Research shows that people who BS are more likely to fall for BS (2021)
uwaterloo.ca
uwaterloo.ca
Despite that, the conference felt as if I was at a cult. And the CEO knew I had a couple of questions about his products. He gave me the death gaze / cold stare during a speech. I was in my early 20s, scared shitless.
Now, remember I wrote the conference was as if I was at a cult? I got invited to this conference via a brother of an aunt (cold side). He used to be in a cult. Now he was a hardcore Christian. He got very rich from these MLM products because he was high up in the chain. As they say: the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.
He's not a salesperson; he's a Harvard Med School professor. But he made a fraudulent $700 million dollar sale (of his company), and escaped having it reversed because he managed to convince the court that he really believed his false claims and bogus research.
This is also the claim that SBF's lawyers are (still) making, now in the sentencing phase.
Absolutely f-ig infuriating.
Sure, just so long as you don't require beliefs to have qualia.
I'm fine with that myself, my beliefs only have qualia when I actively introspect them, but I'd still call them "beliefs" even before I examine them for the first time.
> And they don't usually have a bias in hallucination other than what you're feeding, salespeople absolutely do have a bias
The motivation may be different, even alien, but I'm not sure it matters. You can also tell an LLM to take on the role of a motivated salesperson, and it will role play that just as "happily" (if you'll excuse the anthropomorphisation) as any other.
Forget I asked. If you aren't careful about the places you inhabit on the internet most of what you'll read is generated by an LLM. If we aren't already there, we must be close.
As they say: it's hard for a man to understand something when his paycheck depends on not understanding it.
Although what does "gullible" even mean when buying? They are non-experts in most goods, it is hard to see why they would be sophisticated buyers. Being a sophisticated buyer surely involves an understanding of the market and quality signals of a specific good.
You might think they are at least experts in (seeing through) sales tricks?
The role of a good salesperson is to understand the customer's problems as best they can, then explain how the product will help resolve them. That is good for everyone - the business and the customer. It is helpful if they show the customer that they are trying to understand their emotional frame.
To make that clearer; imagine the opposite - if the salesperson purposefully adopts different body language that'd make the customer uncomfortable and less likely to buy a product even if it could have been useful and cost-effective for them. Value would be destroyed.
"People who are more gullible are more likely to try a bluff" makes more sense: they aren't aware enough to read the situation and react accordingly. That makes them more gullible as well as more likely to attempt a bluff.
In the meantime, everyone in the design team keeps sending back content that he's requested from ChatGPT instead of an actual copywriter. Because everyone here, like everyone on HN, can easily tell the difference, but he can't/won't.
What seems to be very difficult with someone like this is, they participate in hype cycles because not doing so leaves them feeling like _everyone knows something_ and they don't. They don't want to be the idiot left behind when something good happens, so they dive into every enthusiastic movement or belief that comes in range. They don't have the ability or will to suss out that each wave is made up of people exactly like them.
TLDR: High energy, low critical thinking.
However, with deep enough pockets, you can indeed invest in a thousand hyped things, avoid the worst ones, and see if one or two of these sucker magnets is a moonshot.
And suddenly we're describing traditional venture capitalism. To get rich, you just need to start by being rich!
Well isn't that a temporal oddityThe amount of people on this site who say AI has Yx’d their productivity is far too high for this to be an accurate generalization.
A series of 5-7 why drill down questions expanding on a particular word you don't understand or do understand.
And if they aren't quick to respond or don't answer don't know or aren't out of their depth , you know they are bullshitting.
technique borrowed from Feynman's "why magnets work video"
Even from within the first few seconds you can tell Feynman is already annoyed with the interviewer. It's possible that there is some history here: there may have already been a long run of questions and he's now become tired of it.
I know a few people who as good as constantly BS. It's a puzzle to me what drives them, and why it seems like they even don't know they are BSing. Is there some psychological explanation, I'm curious.
I was thinking about giving examples to state my point, but in fact every somewhat sane person must have had those 'WTF are they saying' moments.
Like the kind of kid that says he has a GF that lives in another city or state or even Canada lol
I wrote a program from scratch, tweaked it throughout my PhD, used it to get results for my thesis. I am quite confident in the robustness and accuracy of the program.
I couldn't explain my code to an interviewer (partially because it wasn't production-ready code, but mostly because I don't interview well). I'm glad I didn't get the job. Moved on to work with people who know I'm not a hand waver.
There are also people who struggle to answer, because reality is more complex than what they can easily convey to someone who doesn't already know the domain.
There are pros and cons to both groups.
During Silicon Valley boom cycles, these fast movers ted to do a lot better than people who stop to weigh the pros and cons, moral and ethical considerations, environmental impact, etc. etc.
The what and how is not for your client; it's not for the CEO (or not for a certain kind of CEO). That's for you and the employees. The CEO's job is to lead, inspire, motivate, provide resources.
Seriously, I think this whole Marvel movie style leadership will be seen as a huge red flag and anti-pattern in 10-15 years, just like we now look down on those Henry Ford style managers of the 20th century.
> the researchers examined the relations between participants’ self-reported engagement in both types of BSing and their ratings of how profound, truthful, or accurate they found pseudo-profound and pseudo-scientific statements and fake news headlines.
By their own definition, it seems like the people most inclined to impress and mislead in situations where frankness might result in reputational harm(in other words a real BSer) wouldn't admit to engaging in BS behavior at a rate above a non-bullshitter.
From the press release: "Ratings of how profound, truthful, or accurate they found pseudo-profound and pseudo-scientific statements and fake news headlines." Does that mean the people being tested were just shown the headline? Usually, that's not enough information to decide if something is bullshit. So, were they basically asking their subjects to guess?
The actual paper [1] is paywalled. US$12.00. The press release does not link to the paper, nor does it give a full citation, but it does give enough info that the paper can be found. A useful metric is that if something makes a strong but unusual claim, and the supporting data is hard to access, it's usually bullshit.
[1] https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/...
People almost always have an angle.
I suspect this research itself has an angle as well, making it meta persuasive bullshitting.
Ex: how do you recognize a fake dollar bill? By knowing what a real one should look like.
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” - Blaise Pascal
Long as short: BS has not got a lot to do with depth of knowledge or truth value so much as the attitude of the bullshitter.
It's a moral not a knowldge defect.
The Bullshitter is neither a liar nor self-aggrandising as we commonly think, but simply has contempt for the very concept of truth and falsehood. It's like epistemological sociopathy.
Some bullshitters can be very knowledgable too. They pass the five-why questioning but then defect and talk absolute rubbish as it suits them.
I think all LLMs are in essence bullshitters, and I hope something good to help us understand not just consciousness but morality too, will probably come of studying why LLMs are not really "thinking" and holding an interlocutor "in mind".
Not Frankfurt now, but my own observation, if you wire that to the idea that power is the capacity to paint social reality in ones own interests, then unsurprisingly bullshitters are much more common in traditional power roles. LLMs are therefore (rather obviously) dangerous in any role that involves power or decision making.
If I understand correctly, they simply asked the participants themselves if they are BS’ing and drew the conclusions solely from that? How do you expect people BS’ing others would admit doing that?
Frankfurt's essay goes into a lot of detail about what is and isn't bullshit. If I remember correctly, he differentiates between deception / fraud and bullshit, which he characterizes as lack of concern for the truth. A liar has an untruth they want you to believe, a bullshitter wants you to believe something, they just don't care whether it is an untruth or not.
Now of course, one might complain that Frankfurt hijacked a colloquial word for his idea, but he does spend a lot of time trying to understand the everyday use of the word bullshit.
I.e. BS:ers don't think the listeners understand they are full of BS, so they are more likely to push BS.