[HN Gopher] Fields where it matters, fields where you can thrive...
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Fields where it matters, fields where you can thrive on BS alone,
and in between
Author : johndcook
Score : 54 points
Date : 2023-01-10 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu)
| bitbang wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/451/
| seydor wrote:
| conveniently replaces Academia with Science. People are not paid
| for science, but for being academics
|
| You can BS your way even to High journals as an academic. You
| cannot fall, unless you are cancelled. There is little downside
| once you made your way in.
|
| In finance you can lose all your money. In literature , all your
| audience.
| DennisP wrote:
| The key to surviving on BS in finance is getting other people
| to pay you fees for investing their money.
| thatguy0900 wrote:
| Surely that wouldn't work for long, at least unless you're
| lucky and get decent returns
| jjeaff wrote:
| It works exceptionally well based on data. You can pull up
| almost all of the actively managed mutual funds on
| something like morning star and compare them to an sp500 or
| total market index fund. Once you pull the time horizon out
| to 30 years, you will basically see zero funds that
| outperform the indexes. Most underperform based on just
| performance. But all of them underperform once you take the
| fees into account. So basically every actively managed fund
| is being run by someone who is faking it.
| zmachinaz wrote:
| The selling point is not absolute return, but
| uncorrelated return. If that is really the case, is a
| different story ...
| DennisP wrote:
| Hedge funds are supposed to be uncorrelated, but I don't
| think many equities funds make that claim. They just
| count it a win if they do better than the market (which
| often happens, but seldom continues).
|
| Then there are the financial advisors. Last time I talked
| to one, the selling point was nothing but "trust us, we
| have a team of Ph.Ds."
| cowmoo728 wrote:
| I get the sense that the vast majority of professional
| investors are just being swept around by the tides of the
| market. Over the past 70 years in the United States, that
| has generally been upward. Until they get dashed against
| the rocks, but the professional consequences are so low
| that they can pick themselves up and start again once the
| tides are better. People attribute so much individual human
| agency to financial professionals, but 99.9% of them are at
| the mercy of forces outside of their control, like
| technological advancement, population growth, federal
| reserve policy, and globalization.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Let's say you get paid a 2% management fee (on funds under
| management) and a 20% incentive fee (levied only on gains).
| What keeps you from investing half your clients making bets
| in one direction, and the other half making bets in the
| opposite? If you do this, what total fees do you collect?
| How long can you follow this strategy?
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| In finance you can absolutely thrive on BS. In fact the vast
| majority of finance jobs are BS and produce below average returns
| for their clients with very much above average fees. They even
| have their own astrology (TA)
| chaostheory wrote:
| > Sports: Chess cheating aside, if you don't got it, you don't
| got it.
|
| He forgot about aids such as steroids.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Steroids won't make a champion out of somebody who is a loser
| in that sport. You still have to "have it". Steroids make a
| champion out of a person who is already champion material, or
| very close to it.
| c7b wrote:
| I understand that this is mainly an attack on another blogger,
| but I still don't like the tone of the article. I don't see the
| need for the strong language, and actually, if you try to replace
| it with something more civil, the cracks in the argument are
| becoming apparent.
|
| What is BS? Being objectively wrong? How would we know that
| someone is objectively wrong or right eg in Finance (one of the
| fields mentioned)? Markets can stay irrational for longer than
| someone is alive - what does it mean for markets to be irrational
| from their perspective? Merton and Scholes received the Nobel
| Prize for their finance theories, yet the hedge fund they ran
| explicitly based on those theories collapsed spectacularly. Does
| this conclusively prove that their theory was BS, or were they
| just unlucky to catch a low probability event with a strategy
| that 'objectively' had a positive expectation (just playing
| devil's advocate here)? Let's look at another field OP mentioned
| where we should be able to say what's objectively true, science.
| Hendrik Lorentz's theories on how light travels through ether
| were objectively wrong (for all we know), yet they lead to
| special relativity. Does this make him a BS artist or not? Would
| the answer change if Einstein hadn't come along?
|
| It seems that OP's argument would have been far less convincing
| if he'd bothered to try to be exact about his definitions instead
| of relying on the gut feeling that we all know what BS means. If
| the argument seems appealing, then the reason for that might lie
| more in the mind of the reader (who wouldn't like to rise above
| supposed BS artists?) than in insights about the world. Which
| makes me sad to say, because I generally had a high impression of
| Gelman.
| ksenzee wrote:
| No need to rely on a gut feeling: it's in the dictionary.
| Merriam-Webster defines bullshit as "to talk nonsense to,
| especially with the intention of deceiving or misleading." So
| it's not being objectively wrong, it's peddling nonsense. The
| term has come into popular use even among people who don't
| swear much, because it's precise and evocative.
| c7b wrote:
| Ok, I'll take that. Still not sure about the argument under
| that definition, though. There are disciplines where 'talking
| nonsense with the intention to deceive' would objectively be
| a smart strategy, eg Poker. However, Poker should fall under
| the 'no-BS' fields according to OP (he lists sports, and
| expressly mentions chess there; any sort of trash-talking in
| any sport would also fall under that definition, and trash-
| talking athletes can still be successful - it's quite common
| in martial arts eg). My guess is that the OP would argue that
| Poker or martial arts still are 'no-BS' fields, we just need
| a better definition of BS.
|
| But that just shows that the argument doesn't work with this
| definition, and the onus is still on the OP of providing a
| definition that works for his argument (or we have to
| conclude that his argument doesn't work).
| redleggedfrog wrote:
| It's going to be an unpopular opinion, but software development
| is an awesome field for BSers. Because most of the people you
| answer to don't know the details of what you do, you can totally
| make stuff up, explain failures with magic or noise, and pump
| yourself up by claiming something you did was more difficult than
| it was, combined with talking like you know everything - the more
| confident the better. You often get to make your own estimates as
| well, so moving the button one pixel to the left can be a week.
|
| In the last 15 years I've seen this quite a bit with new hires.
| Self proclaimed experts who can talk extremely convincingly, who
| have passable domain knowledge, and very little practical
| ability. The code they write is usually junk, or worse, actively
| a problem. Because I do not have a forceful personality and our
| upper management is mostly clueless, these people prosper in the
| beginning, but eventually they shit where they eat so much that
| end up creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on.
| Every last of one them.
|
| I guess they fall into the "just enough knowledge to be
| dangerous" category.
| pklausler wrote:
| This is why we have to ensure that somebody asks at least one
| FizzBuzzesque question during interviews, and why you don't
| want to work at a place that doesn't ask you a FizzBuzzesque
| question.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| Agree, with the caveat that the more often these BS
| conversations occur in a group setting, the more likely a BS-er
| is to be caught by his peers.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It doesn't matter what the peers think, if the BS-er is
| manipulating the manager well.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Managers dont have the time to figure out if someone did
| something well or poorly. The code works and so they move on.
| Certain people leave a trail of bad code with nice looking
| syntax. Working directly with them, it will be obvious, but
| otherwise forget it, you will never figure it out. All it takes
| is them speaking well in meetings/good at project
| planning/BSing some design.
|
| The result of their bad code is future changes take 2x-3x as
| long. But no one can tell if those timelines are just what they
| are, or that there is a problem with the existing code.
| johngalt_ wrote:
| I think there is a difference between bad and good places. I
| have worked in bad places where things worked exactly as you
| described. Fortunately times have changed, and places I work
| now care about quality. Most of the time managers used to be
| engineers and they either know and care about it, or they
| care and rely on input from other engineers to understand
| what is going on under the hood.
| ldjkfkdsjnv wrote:
| Eh I've seen this even at FAANGs.
|
| The thing is, the syntax/design patterns in the code can
| look clean. But that doesnt mean the abstraction/interface
| is the right one
| gonzo41 wrote:
| I have similar experience. I am always amazed that there's
| these rockstar personalities that start projects, hit trouble,
| and then pivot to a new project without every finishing
| anything. I kind of find it fascinating that these people are
| always framed as 'the best' etc etc.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I've been in teams where more than half of the people were, for
| lack of a better term, quiet bullshitters.
|
| Everything was "difficult" and "required analysis". The code
| mostly worked, but was full of workarounds that would not have
| been there if someone spent half an hour reading the library
| documentation.
|
| One thing they didn't do though was stick their head out too
| much as that was too great a risk to their cushy positions.
|
| Why do they do that, one might ask? Turns out they're either
| busy with house renovation or have some kind of engaging hobby
| which takes most of their time.
|
| I had a guy confess that those three hours between 7am and the
| end of our standup is the only time he works during the day. He
| was hard to work with because he would do everything to cover
| his ass should something go wrong.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| My thesis is that in software it takes an expert to identify
| another expert, and outsiders struggle with being able to tell
| who's full of shit. You end up with pseudo-metrics like lines
| of code and random inspections of the last bit of code you
| wrote (e.g. muskian Twitter).
|
| An experienced engineer with many products under their belt and
| tons of coaching of others on their track record will easily
| tell if someone knows what they're doing, especially if they
| get to pair program together for even 30 minutes.
| neilv wrote:
| As soon as you get away from what the interview prep books
| cover, it's usually pretty easy to tell if someone in your
| own field is experienced and at least competent, just by
| talking with them.
|
| (Leetcode seems to be an awful predictor of how someone will
| perform as a software engineer. That students are spending so
| much time practicing for it, rather than experimenting and
| building things, is awful. Some of the biggest companies
| they're applying to were founded by students doing the
| opposite of practicing for someone else's hazing rituals --
| they were experimenting and building.)
| rr888 wrote:
| > but eventually they shit where they eat so much that end up
| creating an unmaintainable morass and choose to move on.
|
| At a new company with a higher salary. My richest friends are
| all like this.
| poulsbohemian wrote:
| Their first field is sports... now, they aren't wrong in that if
| you are the last player at the end of the bench on an NFL team,
| you are _still_ a really amazing athlete and still going to get
| paid well. What strikes me though is the number of "just ok"
| players, especially quarterbacks, who get paid as though they are
| a future hall-of-famer... and then fall very, very flat. Case in
| point - Zach Wilson had a big pro day that built up his hype, and
| thus got drafted high, but has been outplayed by no-name guys. A
| non-quarterback, Jadevon Clowney, had a monster hit in a college
| game that garnered significant interest - but frankly, a pretty
| pedestrian career. I could probably cite about ten more
| quarterbacks who got paid big money as though they were going to
| be superstars, but ended up being middling players and had
| relatively short careers. Somebody like a Brock Osweiler comes to
| mind - it was the sports equivalent of a pump-and-dump. I would
| argue that these players are the equivalent of thriving on BS -
| they had a moment or they had a hype machine around them, but
| didn't deliver the goods.
| buescher wrote:
| Detecting BS is going to matter even more now that we have
| ChatGPT - expect discussions of just what is BS to have a lot of
| currency.
|
| I did like "it's easy to promise things, especially if you have a
| good rep; you have to be careful not to promise things you can't
| deliver."
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Alas, ChatGPT will be a bullshit generator extraordinaire for
| the sociopath / politicker / bullshitter with juuuust enough
| knowledge.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| Macro investing.
|
| > Playing the markets is about as real as a game can get. There
| is, of course, a divergence between expectations and outcomes,
| but the outcome has an inexorable quality about it. In most
| social situations---in politics and in personal and business
| relations---it is possible to deceive oneself and others. In the
| financial markets, the actual results do not leave much room for
| illusions. The financial markets are very unkind to the ego:
| those who have illusions about themselves have to pay a heavy
| price in the literal sense. It turns out that a passionate
| interest in the truth is a good quality for financial success.
|
| The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
| plasticchris wrote:
| Ironic then that the Soros fund is down 66 percent over the
| past year.
| elmomle wrote:
| And yet I know some personal wealth managers who are just about
| the most noxious people I've run across--their success is
| entirely due to connections, they're all about minimizing how
| much Uncle Sam "steals" from them, and they will talk your ear
| off about how undocumented immigrants are freeloaders. They're
| the very definition of being born on third base and thinking
| you've hit a triple.
|
| This isn't to say that you're incorrect about macro investing,
| just that there are niches in such fields in which plenty of
| incompetent BS peddlers flourish.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| IMO Soros covers this in the sentence about social situations
| julianeon wrote:
| Why is Finance in the "in-between" category? Finance is the
| single biggest and most important field for thriving with B.S. If
| you're an influencer, or a public personality, and you can
| convince people you're good with money, that's it: you've won,
| you're rich.
|
| You might be bad but not malicious (Jim Cramer), you might be bad
| and malicious (Logan Paul), you might be some other thing where
| you're making highly contestable claims but it doesn't matter
| because investors throw their money at you (Elon Musk), you might
| even be in that same industry and a plain old fraud who got
| caught (Nikola, Trevor Milton).
|
| As that last example in particular shows, if you can BS and get
| away with it, great wealth lies in store for you.
| friend_and_foe wrote:
| If you're making financial decisions based on your ideas you'll
| fail if you're a bullshitter. If you're just giving people
| advice, not putting your money where your moyth is, sure, but
| then you're not really doing finance, you're just bullshitting
| full time.
| paulsutter wrote:
| >Cowen in his above-linked post doesn't want to believe that
| crypto is fundamentally flawed--and maybe he's right that it's a
| great thing, it's not like I'm an expert--but it's funny that he
| doesn't even consider that it might be a problem, given the
| scandal he was writing about
|
| I read the linked post. Cowen makes no statement that crypto is a
| great thing. Nor does the FTX scandal reflect on cryptocurrency,
| it was simply a scam. "Defi" also was not decentralized, not
| really finance, unconnected to cryptocurrency save that it was
| transacted in cryptocurrency, and also just scams ("If you don't
| know where the yield is coming from, you are the yield")
|
| Bitcoin seems to still be operating fine. Useful, no sign yet
| that its revolutionary, no connection with FTX or the other
| recent blowups.
|
| Maybe crypto is just a thing and neither great, nor terrible
| rrradical wrote:
| This is the author's point:
|
| Cowen's list of status losers includes "Appearing with blonde
| models", but not crypto itself.
|
| It's not that Cowen is defending crypto in that post
| specifically, it's that he's looking in every possible
| direction except at crypto. As if the FTX debacle had
| absolutely nothing to do with it.
| euroderf wrote:
| When the proof is in the pudding:
|
| "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise
| his clients to plant vines." (Frank Lloyd Wright)
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| It's funny because Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings almost all
| have leaky roofs but he kept building them to the point that
| flat roofs with odd joins are an inseparable part of his
| aesthetic.
| Animatronio wrote:
| You're probably thinking of Fallingwater, but most of FLW's
| buildings have conventional (sloped) roofs. Gehry and
| Calatrava on the other hand are known for leaky roofs (and
| walls, and windows, etc).
| gronky_ wrote:
| The more senior the role within a company, the more people can
| thrive on BS alone.
|
| If an entry level employee is terrible, it will be obvious in a
| matter of days. It takes years for bad hires at the VP level and
| above to be recognized.
| 8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote:
| Product management feels like the kind of profession where you
| can get away with BSing. It's really hard to tell how much value
| you're truly adding. Easy to claim that the wins were thanks to
| you, and the losses just happened to be market conditions or luck
| of the draw.
| jamesgreenleaf wrote:
| This is a good article, but I don't think Philip K Dick is a good
| example of either BS or the in-between. The literary equivalent
| of getting by with BS is the shallow, derivative work
| ghostwritten for a celebrity that's been preloaded onto the NYT
| best seller list, then trotted around all the vapid talk shows
| for promotion. They might have great sales, and plenty of people
| might read their book, but they're not creating literature.
| [deleted]
| angarg12 wrote:
| When people see a BS-peddler they throw their hands in the air
| and say "you can't fool everyone all the time".
|
| They are missing the point. You don't need to fool everyone all
| the time, you just need to fool the right people long enough.
|
| I believe tech falls in the in between category. We all know that
| one person who is actually incompetent, but somehow has enchanted
| management. He might climb the ranks or get the good graces for a
| short time, jumping ship just at the right time.
|
| Sure, in the long term everyone will realize this game, but the
| long term might not matter much. If you worked at the right time
| (let's say a long and strong bull market), player your cards
| right and got lucky, you might cash out and retire early before
| everyone gets wary of your BS.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| You should realize if you've experienced this is probably not
| because they "enchanted management" as some sort of master
| manipulator playing 4D chess, but rather that _management_ is
| so inept at _their_ job that they can 't tell the difference
| between a useful employee and a useless one.
| 0000011111 wrote:
| Failing up as they say.
| strangattractor wrote:
| Take a look at half the brochures for investment funds and it
| becomes evident. Somehow returns from 2008 get left out - or
| 2020 when COVID hit. Money managers are already gearing up to
| tout their returns once this recession starts to wind down.
| darod wrote:
| Corporations allow for infinite iterations of BSers because at
| the end of the day, if you're found out, you can always re-face,
| re-market, and rebrand. Also, once they get a win and a bag of
| cash is in their hand, now they have capital to help iterate and
| push their BS.
|
| Need to buy more time and you have cash on hand, run the FTX
| effective altruism playbook and throw some cash at charities and
| media.
| molsongolden wrote:
| Tangential but the comments about BS/non-BS reminded me of this
| classic Henry Rollins quote (from an essay about weightlifting):
|
| > _" The Iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen
| to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total
| bastard. The Iron will always kick you the real deal. The Iron is
| the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver.
| Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the
| Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never
| runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always
| two hundred pounds."_
| petilon wrote:
| UX Designer. I have seen some horrible ones thrive - including a
| Director of Design - because the management can't tell a good one
| from a bad one.
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