Ask HN: How do you tell if someone in tech is full of bs? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you tell if someone in tech is full of bs?

3 pointsbehnamoh4 comments

I admit that I don't have a high EQ. I don't read the cues as fast as I should and that often leads to situations where I trust someone (a boss, a professor, a coworker, random person online) only to be disappointed that they are in fact full of bs.

Edit: redacted a website I was referring to as example.

I think there must be more ways to call bs on such people. Care to share yours?

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People who understand a topic will simplify it for you. Even if it’s a complicated topic, they’ll be able to have a clear conceptual breakdown of its parts and their interactions.

Whenever someone tries to sell themselves as an expert through the usage of obscurity, their explanations are complicated, whenever you poke at it with questions they’ll answer with a new part of an ad-hoc conceptual framework, as opposed to explaining it in terms of concepts which are derived from a generalization of more fundamental, simpler concepts.

Also sometimes you think someone falls into the second category but eventually they’ll just tell you “I don’t know “ or “I don’t understand” as you explore a domain. At that moment I personally put them in the first category, because IMO people being aware of their partial lack of knowledge is a good signal of better quality in the part of knowledge that they do claim to have.

If your EQ is low you need to avoid focusing on the person or identity factors. For like a million reasons starting with the fact that it's not your strength.

Instead focus on individual ideas and their merits. If you have to criticize, focus on the objective materials and stay away from the personal aspects.

Over time this will help you evaluate things like the level of prospective risk a person is willing to take, which is a good swap-in for BS given that the latter could mean just about anything and is an emotional word, while the former is less of a harsh judgment and more objective.

Good luck

There's a lot of people 'faking it until they make it' meaning they put on a confident persona, but really they have no claim to fame and are winging it, until one day they become credentialed and have attained various medals for being a good influence on others or making a dent. This doesn't mean I only listen to credentialed thought leaders. There's many who offer insight sans medals and trophies.

Edit: This guy actually has some credibility:

https://lifearchitect.ai/about-alan/

> Alan completed his Bachelor of Science (Computer Science, AI, and Psychology) at Edith Cowan University, 2004;

I'm not sure I agree with you. I've been watching Dr. Alan Thompson for awhile now, and I don't sense any BS from him. Is there an aspect of marketing on his site? Definitely. But it's always seemed to me to be marketing with a solid experiential background.

I could be wrong, though.

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