How to tell if someone’s full of shit.
Can you tell a real expert from a fake expert? Here are 6 strategies you can use to sort the geniuses from the phonies.
The world is full of fake smart people.
These people walk among us, blending in. But they don’t actually contribute anything of value to society. They just smile and nod their heads and regurgitate stuff that other people say.
They’re hoping desperately that we don’t spot them for the fakers they are.
They have all kinds of strategies that they use to hide their lack of intelligence. Usually they have great people skills. They’re fantastic yes men, they’re great salesmen, and they’re world class bullshitters.
If you trust one of these fake smart people, it can land you in a bunch of trouble.
For example, imagine if you’re falsely accused of murder, and now you’re set for trial. You need to hire a really, really good lawyer. But how do you tell a really, really good lawyer from a lawyer who’s a really, really good salesman?
This goes for less high-stakes stuff, too. Most startups live and die based on the quality of the first few people they hire. If your first few employees are terrible then your company will tank.
Similarly, if you hire a bad gardener, or a bad plumber, or a bad chef, then they’ll do a bad job and you’ll have a mess to clean up. And if you learn from the wrong teachers/mentors/content creators, then you’re gonna learn bad lessons and you’re gonna go down a bad path in life.
When fake smart people get into Hollywood, you get bad movies. When fake smart people get into academia, you get bad science. When fake smart people get into business, you get bad products. And when fake smart people get into politics, you get inept government.
So you need to be able to spot these fake smart people. The problem is, that’s really, really hard. Generally, to judge whether somebody’s a real expert or a fake expert in any subject, you have to be an expert in that subject yourself.
But there are actually a few ways you can tell a real expert from a fake expert without being an expert yourself. I’m gonna give you 6 of them in this article. #6 is my favorite, and it’s by far the most effective.
Here you go:
Strategy #1: Look at their past results.
Sometimes you can tell that somebody’s an expert because they can point to their track record of past results.
For example, take my industry, digital marketing. If you’re hiring someone to run Facebook ads for you, you don’t have to quiz them about how much they know about Facebook ads. You just have to ask their other clients how their ads are performing.
Sometimes you don’t even have to ask about somebody’s past results. You can simply assume that, because they’re in the position they’re in, they’ve done a good job in the past. The best example is pilots. If I’m in an airplane, I don’t get paranoid about whether the pilot can land the plane — because if the pilot couldn’t land a plane, he’d already be dead!
But you can’t always judge people by their past results. One caveat is that sometimes, they just got lucky.
In Fooled By Randomness, Nassim Taleb tells us to beware of stock analysts who brag about their results, because some stock analysts will have amazing results just by chance.
A great example of this: Sweden issued a booklet with a whole bunch of investment options where people could put their retirement savings. Tons of people picked the fund that had performed the best in the past 5 years.
How did that fund manage to outperform all the other funds in the booklet? By taking tons and tons of risks, and getting lucky. In the next 5 years, they took the same high-risk, high-reward strategy, they weren’t so lucky, and they lost their investors’ life savings.
Another caveat about judging people by their results is that they might have been riding someone else’s coattails. A great example of this is the football coach Adam Gase, who was the offensive coordinator for the Denver Broncos in the early 2010’s. The Denver Broncos had a great offense while Gase was at the helm, and in 2013 their offense broke a bunch of records en route to a Super Bowl appearance.
The problem was, the Denver Broncos quarterback at the time was Peyton Manning. Most people would agree that Peyton Manning is one of the 3 greatest NFL quarterbacks of all time. And Peyton Manning has had plenty of success without Adam Gase, but Adam Gase has never had success without Peyton Manning.
Adam Gase parlayed his reputation as an “offensive genius” into 2 NFL head coaching jobs — for the Dolphins and Jets — and failed miserably in both. In fact, when he was coach of the Jets, he was considered to be one of the worst coaches in the NFL.
(The same goes for failure, by the way. If somebody failed in the past, it might be because they got unlucky, or because somebody else screwed up.)
And then finally, people can trumpet their successes while sweeping their failures under the rug. So if you’re judging somebody based on their track record, you have to wonder if that track record is accurate.
The point is, if you’re gonna judge somebody by their results, be careful. You need to separate out their skills from random variance and from other people’s skills as best you can.
Strategy #2: Look at their reputation.
Imagine you’re taking your spouse on a date night. And you’re looking for a place to go to dinner. How can you be sure you’ll have a good meal?
The best thing you can do is look at the restaurant’s reviews. If other people liked the restaurant, then you probably will, too.
The same goes for hiring a plumber. If the plumber has a good reputation, then he’s probably a good plumber.
But one warning: people can have good reputations even if they’re not actually that talented!
How do you get a false reputation? Well, the best way to make up for a lack of talent is with social skills.
For instance, consider the professional soccer player Carlos Kaiser. He had a reputation for being a great goal-scorer, even though he played soccer for 20 years and never scored a goal.
How? He was good at making the other players on his teams like him. He helped them get access to the best nightclubs (and the prettiest women). So they vouched for him to their managers and owners.
He also befriended newspaper writers, who wrote glowing articles of his (fake) on-field heroics for various soccer teams on the other side of the planet.
There aren’t too many fake soccer stars, because if you want to tell if a soccer player is any good, all you gotta do is watch him play. (Kaiser got around this by always having a “hamstring injury”… but eventually he always got discovered and chased out of town.)
Now, imagine a field where performance is harder to measure — like management consulting. How do you tell if the management consultant you hired is actually doing a good job? Most of the time, you don’t… you just judge them for their suit and their smile.
One group of people who always have overinflated reputations is sports talk show hosts. These guys pretend to know about sports, but they’re really just professional entertainers. They know that by using buzzwords and tropes and by shouting at each other, they can get people to tune in.
The same thing applies to the talking heads on politics TV shows — the only difference is that they try a little harder to look professional. Everyone knows Stephen A. Smith is an entertainer who doesn’t actually know a thing about what he’s talking about, because Stephen A. Smith acts like a cartoon character. It’s less obvious that Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson are entertainers who don’t actually know a thing about what they’re talking about, because they make a real effort to seem polished and professional.
The same thing is true in business, government, academia — just about everything. Tons of people who seem like they know what they’re doing are really just “yes men”. They build a great reputation by saying smart-sounding stuff and getting people to like them. But they aren’t really that talented.
So be careful when judging people by reputation alone. Because sometimes reputations lie.
Strategy #3: Ask their peers about them.
In some professions, the best way to judge an expert is to see what other experts say about them.
For example, tons and tons of doctors coast by on their sales skills, but they aren’t actually that good at medicine. Patients can’t spot these doctors. But other doctors can! So if you want to know if a doctor is any good, see what other doctors say about him.
Similarly, quacks can fool regular people into thinking that vaccines cause autism — but they can’t fool actual scientists.
However, this isn’t gonna work if the whole field is corrupt. You can’t figure out who’s a good stockbroker by asking other stockbrokers for their opinion. You can’t figure out who’s a good witch doctor by asking other witch doctors about them. Et cetera.
Another caveat: you have to ask for people’s opinions in a way where they don’t feel compelled to be polite. If you ask a doctor point-blank what he thinks of a close coworker, he’ll probably say, “oh, yeah, he’s a great doctor”.
Instead, ask him to rank the doctors he works with from best to worst (there has to be a worst). Or ask him anonymously. Or ask him about someone he used to work closely with. Or simply bring the subject up while he’s drunk.
Another caveat to this: some fields are corrupt in some ways, but not in other ways. For instance, professional historians generally do good work. But they get really angry whenever someone who doesn’t have an advanced degree in history tries to do history. (Guns, Germs, & Steel is one of the best history books of this century, but because it was written by a geography professor, history professors don’t take it seriously.)
Strategy #4: Talk to them.
Another way you can evaluate someone is by talking to them.
For example, if you work in HR at Goldman Sachs and you’re looking to hire investment bankers, at some point you’ll schedule job interviews with some of your candidates.
The problem with job interviews is that they don’t correlate that much with actual skill. Doing well in a job interview is mostly about sounding confident and getting the interviewer to like you, because face-to-face conversations are less about ideas and more about emotions. Plenty of untalented people can sound confident and get an interviewer to like them.
Meanwhile, talented people might not be able to think fast enough to impress you in a job interview.
Hedge fund legend Ray Dalio says in his book Principles: Life & Work that he gives job applicants at his hedge fund a series of personality tests. He says that if you forced him to choose between interviews and these tests, he’d pick the tests. They’re way better for actually gauging somebody’s abilities.
On top of giving personality tests, I recommend talking to people you want to evaluate via chat apps in addition to face-to-face. These give people more time to think about their response, meaning the stuff they say better reflects their abilities. They’re also less emotional than talking face-to-face, which helps you focus on the actual ideas you’re talking about.
Strategy #5: Give them a test task.
If you wanna see someone’s skills in action, why not give them a test task?
Your test task can be related to the thing you’re hiring them for. For example, if you need to hire a video editor, then have candidates edit one of your videos. If they do a good job, they’re probably a good video editor.
Or you can just give them a general test task to see how smart they are. Albert Einstein used to give his prospective employees “Einstein puzzles,” a type of logic problem he invented to see how smart people were.
The biggest problem with test tasks is that they usually leave something out. For example, IQ tests generally correlate with intelligence, but there are all kinds of things that are part of intelligence that don’t get measured by IQ tests. You can tell because the people with the highest IQ’s are never the smartest people, and the smartest people are never the people with the highest IQ’s.
Test tasks can also be gamed. If someone knows what the test task is gonna be in advance, they can rehearse and practice for it. For example, No Child Left Behind mandated that schools were judged based on their test scores — so teachers taught students how to answer the questions on the test.
Also, somebody might be insulted if you give them a test task. For example, imagine you need surgery. Should you walk up to a doctor and ask them to perform the surgery you need on a dead body? That probably won’t work.
Finally, test tasks often cost money. People don’t work for free. But if your decision is important enough, it’s worth paying to get it right.
Strategy #6: Conduct a “thinking audit”
In his book The Hard Thing About Hard Things, legendary venture capitalist Ben Horowitz talks about the time he hired a sales manager.
The first candidate he interviewed was Mark Cranney, who came in with a huge binder full of all his processes for how to manage a sales team. Horowitz figured this meant he had spent tons and tons of time thinking about how to manage a sales team. So he hired him.
Horowitz didn’t realize it, but he was doing a “thinking audit”. A thinking audit is where you analyze people’s thinking and see whether or not it’s any good. If you can spot big problems in somebody’s thinking, then it probably means they’re not that smart.
Here’s another example of a thinking audit: if you want to get a programming job at a big tech company, you’ll have to do a “technical interview”, where they give you a bunch of coding challenges.
Part of the reason they give you a “technical interview” is so they can see if you can code. But they also want to see how you think about coding. Because once they understand your thought process, they’ll understand your skill level.
Understanding somebody’s thought process is the gold standard for evaluating them. If you know how someone thinks, then you know how talented they are. And if you can spot problems in their thinking, you know they’re not talented.
Another cool thing about thinking audits is that you don’t actually need to be able to talk to somebody yourself to understand their thinking. You just need to find some of their writing, or a clip or two of them talking. (In fact, you can do a thinking audit on me just by reading some of my Medium articles.)
The big caveat to doing a thinking audit is that sometimes people understand something without being able to explain it. (Nassim Taleb calls this the “Green Lumber Fallacy”.) This is especially important for automatic skills, like speaking your native language or riding a bicycle — you can’t really explain how to do it, you just kinda know.
How do you audit somebody’s thinking? It varies from case to case, but here are the questions you should be asking:
What mental models do they use?
Whenever someone says something, try to understand the thought process that got them there. Why do they think what they think?
This works better when you understand a subject really well yourself. You won’t really be able to evaluate an expert-level programmer’s thought process if you don’t know anything about programming. However, you can sometimes evaluate an expert-level programmer’s thought process if you’re a humble intermediate-level programmer.
But there are some mental models that are generally good for solving just about any type of problem. If you see someone using them, it’s a safe bet that they’re smart.
(If you wanna learn more about mental models, check out this article.)
Are there any obvious counterarguments to what they’re saying?
Whenever someone says something, play devil’s advocate and see if you can come up with a counterargument. You don’t have to start believing the counterargument, but entertain it for a second.
If you can, ask them about the counterargument and see how they respond.
Are they employing any logical fallacies?
If there are tons and tons of logical fallacies in somebody’s thinking, then their thinking is probably biased or sloppy.
If you have trouble spotting logical fallacies, then write down arguments in premise-premise-conclusion format. That makes it easier to tell if something looks wrong.
(If you don’t know much about logical fallacies, I highly recommend reading Plato and a Platypus Walk Into A Bar.)
Are they acting shady?
If someone’s trying to hide something from you, then they’re probably not super trustworthy.
The same goes if they mince their words, or if they cloak what they’re saying in lots of technical jargon. Never trust anyone who sounds like a corporate press release.
What do they pay attention to?
Once, Tom Brady went on Stephen Colbert’s talk show and drank a beer. The internet wondered if it was real beer, because Tom Brady is notorious for his strict diet.
But then, Jon Taffer of TV’s Bar Rescue came along and said he could tell that the beer was real. Why? Because there was more foam inside the glass after Brady drank it.
Most people weren’t thinking about foam. They were thinking about the beer’s color and the type of glass it was in. You have to know beer really well to even think about thinking about foam.
This is a good way to tell if someone knows their stuff. If they’re paying attention to obvious stuff or surface level details, they might not know the subject that well. Whereas if they’re paying attention to things that no one else would pay attention to, they’re probably an expert.
How ideological is this person?
Most people fall in love with ideas and then become unwilling to admit that they’re wrong. Don’t hire people like this.
On the flipside, if you see a person criticizing their own ideas and asking themself how they might be wrong, then you know they’re a good thinker.
Are they trying to kiss my ass?
Peter Thiel’s VC Firm, “Founders Fund”, automatically rejects any entrepreneur who shows up to a funding interview wearing a suit. Thiel reasons that salesmen wear suits and nerds wear t-shirts, and nerds are better at building technology than salesmen.
A general rule of human beings is that fake experts focus on what other people think of them, while real experts focus on doing a good job.
So when you evaluate people, think like Peter Thiel. If someone’s trying really hard to get you to like them, be suspicious of them. On the flipside, if someone’s socially awkward but they’re brilliant and they do good work, trust them.
Are they just copying what other people think?
Fake experts can only talk about other people’s ideas. Real experts come up with their own ideas.
If someone gives you a unique opinion that they have, they’re probably a pretty deep thinker. And on the flipside, if all somebody can do is recite other people’s ideas back at you, then they’re probably not very deep thinkers.
For example, it’s pretty obvious that Einstein wasn’t a fake smart person because he came up with the theory of general relativity. Whereas Thomas Edison, who mostly stole ideas from Nikola Tesla, was probably a fake smart person.
(Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to talk about other people’s ideas — but you have to have a few of your own ideas, also.)
Here’s another job interview tip from Peter Thiel: ask people for an opinion that they have that few other people have. If someone has a rare or controversial opinion, and they can defend it well, then they’re probably pretty smart.
Do they get defensive when you criticize them?
One of the hallmarks of a fake expert is that they’re constantly afraid that people will figure out they’re a fake expert. This is why fake experts often get defensive when someone criticizes them.
Some fake experts take this a step further. They understand that being on the defensive is a bad look. So when you criticize them, they’ll start criticizing you right back.
A great example of this is the 45th president of the United States, Donald J. Trump. Anytime someone insults or criticizes Donald Trump, he immediately lashes out at them with some insults of his own.
A real expert feels secure, so he doesn’t feel like he has to defend himself from criticism. If the criticism is dumb, he just shrugs it off. If the criticism is smart, he sees it as a learning opportunity. And he isn’t worried that his mistakes will define him — if he screws up once, he knows he can make up for it later.
How deeply are they thinking?
Finally, dumber people pay attention to surface-level stuff, while smarter people pay attention to more meaningful things.
For example, a shallow thinker might compare New York to Boston or Washington D.C., because they’re all big cities on the US’s east coast. Whereas a deeper thinker might compare New York to Shanghai, London, or Hong Kong, because each of those cities is a financial center. Or they might compare New York to Singapore, because they’re both hypercapitalist cities on islands, with unique cultures totally different from the surrounding area.
Or, imagine if a microwave stops working. A shallow thinker might whack it a few times and hope it starts working again. Whereas a deeper thinker might ask what’s wrong, and even conduct a few experiments to try to figure out what’s wrong.
Generally, if somebody’s paying attention to important stuff instead of cosmetic stuff, then you can bet they’re pretty smart.
Alright, let’s do a thinking audit.
If you want some practice, do a thinking audit on Donald Trump.
You don’t have to go watch the guy talk, but think about everything you’ve ever heard Donald Trump say, and try to summarize his thinking. How does he see the world? How does his brain solve problems and process information?
You might say that everything that comes out of his mouth is calculated to make him look good and his political opponents look bad. You might also say that he seems to be obsessed with status — he loves anything that gives him an ego boost or gets his name in the papers.
You might also say that he reacts to stuff emotionally. When something happens, he doesn’t really take the time to think it through and understand what’s going on. He just does the first thing that comes to his head.
Alright, do you see how this “thinking audit” stuff works now?
If you wanna do another one for practice, do a thinking audit on me. And then leave it in the comments. I’m curious what you think about how I see the world!
Hey! Thanks for reading.
Some news from me: I started a YouTube channel where I make summaries of the books that I read. That way you can get the big ideas from them in just 6 minutes or so, and you can decide whether you wanna read the whole book.
I made a summary of Som Bathla’s book “Think With Full Brain”, which is about the different styles of thinking. This will help you do thinking audits. If you’re curious you can check that out here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIql0b9vB-4&t=8s
If you’re new here, my name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually that’s related to understanding how human beings work.
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Happy trails!
