tl;dr

Across society, our leaders today are liars. Even the most truthful are consummate bullshitters. Not just the President, but almost all of them. Why? It works! People reward the liars and bullshitters. They choose to follow and effectively believe them. Eventually, reality will punish them, but most get away with it. This all seems to be a product of our increasingly online world. This combined with greed and inequality of wealth drives lying and BS. There is a lack of oracles and arbiters of truth. In the long run, we will all suffer. The debts to truth will come due.

“Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.” ― Peter Drucker

A reasonable conclusion is that we are neither managed, nor led today.

Leaders Today

Today our leaders have a conflicted and ambiguous relation to the truth. At the same time the level of trust in society is plunging to all-time lows. This would seem to be a vicious cycle headed for disaster. As I’ve stated before reality will always assert itself, and when it does the results are undeniable. The twin issues of lack of trust and wishful thinking seems to be combining to supercharge this behavior. We see it every day from our National leadership. I saw it with my management at work. Leaders lie because it benefits them. It is the road to success. As long as we reward the lies and bullshit, we will get more of it.

My own departure from work and retirement was triggered by this dynamic. I had leaders who did not trust the system enough to accept the truth and respond to an objective reality that required a response. Instead they engaged in unethical practices that were effectively a cover-up. It was a case where someone did high quality work with results they didn’t like. Rather than take that information, and respond to the results, they censored and covered it up. I was working in an institution that green-lighted their incompetence as the right response. My own responsible actions were viewed as unacceptable. In terms of National security, the leaders actions were irresponsible and incompetent. Yet, it was also the path of least resistance. They chose the easy, cheap path that leads to willful ignorance. They are the epitome of modern leadership.

I remember the last time I engaged with the Director of Sandia. It was a forum on AI. I asked her a question online about our information environment. As I’ve noted before Sandia has a very restrictive, “do not share information” culture. The impact of this on information technology is profoundly negative. As a consequence functions like search are crippled. Given this track record, and AI’s dependence on training data, how would we avoid this mistake from crippling AI? Her response was “that was a harsh question.” There was no willingness to take evidence and respond to it. Certainly, no confidence is any action to recognize the problem, much less remediate it. The evidence was rejected as harsh. With leadership like this is it any wonder why my managers would be any such pathetic cowards? Seemingly not, her example set the bar.

We will get this from our leaders as long as we accept it. We will get it as long as they suffer no ill from its effects. Avoiding the damage from the resistance to objective reality is an illusion. It will be obvious and catastrophic. The damage is already done; it is just not evident enough to prompt a strong enough response.

“Do you want to know who you are? Don’t ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” ― Thomas Jefferson

Motivations are all Wrong

“The mark of a great man is one who knows when to set aside the important things in order to accomplish the vital ones.” ― Brandon Sanderson

A core problem is that our leadership has no allegiance to the truth. What they have allegiance to is money, profit, shareholder value, … At least if our time scale is short and all the leadership is short term focused. In this case, the truth is the enemy of all these things and our leaders are basically really good liars. It is worse that most are bullshitters. They don’t care about the truth, and chose whatever suits them best. The lying and bullshit serves to increase the value of what they care about and the truth isn’t it. We see it everywhere.

Corporate interests are a the canonical example. This has become the model and framing for society as a whole. The core of the attitude is the maxim of maximizing shareholder value as the sole purpose of corporations. This attitude has been adopted by politics and other organizations. My personal experience is thick with organizations like National Labs and universities. There, this principle of leadership is simply ill-suited to their purpose and actively damaging. For corporations this principle can be argued to be appropriate. That said, it produces a focus that is relentlessly short term. As those effects become evident the shareholders simply divest and move on to their next victim. While profitable and driving the stock market, it hollows the future out. Often this profit is done in ways that damage our society. The classic example is dumping toxic waste without any conscious. Today, no example is more apt today than social media. These companies are worth a huge amount of money all based on preying on the rest of society.

The force of this philosophy has created vast swaths of wealth. It has also created income and wealth inequality on a scale unequaled in United States history. Today’s billionaires are worse than the robber barons of the 19th Century. Furthermore, it is being adopted across the leadership spectrum. The government has decided that it is the model for things they fund. Politicians too. The Laboratories managing science and national security are examples. I saw this close up. The result is a primal focus on money above all else. The money becomes a stand in for quality of work and technical excellence. More insidiously, the behavior of the management is distorted. We see the same lying and bullshitting as corporate leaders. All of it links back to the chosen priorities.

I’ve point to Boeing corporation as a cautionary example. Reality has visited their business and showed its failures. Planes crash and doors fall off with evidence pointing back to corporate decisions. The corporation worked to maximize short-term value at the cost of quality. Technical excellence is costly and they curtailed that. We can see the same thing setting up with AI. Sam Altman of OpenAI is bullshitting his way through the investment bubble. He is trying to get his company to its IPO with as much value as possible. This value is being powered by bullshit and sleazy behavior. We can see how Boeing fucked itself. Will OpenAI fuck itself too? or will they get to their massive payday. Ultimately, all this behavior is in service of creating billionares. They are created on the backs of the rest of us. They also don’t give a single fuck about the country, or their citizens.

God help us, this is the model of leadership across the whole of society.

“The greatest leader is not necessarily the one who does the greatest things. He is the one that gets the people to do the greatest things.” ― Ronald Reagan

It is Effective

The obvious issue is that current models of leadership are viewed as effective. It is successful. Donald Trump is an exemplar of it. He’s been elected President twice. His constant lying and bullshit seems to benefit him. There is no seeming penalty for it. In all likelyhood the impacts of his behavior will come due when he is out of office (or dead). The same goes for other leader whether it is the CEO of Boeing or the Director of a Lab. Someone else will have to clean up their mess. The current leader will get rich and enjoy power. The future is something they have no responsibility for. This should not be our model for leadership.

The core of the issue is time scale. The leadership is focused on tomorrow (or the next quarter). We see this in the quarterly review so popular in corporate governance and adopted everywhere. The lens for it is money. This drives stock price and corporations work to engineer the quarterly review to drive stock value. In this system, the future is lost. The long term health of any of these systems has no vote. This was evident at the Labs where I worked. The long term prospects of the Labs declined, and declined with the short term focus. At the same time every program was declared a great success. In almost every case this success was bullshit.

Just as the long term is sacrificed, the impact of society has no vote. This has clarity in the behavior of social media where vast profits have been made by preying on people. We might guess that AI will do more of the same. Society would benefit from an honest AI that operated with humility. Profit demands that AI acts confident in all answers, and shows mastery where there is none. We see the lines of conflict set up where lying, hallucinations and bullshit line the pockets of tech billionaires. Society would be better off with an honest AI that shows humility. It would respond with genuine doubt and warn the users of sketchy answers. This would be far more responsible, but negatively impact the (short term) bottom line. In this, we can see how the incentives are arrayed against responsible long term health.

“Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.” ― Peter F. Drucker

It Won’t Change Until It Blows Up

“Being responsible sometimes means pissing people off.” ― Colin Powell

The core of the problem is that this way of doing things works. It creates wealth. It is the standard set by society for organizations. All things are measured in money. All of the measurement is short term. Any other measure shrinks into being meaningless. If we measured the long term health, we would see the problem. We don’t. All sorts of important things are ignored. Excellence and quality are disregarded, unless it fits into the finances. They rarely do. Both are expensive, and when the opposite works in the short term, they are jettisoned. Generally excellence and quality matter in the long term (see Boeing). Their disregard takes years to become evident. I witnessed a similar decline at the National Labs.

“Advertising is legitimised lying.” ― H.G. Wells

Today’s leaders are not communicating reality to us. Almost everything they say is merely marketing of what they wish were true. It is advertisement of their success, “cherry picked” to only mention success. Problems and failures are simply ignored or spun into a success. Too often the leaders offer zero humility. Their messages show little vulnerability. I do think the internet and social media can be blamed for a great deal of this. They act as if any weakness or failure will be used against them in an instant. This is part of the absence of trust. The viscous cycle is driven as the trust-destroying nature of their actions only makes things worse. It feels like we cannot escape this dynamic. Meanwhile AI is appearing as a lying trust-annihilating technology to amplify this trend.

While the problems are evident, nothing is changing. We are societally careening toward multiple crises. When problems are ignored, they fester. The problems grow larger as they rarely moderate or disappear without focus. I would call this approach optimistic pessemism. There optimism is expressed with pessimism about our ability to make things better. I personally prefer pessimistic optimism. There the problems are discussed and identified with optimism about our ability to solve them. I know one thing, we won’t solve anything without identifying the problems. This is a necessary first step and the origin of success.

Social media has taken all of this to the overdrive. Not only is social media powered by the maximizing shareholder value motive for leadership, but it’s created a world where leaders feel the need to define their reality before the reality is defined for them. The leader works to define the reality that suits them. They worry that any problem will impact their short term prospects. It will lessen their wealth or impact the funding negatively. This is just spiraled. In addition, the voices of insiders who know better are typically silenced by fear. See me as an example of this. In today’s world, we have less and less voice instead of more and more. Social media is there simply to sell us things.

“Good leadership requires you to surround yourself with people of diverse perspectives who can disagree with you without fear of retaliation.” ― Doris Kearns Goodwin

Postscript

I realize that my more technically oriented posts do a lot better in terms of readership. I could simply focus on that. On the other hand, the issues that I discuss in these more managerial to political posts are the barriers that I saw while working to actually execute the technical work successfully. These leadership issues discussed here, for example, are precisely the things that make the technical work completely pointless. Without leadership that recognizes our problems and works to actively solve them, all the good technical work in the world will amount to nothing. We have a number of rather profound issues and problems to solve today. The nuclear stockpile remains something of acute interest. With the advent of AI bursting onto the scene in the last few years, there are incredibly difficult problems at the boundary between political, managerial, and technical that must be navigated.