And relevant to the title quote: maybe it should be amended to “good ideas do not need a lot of lies to gain public acceptance eventually”. The dynamic here is that a significant part of public opinion is simply “well, this is how things work now, and it seems to be working”, and any new and innovative idea by definition is not going to be how things work now. The lies are needed to spur action and disturb the equilibrium of today. But if you’re still telling lies a few years in, you’ve failed and it’s a bad idea to begin with.
(Google tells me this is a relevant summary of US GAAP https://carta.com/uk/en/learn/startups/equity-management/asc... )
Stock options for the company's own stock are kind of weird because the company can issue its own stock, which puts them in a much different position than someone selling uncovered calls.
An uncovered call is a potentially unbounded liability. If you issued someone options to buy 10,000 shares for $10 each and then the price went up to $1000, you could be on the hook to have to buy $10M in shares and then sell them for $100,000, i.e. you'd take a $9.9M future loss, and the risk of that is a significant liability.
Whereas if you have 10,000 shares and agree to sell them for $10 each and then the the price goes up to $1000 before they pay you, you don't actually owe anyone that extra money, you just failed to make the $9.9M gain you otherwise would have. It's the same as if you'd sold (or issued new) shares for $10 immediately. But we don't generally book "opportunity cost of selling shares for the current market price" as an expense, do we?
> Our lecturer, in summing up the debate, made the not unreasonable point that if stock options really were a fantastic tool which unleashed the creative power in every employee, everyone would want to expense as many of them as possible, the better to boast about how innovative, empowered and fantastic they were.
That's saying that it's stock options themselves which are the bad idea. The lie is in how they are expensed or not expensed. The point the accountant is making is that if stock options were a good idea, they could be expensed, thus not needing the lie.
But nowadays, stock options are expensed, right there in public, and they are still considered a good idea.
Although I've noticed that options have been replaced more and more these days with RSU's (plain old grants) because options have a tendency to go "underwater", suggesting that they weren't all that great to begin with.
RSUs are also much-less liquid and tightly controllable by companies than actual stock. That has made them attractive to management and insiders.
In any case, it is a bad idea to invest in the company you work for - unless you are high enough up in the company that you see the real books, or you have so much invested they have to show you as a large shareholder. (nobody is the later - large shareholders have a full time job managing their money not working for someone else). There have been a number of cases where a company has unexpectedly filed bankruptcy and someone lost their job and their savings on the same day.
Every time I got an RSU I could just sign into my RSU account and press a single button which sold them all, put a portion of the proceeds aside for taxes, and deposited the rest as cash directly into my bank account within 1-2 business days.
How are options more liquid than that?
I happen to have read probably everything that Warren Buffet wrote on this subject, and in my opinion your take is confused at best.
First, you say that “stock options did become nearly universal“. No, they were already nearly universal at the time that this conversation was happening. I remember that Warren Buffet was quoting, going by memory, something like all but 3 out of 500 S&P DONT companies do it, or nasdaq or whatever index he was talking about. The fact that almost all companies do it doesnt mean its the right thing to do and if almost no company did it, Buffet wouldnt be complaining about it.
Second, you say “companies that granted them outcompeted companies that did not“. I literally have no idea how you came to this conclusion since, like I said, at the time this conversation was going on almost all company did it. Not because the companies that didnt do it died out, but because companies that didnt do it switching into doing it.
Third, and most important, I believe you misunderstand what the conversation is about. Expensing stock options is not a competitive advantage. Granting stock options might be, the rationale that paying management and staff more attracts the best people is an argument worth having. But the conversation isnt about whether its a good idea to grant stock options, the conversation is about which entry you should put your stock options when preparing financial statements. The author says clearly that this is about accounting, but you missed that. Theres no competitive advantage in doing one way or the other. The reason why Buffet complains about them is that A) it makes harder to discern from financial statements how much staff is costing the shareholders, not that its a competitive advangage or disadvantage, and B) if theres a cost that you need to pay in order to run the business, thats called an expense, and by your own argument you need stock options to run the business, therefore those are expenses and thats how they should be labeled in the income statement. The argument of companies doing it is that “earnings“ is bigger if there are things which are expenses but you dont call them that. Its literally saying that pnl = P - L but you know what, its bigger if I just report the P and hide the L.
Yes, that is true - that is what Warren Buffet says are his reasons. It might also be true that the actual reasons might have more to do with the fact that he didn't like the idea of having to potentially dilute his 100+ billion dollar wealth in shares of Berkshire or that he didn't like having to increase employee compensation to compete for workers since he refused to give out options.
What are you basing this claim on?
[1] https://www.slickcharts.com/sp500
[2] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-largest-sp-500-c...
Because that's what I see constantly on social media in response to progressive ideas the rest of the world has largely accepted but apparently just can't possibly work in the United States...
Right or wrong, an interesting (and ironic) historical analogy.
To try and justify their outrageous capital spending on data centers; they are incentivised to exaggerate its current capabilities and also what it will be capable of 'soon'.
There is no time to evaluate each step to make sure it is accurate and going in the right direction, before setting it loose on the public.
There also doesn’t seem to be much risk in falling behind. If you wait longer you can skip buying the now obsolete GPUs and training the now obsolete models.
https://9to5mac.com/2026/03/02/some-apple-ai-servers-are-rep...
I bought an EV last year and it's definitely been a "good idea" for me. Luxurious ride, fuel costs a tenth, doesn't stink.
Seems such an obvious upgrade it slightly confuses me take-up hasn't been quicker among people who like me can charge at home.
So I still run an old Landrover with a massive V8 engine.
Then I'd be paying roughly ten times as much for insurance, because it's a new and valuable car, and being "keyless" it cannot be secured in any meaningful way without locking it in a garage, which I don't have.
Because I don't have a garage or a driveway I can't park right at my house, so I would not be able to charge at home. So I'd have to park an EV up at the nearest charging point several miles away, cycle home, and then cycle back to the car to retrieve it. This would then be costing roughly the same per mile to charge it up as it costs per mile for propane (my car is dual-fuel).
That's before you add in the exorbitant cost of servicing an EV, which can only be done at a dealer.
All told, I'd be spending a grand a month to replace a vehicle that costs a couple of hundred a month, that - crucially - wouldn't allow me to actually do the things I need it to do.
I think legacy car makers have been slow rolling. They might have to in order to allow their organizations and customers to adapt.
I would say that investing oneself and one's money in an idea changes how one feels about the choices that was taken. I would say that those not invested might think that some of the arguments might have untruths more than those who have invested.
(For me inertia does play a role too! "Why fix what's not broken")
No big mystery: a) most people keep cars for 20 years or more, b) most people don't buy new cars - they're too expensive.
It's true that most people don't buy new, but there's still 20% of purchases new, and a steady flow of EVs into the used market.
> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/123niq7/ag...
I know for a fact that the figure for Poland is exaggerated, because plenty of cars which are currently shaving people's beards and have been performing this duty for years now remained in the registry and were purged from it only in 2024. That was 7 million out of 41 million originally there and most likely there's many more, as the criteria were set to avoid false positives.
b) You can also buy used EVs. I bought one last year, 2 years old, for 56% of the original price.
https://www.scrap-car-dealers.co.uk/latest-news/post/average...
> As of 2025, the average age of a scrapped car in the UK is between 16 and 20 years old!
...
> You can also buy used EVs.
True, but you're quite limited there since good EVs have only been around for a very small number of years. Maybe you can get an old Tesla for not too much but that's pretty undesirable for obvious reasons.
We get these ads emphasizing the luxuriousness, the status, the high-tech, the exclusivity of EVs. Meanwhile... BYD.
Surely it can't be entirely conspiracy to bludgeon the public with messaging that EVs are premium goods and ICEVs are for the mass market.
Could it be that the maxim should really be something like "bullshit too often and too greedily and you forget how to sell something that sells itself"...?
History shows that even harmful or suboptimal ideas (like coal power) can gain widespread support if presented persuasively, while genuinely beneficial ideas can struggle if they’re complex or unintuitive.
A useful heuristic is: if an idea relies on misleading claims to survive scrutiny, that’s a warning sign. But public acceptance itself is not proof of goodness or correctness.
In short: persuasion and truth are related—but far from identical.
That is in fact because coal energy is a terrible idea. It has 0 upsides compared to renewable alternatives, and is on the whole worse than even other non-renewable alternatives.
If you have to lie to make it sound good, that's probably because it isn't actually good
My point is just that public acceptance itself isn’t reliable evidence either way: ideas can gain support (or fail) for reasons other than their actual merit.
Well, there's a lot of lies flying around lately. So it happens.
"Present the facts and all the people will cheer and support stop using coal" -> correct
"If not it means stopping using coal is a bad idea?" -> incorrect, because people are against switching to renewables because of lies, not because of facts
Some good ideas might need a whole lot of marketing to catch on. Some bad ideas might need very little. The quote merely argues that if you must deceive people for an idea to catch on, the idea is not good. A corollary is that if you are tempted to lie in your advocacy, you should probably reexamine what you are advocating for.
I’m pointing out that the process by which ideas gain acceptance is somewhat independent from their actual quality, so acceptance alone isn’t a strong signal.
Not to the same extent. An army of humans is obedient up to a point, but there is a limit to what orders you can give them. When the officers are algorithms that limitation is a lot weaker.
There are a couple of problems with this:
1. As a matter of raw empirical fact, a government around the year 40 wasn't too likely to possess a monopoly on violence.
2. A monopoly on violence isn't necessary to ruin your life. A simple nonexclusive license, which governments of the period did have, is sufficient.
Yea, and they were way more successful at it in 1940 than 1840. Are you accounting for all the times they tried to enforce their authority but ultimately failed?
> And that tool is known as the monopoly on violence.
No one has a monopoly on violence. What they really have is called "qualified immunity."
In this particular instance, though, their violence is particularly enabled by cheap technology and computing power.
Put it this way, if Hitler had grok, would it really get any worse for the Jews? I don't think so. I think they would be screwed no matter what.
This shouldn't make as much of a difference as it does, but due to how our legal system works, it's much harder to get meaningful legal satisfaction when an algorithm (or other inhuman distributed system) commits a crime against a person than when a person does so.
Cars measure success by not hitting things.
Cops measure success by number of people they arrest. Note, not the number of people found guilty, that's the prosecutor.
Cops will gladly use a hallucinating computer system to beat the absolute fuck out of you with qualified immunity.
"Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats." -- Howard Aiken
...to mean that, usually, the good ideas are the crazy sounding ones...
If its a good idea that's obvious, it's already used widely. If its not obvious, you'll still have to convince people. None of that requires lots of lies, though.
We learned that the average citizen will never accept that as fact. And even if they do: they’ll say it never mattered much anyway.
Like life expectancy, happiness, social mobility, literacy, student performance, global soft power and their overall reputation.
People are social critters that typically fear originality, and not by just a little bit either. Most people find originality repulsive no matter how well qualified a good idea may be. Instead, most people look towards social validation. A socially validated bad idea has vastly superior acceptance for most people as compared to any good idea.
We all like to think we are rational actors, but most of us aren’t and never will be.
“The truth doesn’t require your participation, only bullshit does.”
I’m kind of conflicted and confused faced with this message on this site, especially with the content of the post. Can someone explain why I’m feeling annoyed?
For example: http://fototour.blogspot.com
That implies that it is ridiculously easy to be right when everyone else is wrong. People aren't trying to be right. Any sort of principle-based analysis easily outperforms the herd. When leaders in society start lying that is indeed one of those situations. Pretty much any situation where everyone knows something and the hard statistics are telling a different story is.
The more pressing problem is how to go from a lovable Cassandra to someone who can preempt major events and convince the herd to not hurt itself in its confusion. Coincidentally that is how markets work, people who have a habit of being right are given full powers to overrule the mob and just do what they want. Markets don't care if everyone believes something. They care if people who got the calls right last time believe something.
In this case, the US hasn't seen a good outcome to a war since something like WWII and even there they waited until the war was mostly over and the major participants in the European theatres were exhausted before getting involved. The record is pretty bad. Iraq was an easy call to anyone who cares about making accurate predictions.
I think this true but misleading — conditioned on other people going with the herd in the wrong direction, it is easy to be right. However, often the herd is going in a right (or at least acceptable) direction. The continual effort to check if the herd is going in the right direction _is not_ easy. If a magic eight ball could alert you “hey the herd is wrong right now, take a closer look”, that would be great! But we have no such magic eight ball.
Korean War, Panama, and Gulf War were rather successful, resulting in a (more) US-aligned and prosperous South Korea/Panama/Gulf. Without these wars, South Korea wouldn't exist, Panama would probably still be a dictatorship, Saddam Hussein would control Kuwait and the US would have significantly less influence among the GCC.
At the risk of missing the point, I have to say that knowing what we know now, this is a very poor heuristic. Predicting a lack of WMD was not only correct by mere coincidence, but also irrelevant to the decisions made about the war in Iraq.
What is this blog post even saying? When you can't distinguish a lie, trust the room vibes? Seeking comfort won't give you any answers or get you closer to the truth.
Not enough people ask "why". They instead argue about effectiveness or correctness. At some point you have to determine whether you're chasing the truth to make a decision or just for its own sake. In the vast majority of cases what you want is a decision that will produce the desired results. That's the real reason why lies happen and why merely knowing the truth doesn't get you anywhere and often nobody cares.
EDIT: for the sanity of any late replies. My bad. I replaced the part about AI with something I thought was more interesting.
This was the stated purpose of the war! If Bush and Blair had said "there are no WMD in Iraq", the war would not have happened.
We know why it's being pushed so hard - people need a return on all that money being burnt.
It's effectiveness is argued about because it's not clear one way or the other where things are, where they are heading, and where they will end up.
There has been a strong push for AI/AGI since before computing, so every time there's a breakthrough to the next level there's a hypewagon doing the rounds, followed by a "oh, actually it's not there yet" - and this time, like every other time, we go through a "is this the time? It's so tantalisingly close"
Are we actually there now? Emphatically no.
Are we at a point where it's usable and improving our lives - yes, with a PILE of caveats.
Edit: I wanted to add
There's always "True believers" whenever there is a fork in the road, and con artists looking to take advantage of them, but that happens whether there is a genuine breakthrough, or not - the hype is never a guide on whether the breakthrough exists OR not, so purely being a sceptic isn't worthwhile (IMO)
Was it immaterial to the fact that we were going to war, regardless of the effectiveness of the "sell"? Yes, that's true, but it gives a lot of cover to the Bush administration that so many people, including 110 Democratic congressmen, voted for the authorization to use military force.
Why is it being re-posted now? Who knows... AI, Iran, whatever.
It is a bit of a weird article, though. Correctly predicting Iraq isn't some amazing feat. All it required was being paying some vague attention to the available facts. The question is not, how did some people get it right. The question is, how did so many people not?
