like Taleb (who claims Sextus Empiricus laid it all out bare in terms of risk/belief).

The essay / book (from the posted link) "On Bullshit" Harry Frankfurt is an excellent short read. Here is the link to the book and PDF:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on...

http://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_...

Article was fine. Nodded along to parts of it. Then, hilariously, came the spread of card links below:

-Obsessed: Building a Brand People Love from Day One

-How to Build a Brand—From Anywhere—by Embracing Your Surroundings

-99U Conference Speaker Spotlight: Alain Sylvain on the Ever-Changing, Infinite Pursuit of Creativity

It's almost like they were trying to prove this article's point by immediately hitting you with a bunch of "bullshit"

I noticed this too! Thought it was a random advertisement that I happened to receive in perfect irony. The irony is even richer since it’s being shown to everyone

This is not suprising-- we've seen articles moaning about too many invasive ads on sites with hundreds of invasive ads.

As always, the person who writes the article has nothing to do with the rest of the marketing team, for whom its business as usual

One of the difficulties about being a creative is that bullshit is often required to earn enough to live off of. When you write a book, you may spend a very long time to write the work, then you spend a long time editing the book. Once it's actually purchased, your advance doesn't come in all at once but actually is split into 3/4 payments over the course of potentially 2 years. So if you get a 20k advance, you're actually only getting much less than that per payment. You have to then make up that shortfall with talks, interviews, patreon, and access to you in general as a published author which puts you in an authority position for advice.

Unless you make it to well above bestseller level, and potentially even then, you have to participate in the bullshit pyramid described here if you want to be able to afford a living + paying your own healthcare.

I solved this problem by deciding early on that the only way for me to get creative stuff done, and to enjoy myself while getting creative stuff done, was to treat my creative endeavours as hobbies rather than income streams. Turns out you don't need to be a full time Poet, toiling away at the academic coalface 24/7/365, to have fun writing and sharing poems.

Same. Creative writing was my own creative outlet after a long day spent doing IT.

Reading this reminded me of one of the challenges with fundraising VC money, and that is... For the most part you're being judged against the best "bullshit" someone else can peddle. Which risks creating an incentive structure that's a race to the bottom of the manure pile.

At the bottom there is a whole subgenre of startup cosplay.

It's like a cultural scene where group of people, mostly young, sometimes older are hanging out and networking and acting "startup". These guys don't even have credible bullshit to get a meeting from real VC. Retired lonely rich tech guys (cosplaying Angel investors) and random big firms from time to time provide snacks and feed the scene.

That sounds... depressing.

I thought HBO's silicon valley would be a wakeup call at the ridiculousness of this culture, but if anything people have doubled down.

that is such a good description, I'll be repeating that one!

Video embedded in the article doesn't work, so here's the direct link: https://vimeo.com/167796382

Yeah, it's become bad from a reader/viewer/listener/player standpoint as well.

I've been waiting for the media torrent/general market oversaturation to die down, but the moment never comes.

Until then I rely on personal recommendations, such as occasionally in the comments here.

Store fronts, autosuggestions and viral stuff are a lottery not least due to many gaming the metrics and sheer volume of submissions; I don't really bother anymore and hope the pearls make their way to me anyway (or remain findable somewhere).

There was a point a few decades ago where we took the expert individual out of decisionmaking and favored whatever we have today. A director like spielberg today would never have had the independence he enjoyed early in his career. It just wouldn't be possible anymore because of the mechanisms we have constructed in order to ensure we select the most generally engaging product out of the pile. Engaging rarely means good, an example is netflix's new cash cow "The Kissing Game" which started as a terrible terrible movie covering every cliche you can expect out of some highschool romance movie. Panned critically of course, but what do you know, people like junk food and junk TV and this turd becomes one of netflix's most successful original movies, which they've turned into a trilogy. This is the Lord of the Rings of 2021.

This is a feature of the internet publishing model crossed with the social media marketing model: people believe they need followers to advance their career, and websites need content to feed the hungry click monster. I see the same phenomenon in other domains I pay attention to.

Giving him the benefit of the doubt, it may be a bit worse in the creative world, since there are so many more people in it looking for a leg up.

It is truly a feat of irony that this is hosted at adobe

A misconception: commenters seem to be hearing OP's message as "quit your job and work on your own for the good of humanity." He's not demanding that of you.

That would indeed get you out of the B-IC, but it's not necessary. You can gain genuine Group 1 expertise at a FAANG company (or any other). It may take years, but when you write about real lessons you've learned, that will not be bullshit.

In a world of quick solutions, elevator pitches and so forth, there will demand for summaries of summaries (of summaries). Dealing with the actual complexities is something that is often successfully trained away in the more recent generation of executives and leaders.

If been collecting great posts ,book paragraphs, methods and own learnings from my jobs as well as templates I created along the way and wanted to put all of these things on a webpage. Of course my goal was to a)get better (if I can teach it or rewrite it I consider myself as mastering the topic) and b) to get visibility to ensure my career.

Would this make me a bullshiter part of the complex described in the article?

Motivation behind your actions matters. If you are adding your own insights or mental explanations, I don't think that's wrong.

I completely agree with this article. However, in a more generous sense, bullshitters are not that different from sixth grade science teachers. I don't think my first biology teacher ever did deep work in his field. However, that didn't stop me from hanging on every word, because, let's face it, he made the topic interesting for me.

> And when you make choices based on what others will think about you, you lose yourself along the way, and the world loses another creative mind that would otherwise share something original.

I like it, but YMMV.

I didn't know Adobe was LinkedIn o_O

Capitalism begets grifters as a matter of necessity.

This arena might be reserved for compulsive liars and psychopaths were we not compelled by society to make ends meet regardless of whether or not the ends ethically justify the means.

In this society, bullshitting is built-in at every level to some degree and being savvy in it can be the difference between subsisting and not.

> Capitalism begets grifters as a matter of necessity.

While I don’t disagree, I expect there’s a substantially equivalent number of grifters under socialism as well

Depending on how the system is constructed, there's less financial incentive for it. Sure, the political arena might have some, but in theory you're supposed to try to weed those people out through the party. Nonetheless, I don't think you can characterize capitalist politicians as anything other than grifters or war mongers.

Then the grift is to be a party hack and have the party arrange for a nice dacha for you, good schools for the kids.

of course, you don't hardly make anything, the party provides, in its benevolence!

edit: my point is that grifters show up in any particular structure. not to sling arrows at the USSR or the USA.

Not all incentives need be financial. Connections yield better schools, better housing, invitation to more cultural events, etc etc.

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice.

It would be great if you people tried reading a history book for once. In particular, stories of people who believed these ideas were great and (despite a bunch of red flags) tried to act on that belief by immigrating to the Soviet Union in 1920s and 1930s, to help build the promised utopia. Spoiler alert: it doesn't end well for most of them.

Yeah, this is a thing of human nature. I'm sure if we rolled back to ancient Greece we could find no shortage charlatan oracle-soothsayers who put on a good show but deep down knew they were blowing smoke.

I don't know if grifting is intrinsic to capitalism itself. But it certainly seems to be an emergent property of the unconstrained giant corporation massive income inequality flavor of capitalism we are experiencing.

As the number of reasonable avenues towards financial stability dwindles, people will rationally pursue whatever ones are left with greater furvor, even if those paths are morally bankrupt like being an "influencer" or "thought leader".

Like rats, we'll push whatever button gets us fed. If we want people to do more meaningful work, we need a culture and economic system that lets them provide a stable life for their family while doing it.

Gorgias

Spoiler alert: we’re all bullshitting our way through life, in one way or another.

Pretty progressive of a publicly traded company to use profanity in their blog, I dig it! What is 99u?

https://99u.adobe.com/about

Is there a common, non-profane, synonym for bullshit? I can't think of another word that conveys the same mixture of useless, deceptive, meritless, propaganda.

While some may object to the use of profanity in a public space, I think such a reaction is fitting for the nature of bullshit. It SHOULD be repellent when invoked. A big, disgusting, load of crap that nobody should tolerate in their presence. I think bullshit captures the spirit of the term perfectly.

"load of crap" seems like the perfect synonym to me. Less provocative of a title, but there's other words that can convey the same.

Hogwash

Poppycock

Nonsense

Rubbish

Ya none of these quite hit like Bullshit.

"Bollocks" is a little less severe than "bullshit" in British English, but that word is still considered swearing by some. I agree that bullshit is the perfect word to describe the subject, it's a vulgar word because it causes a vulgar reaction when you experience it. Using a non-profane word would just dilute it.

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