I don't know about Nobel prizes but something that makes you laugh and then makes you think qualifies i for an ig-Nobel.
Calling out corporate BS? There's a steaming pile to aim for
Science is at its best when it makes manifest radical ideas that change our worldview. This is the flag all sane people salute, under which we march to war. Yet in our hearts, we know that the very tastiest science is that which confirms our prejudices and validates what we've known all along. Cornell University has just served …
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Monday 23rd March 2026 18:05 GMT David 132
Moving forwards, in a very real sense, we should also blue-sky strategize our synergies with stakeholders in order to facilitate concrete deliverables.
(And now, I am feeling mild revulsion at how easily the above came to me. I spent far too much of my working life at one of the giant companies that the article mentions.)
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 00:57 GMT JoAnywhere
There is one key error in your otherwise fine piece of work. CONCRETE. Seriously? The purveyors of such drivel wouldn't know concrete if they tripped over a block of the stuff. Try 'intangible high value deliverables'. If you're feeling especially generous, you can substitute in 'tangible' for 'intangible' :)
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Monday 23rd March 2026 09:28 GMT jake
"This can be traced back to Turkey Bingo in colleges in the early '90s"
My dad told me that they played it during lectures at Berkeley, as "buzzword bingo", in the early '50s. He was under the impression that it had come over to California from the East Coast, probably from MIT or Harvard. He was rather surprised when I came home from elementary school with mimeographed versions. The Principal at the school was curious to see if the teachers were using new terminology or not, and set us kids to work. Very early '60s in my case.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 10:59 GMT elsergiovolador
Quornell
The Cornell study fails to capture a mission-critical variable - it assumes a binary landscape consisting of two distinct cohorts: the analytically robust stakeholders who deconstruct the noise, and the low-fidelity adopters who ingest it holistically. However, there exists a third, high-value demographic: strategic practitioners who recognise the lack of substantive alignment but deploy these frameworks with full theatrical buy-in, primarily because the alternative is a deep-dive into the existential void of another quarterly planning cycle without a sustainable value proposition.
The true synergy isn't found in the jargon itself. It’s the cross-functional comedy of having three distinct species synchronised around the same boardroom table - the true believers who genuinely feel they are 'leveraging agentic AI to unlock transformative value at scale,' the self-aware performers who socialise the exact same messaging with an invisible wink, and the openly cynical who are experiencing a total system failure internally. And here is the key takeaway: from a high-level perspective, they are indistinguishable. The delivery is vertically integrated. The PowerPoint deck is 1:1. The confident head-nod when a stakeholder suggests we 'need to ideate around our AI-first strategy' - completely standardised.
This is what transforms corporate life into a richer anthropological spectacle than the Cornell team’s current roadmap accounts for. This isn't bullshit bingo - it’s bullshit poker. Every stakeholder is holding their cards, nobody has visibility on who is bluffing, and the pot continues to scale because no one wants to be the first to sunset their position and admit they have zero bandwidth for what 'orchestrating our digital twin ecosystem' actually entails in a production environment.
AI-specific nomenclature has hyper-accelerated this dynamic, given that the underlying technology remains a moving target. When a lead mentions they are 'implementing a RAG pipeline to drive enterprise knowledge synthesis,' that could scale from a sophisticated technical architecture to 'we integrated ChatGPT with a shared folder.' The ambiguity is a core feature. It allows the self-aware to pivot among the believers and vice versa, creating a linguistic herd immunity where no one is flagged for a lack of domain expertise, because actual understanding was never a KPI.
So, by all means, let’s iterate on the AI Bullshit Receptivity Scale. But ensure it accounts for the high-performing individuals who index high on receptivity not due to a lack of analytical rigour, but because they’ve strategically concluded that leaning into the narrative offers a better ROI than resistance. Some of us aren't experiencing friction with the bullshit. We are optimising it.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 12:13 GMT blcollier
Re: Quornell
I hope you wrote that yourself, because that is a gloriously perfect synthesis of management-speak and LLM-generated slop. You've got the 'rule of three', 'it's not X, it's Y', bland tone, excessive verbiage to say nothing of substance... Throw in a few em dashes here and there, and it would be absolutely indistinguishable from the finest megawatt-powered word-soup slop.
Another one of these from me: --->
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Monday 23rd March 2026 17:23 GMT cleminan
In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.
> This new learning is doubly delightful,
Learning is an adjective. You can be learning French, she may be learning electro microscopy in a future lecture, or they may have been learning how to boil eggs. 'Finding' would work better here, 'lesson', less-so.
At least you didn't go full echo-skull & use the term 'learnings'. Rarely does a word invoke the urge to hurt the speaker as much as that, that... thing.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 07:35 GMT Sherrie Ludwig
Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.
most grating obnoxious examples of modern business Bullshit lingo
I have a persistent eye twitch at "utilize". why don't you just USE it? Utilize always brings up a mental image of someone employing (there's a synonym!) something in a needlessly complicated and awkward way, like eating spaghetti using chopsticks while wearing boxing gloves and doing a headstand.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 11:12 GMT The Organ Grinder's Monkey
Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.
Ref "dove"
You've accidently reminded me of a modernism that makes me gag. Dove is a pigeon-adjacent bird, dived is what a diver has done.
While we're at it, can we kill "medalled" too? Phonetically it's what Saville, Epstein et al do, not successful athletes.
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Monday 23rd March 2026 19:31 GMT PRR
Re: In the mockery a glob of insipid business speak oozes through.
> At least "Learning(s) as a noun does have some historical usage.
>> Learning is an adjective.
Dictionaries (US and UK) say Noun.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/learning
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/learning
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Monday 23rd March 2026 19:31 GMT Philo T Farnsworth
A Pisces, working for scale
From the article: They ranked nonsensical statements more highly when composed of the finest business bovine byproduct, as ranked on the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale or CBRS.
Oddly enough, before retiring I worked for an organization with a permutation of that abbreviation.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 11:46 GMT jonathan keith
I've always found that the phrase "Excuse me, but would you explain what [the fuck] that actually means?" tends to bring such meetings to an unexpectedly early end. It may also have something to do with the fact that I have also had a succession of short-lived jobs instead of anything remotely resembling a career.
Why, yes, I have recently received an autism diagnosis. What made you ask?
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 11:52 GMT Manolo
Not just geeks
"When geeks first meet, their initial conversation often resembles modem talking to modem, a training and negotiation sequence when the highest level of communication is established"
Not just geeks. When my late mother (retired physician assistant), my sister in law (medicine degree) and myself (pharmacist) met my mother's oncologist, after a few questions he said: "Wait, what are your qualifications?". So he could switch to a higher bitrate.
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Tuesday 24th March 2026 13:40 GMT s. pam
Pick the consulting firm, enjoy their particular bullshit bingo dictonary!
Each one of McKinsey, PWC, TCS, and Crapita have their own BS generating divisions.
Woe be the employee in any company these asshats are deployed into if you get their BS dictionaries wrong and say the other firms' word to them!
Enter the Human Remains department to inflict strict summary punishments!
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Wednesday 25th March 2026 12:09 GMT Sitaram Chamarty
confusing line in the original cornell report
The original report, at https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/workers-who-love-synergizing-paradigms-might-be-bad-their-jobs says this:
> The results revealed a troubling paradox. Workers who were more susceptible to corporate BS rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary,” but also displayed lower scores on a portion of the study that tested analytic thinking, cognitive reflection and fluid intelligence. Those more receptive to corporate BS also scored significantly worse on a test of effective workplace decision-making.
That doesn't sound like a paradox to me. If you believe BS, you're not smart -- what's so surprising?
