I think the canonical response to this comes from Harry Frankfurt:

""" Both lies and bullshit can either be true or false but bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences, and in general are unconcerned with the truth or falsehood of their statements (it is because of this that Frankfurt concedes that "the bullshitter is faking things", but that "this does not necessarily mean he gets them wrong"). While liars need to know the truth to better conceal it, bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agendas, have no use for the truth. Thus, Frankfurt claims, "...bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are" (Frankfurt 61). """

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Bullshit

Translation: intellectual dishonesty is worse than ignorance.

I loved that book by the way. 'On Truth' was good too, but 'On Bullshit' is definitely better.

I don't disagree with the sentiment here but I object to the idea that "anti-hucksterism can be seen every day on HackerNews"

A startup, by definition, is an act of hope. It's a bunch of people agreeing to be underpaid and overworked for the chance at doing something great. Even though they know the odds of them actually doing something great are next to 0 (the majority of startups fail).

So the type of Bu--sh--ting or Hucksterism he refers to absolutely MUST be present by definition. And I think everyone knows that. In fact I think it's celebrated here more than any place else.

Look at all the "ASK HN: REVIEW MY STARTUP" threads and you'll see a lot of support. I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone tell a budding entrepreneur not to reach for $100-a-share. When criticism is present it's almost always to help the person achieve that goal not reprimand them for having it.

This is called sophistry, and it had already been debunked by Socrates 2500 years ago.

He made a lot of eloquent ennemies in the process, which probably didn't help during the trial that sealed his fate.

It was my understanding that the derogatory use of "sophistry" implies an intent to deceive, which is not professed by the author of the article.

He's not just advocating deception, he's advocating that if you deceive anyone, be sure to first deceive yourself.

I love how HN gets mentioned as if readers of CNN's financial pages would already know what it was.

That said, I don't feel that HN is overall anti-marketing. It just tends to attract people who would prefer not be the ones doing the marketing (and who would prefer not to need it). To me that's not the same.

(Personally, when my wife was taking marketing classes in college as part of a Graphic Design degree, I couldn't believe how evil her textbooks were. "Consumer Behavior" is an ugly cross between psychology and evil.)

Good marketing: we have a product that we truly believe you would benefit from; let us tell you about it, because we want to be of service to you (for a fair price).

Bad marketing: we want your money. We realize you won't just give it to us, so how about if we give you this product in exchange for your money? We'll do whatever we can to make you think you want this product, even if you really don't, because we really want your money.

I think most marketing leans toward the bad side, which is unfortunate. I really appreciate good marketing.

To tie this into another subject of discussion, where do Ballmer's disparaging remarks about Apple's products fit in? Is he bullshitting but believes what he says and just hopelessly incompetent at recognizing their merit? Or is he deliberately lying to try to manipulate people into buying his products?

I think he believes it.

Ballmer has said iPods and Google aren't allowed in his house (http://www.geek.com/articles/apple/no-ipod-google-in-ballmer...). He and his family all use Zune and Bing (by Ballmer's edict). So he's completely detached himself from reality.

If anything this is the reason Ballmer has to go. He has Microsoft too ingrained into his thinking. So much so that he can't see its weaknesses anymore. Which means those weaknesses don't get addressed and things go from bad to worse.

It is that surprising that is what he says in an interview? When it comes to PR, "Ballmer Says No iPods, Google in Household" is better than "Ballmer Family Uses iPods, Google". I recall Melinda Gates saying the same thing after being berated in NYT (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/magazine/24fob-q4-t.html)

It is Ballmer's/Gates' job to convince the world to use Microsoft products, not Microsoft's job to convince them. In public sphere, they are of course going to present a unified front. But in reality, I would be shocked if he actually never used a competitor's product.

Looping back to the point of the article, there is an important balancing act required where you must be able to see the potential success while still being cognizant of all the realities of what needs to be done to succeed.

So believing that Zune will supplant iPod might not have been wrong, but ignoring iPod's strengths and Zune's weaknesses is definitely wrong.

As a product guy, I would want my family to try the competition. My products should win because they are better, not by edict. You can't give an edict to the whole market!

As much as I agree with the ideology behind your statement, history has shown us that inferior products sometimes do win just because of better marketing.

Do you have any examples handy? What I often find when people say this (particularly engineers) is that they're weighting solely on theoretical engineering superiority and under-valuing things like price, life-cycle use, and common user experience.

I'm not saying you're suggesting this, I just always see things like "Betamax vs VHS" trotted out. Where the engineers spend undue time comparing visual quality specs and completely ignore things like the simple fact that Betamax tapes didn't hold enough video to record the types of things that consumers wanted to record. (movies, sports, etc)

Your comment forced me to think harder about what makes an "inferior" product. Yes, Betamax was the first example that came to mind. But, as you say, it was superior only to engineers since picture quality mattered most to them. In the same vein, Fahrenheit vs. Celsius, metric standards in general -- in my mind, it's so absurdly clear which one is "better." However, in the pro-Fahrenheit camp, there are lots of reasons (which are irrelevant to me) why people think F is better. PAL is (arguably?) better than NTSC. Linux is better than Windows.

So, I should amend my original statement and say that there are lots of products which were superior in engineering terms but lost the battle on other grounds, whether it's user-friendliness, price, availability, installed user-base -- all of which I (incorrectly) grouped into the term "marketing" in my original post.

Wine and diamonds are pretty obvious examples.

It's a lot easier to find examples where things are all pretty much equal except marketing. Toothpaste, soap, all sorts of consumable household stuff where the only differences are color, perfume and marketing.

Fair enough. Wine and Diamonds fit that bill. I was thinking electronics, but those make the argument pretty succinctly.

The history of democratic politics is replete with such examples.

The general view is that marketing entrenches information asymmetry.

Marketing is very much a part of the whole product and is included in my comment. Only engineers think the product is just the bits (either 1's and 0's or plastic :).

As I opined on the Balmer thread, I think it's cluelessness and xenophobia.

(I'll leave out the inflammatory parts of my earlier comment, though.)

A colleague once described such people as "The Knights Who Say NIH."

While technically correct, it doesn't remove the need to apologize if you end up having told an untruth.

In other words, you are still responsible for correcting anything you say if it's wrong.

It's worse to knowingly tell an untruth, but it's still bad to have done it at all.

This whole article is a great piece of bullshit. And I say that not in a disparaging way.

The story about kibble? Sure it's probably half-true but he clearly spun it in a different why to tie it into his argument here.

And then this is just a blatant example of bullshit/spinning:

I had to think for a minute. Then I said, "It isn't lying if you really believe it yourself."

Kind of appropriate to write a piece in defense of bullshitting which is composed entirely of bullshit. :)

Disclaimer: I have been known to bullshit myself.

It is trivially true that you're not lying if you believe what you're saying.

However, in context, his message is closer to "it's not lying if you lie convincingly to yourself first," which is one of the more pernicious flaws in our culture.

netflix stock price: 246 http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:NFLX

I guess any statement about the future is a lie, since you can't know. Interesting how he relates a similar propensity to "lie": optimism. OTOH, the self-fulfilling prophecy is a real effect: expect success, and you increase its likelihood.

Sounds like he not only predicted the stock price, but shot well past it!

Or as George Costanza put it: "Jerry, just remember, it's not a lie if you believe it".