100% agree with Carette Antonin. Social media platforms are awash with bullshit claims that are tenuously tied to “some truth” floating free without context accumulating eyeballs and engagement like a snowball turning into an avalanche:

This pattern of “hype first and context later” is actually part of a growing trend.

I call the individuals participating to that trend “The Influentists”. Those people are members of a scientific or technical community, and leverage their large audiences to propagate claims that are, at best, unproven and, at worst, intentionally misleading.

But how can we spot them?

I personally identify these “Influentists” by four personality traits that characterize their public discourse.
The first is a reliance on “trust-me-bro” culture, where anecdotal experiences are framed as universal, objective truths to generate hype. This is a sentiment perfectly captured by the “I’m not joking and this isn’t funny” tone of Rakyll’s original tweet, but also the dramatic “I’ve never felt that much behind as a programmer” from Andrej Karpathy’s tweet. This is supported by an absence of reproducible proof, as these individuals rarely share the code, data, or methodology behind their viral “wins”, an omission made easier than ever in the current LLM era. And finally, they utilize strategic ambiguity, carefully wording their claims with enough vagueness to pivot toward a “clarification” if the technical community challenges their accuracy.

A meta skill going forward is the ability to discern sense from nonsense. Without this ability to discern things, we’ll all be swept up in the raging tides of contextless bullshit unleashed by engagement farmers. We live in an age of pithy bullshit, tiny morsels separated from their original context masquerading as profundity. The trick is to know when you are “consuming” content and when you are getting “consumed.”