I think this bluff is much harder to pull off against programmers, because in software, the priors are very heavily weighted towards incomprehensible things just being wrong, rather than being incomprehensibly advanced.
It’s also more difficult to be deceived this way the more intelligent you are; as your intelligence and breadth of knowledge grows, a progressively smaller fraction of legitimate intellectual work is incomprehensible and a larger portion of that fraction is nonsense. Since you can mostly understand arguments that are moderately more advanced than those you can produce, you don’t need to be top tier to be able to recognize all the bullshit, only second tier.
I think this bluff is much harder to pull off against programmers, because in software, the priors are very heavily weighted towards incomprehensible things just being wrong, rather than being incomprehensibly advanced.
It’s also more difficult to be deceived this way the more intelligent you are; as your intelligence and breadth of knowledge grows, a progressively smaller fraction of legitimate intellectual work is incomprehensible and a larger portion of that fraction is nonsense. Since you can mostly understand arguments that are moderately more advanced than those you can produce, you don’t need to be top tier to be able to recognize all the bullshit, only second tier.