Don’t believe the hype
How not to get swept away on a wave of BS
A few months ago we set aside a couple of hours at Brink for a discussion about vanity metrics: what they look like, how to spot one in the wild, why they’re so seductive, and what to reach for instead. It was a useful, productive session and we all left confident of our own ability to avoid them in future… Then we went back to our desks and realised very quickly that knowing that the trap is there is only half the job. It’s like knowing a doughnut is not good for you, and then having one of the freshly baked, rainbow sprinkle-topped delights sat on your kitchen counter, just staring at you 🍩. What are you going to do?
This month we’re determined to get to the bottom of this and answer the question of what is it that keeps producing that pull, and why it’s so hard to step outside it.
BS doesn’t stand for ‘Brilliant Solution’
Two philosophers at Delft have just published a paper that gave us a name for this thing that goes beyond just ‘vanity metrics’. They call it ‘technological bullshit’.
In their definition, a new product or innovation contains bullshit when its real job is hidden behind a job it only pretends to do (the example given in the paper is the ‘fatbike’, which was sold as an off road e-bicycle with oversized tyres, but which was really engineered as a loophole for teenagers in cities who wanted to avoid the helmets that were mandatory for riding motorised scooters).
“Technological bullshit is a whole pattern of behaviour that relies on ‘performing impact’, whether or not any really arrives.”
While a vanity metric is a flattering stat or story; technological bullshit is a whole pattern of behaviour that relies on ‘performing impact’, whether or not any really arrives. Once you’re alerted to this pattern it’s not hard to see it cropping up in development and innovation contexts.
But where does this instinct come from? Why is it that we so often find ourselves in environments where acting like you’ve solved something is incentivised nearly as much as actually solving it?
Strange stories
The answer might come from Michael Strange, a political economist at Malmö University, and his work on the impact of hype on AI in healthcare. Strange argues that whether hype is positive (it’s the future of work!) or catastrophic (the robots are taking over!), it always serves to flatten a complicated situation into a single clean story. The people with the most to gain from that flattening are the organisations and investors whose products depend on a shared sense of momentum and social cohesion to drive rapid adoption. There isn’t much motivation for a nuanced narrative asking careful questions about who the technology actually serves. When your eyes are firmly on the prize, it’s easy to lose sight of your purpose.
“There isn’t much motivation for a nuanced narrative asking careful questions about who the technology actually serves.”
The Delft paper contains a few stories about what happens when innovation gets swept away on a wave of momentum. In 2019, a Dutch municipality built blockchain into a childcare app that let low-income parents purchase items for their children. It worked, and it won awards as a pioneering piece of civic technology. But one of the creators later admitted the blockchain wasn’t doing anything remotely functional. It was there purely to make the app qualify as blockchain technology, because at that moment, that’s what got you an award.
At some point, the developers of that app saw adding needless functionality as a rational, even necessary, move, because the reputational environment made blockchain the thing that won funding and recognition. It’s vibes-based engineering.
That incentive gap between what gets rewarded and what actually works is hardcoded into how the sector funds and evaluates itself. A messy, honest problem with no clean answer is a harder thing to back than a confident pitch with a big number on it, so the funding environment tends to get nervous around complexity, and to mistake the performance of a solution for genuine impact.
Finding the grey zone
We are not immune to this, and neither is anyone working in social impact, because when a well-told story wins funding, the incentive to lead with the performance rather than the substance is real and reasonable.
Strange’s way out of this instinct is to reclaim what he calls the grey zone: the space where specific, unglamorous questions live. While hype closes those kinds of questions down in favour of a more binary set of questions (usually some version of “Are you for this technology or against it?”), the grey zone opens up messy, but ultimately rich and valuable, lines of inquiry.
So how do you get out of the hype loop and learn to live in the grey zones?
The most reliable way we’ve found is through falling in love with the problem rather than the solution. In practice, that means three things:
Get the problem definition right. Make it knotty, genuine and true, and don’t flinch from the messy parts. If you start here, then an honest diagnosis has to follow and it becomes much, much harder for hype to creep in.
Get familiar with your own hype language. If you know what your own BS sounds like then it’s easier to spot it when it starts creeping into your design.
Let the story come from the messy parts. The grey zone is where the genuinely interesting narrative lives, so build your stories out of the real challenge rather than reaching for a clean story that can sit neatly on top of it.
In this era of overly-polished, cookie-cutter AI content, the stories that genuinely stand out are the messy human ones rooted in a specific challenge, so while the grey zone might not sound like a particularly fun place to hang out, it’s increasingly the where the real integrity and value can be found.
This month’s mystery links
Your reward for reading down this far…
There are currently 1,921 of you reading this newsletter. In 1921, eminent palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn examined the Piltdown Man (the fossilised remains purporting to be the ‘missing link’ between ape and human), and pronounced it genuine “without question”. He was wrong: the thing was a total forgery, but it told a story everyone wanted to believe, which is maybe why it took another 32 years for it to be debunked.
If you’d like to play the part of hype man or hype woman for this newsletter, then please feel free to send this issue to someone you think might enjoy it:
Great piece. One lesson I've learned, in both the military and business, is that activity and impact are very different things. Don't confuse motion with progress...don't confuse action with outcomes.