Terrible take. People think they can tell when someone is bluffing or lying, mostly they cannot. As someone who does a lot of contract negotiations, who has to bluff all the time, and as someone who also does a lot of audits where I have to spot bluffing all the time I see it both ways. Most people are bad at spotting liars and bullshitters, however good news, most people are also absolutely terrible liars and bullshitters so you don’t need to be good, however this gives a false sense of security in your instincts, you are not Sherlock Holmes, you can’t sniff out a lie a mile away and if your opposite number is half way competent the only way to be really know is to do your homework and catch people out in hard data and in evidence. Me included, I’ve been fooled before and doubtless will be fooled again. It’s the nature of the beast. The only way you can reliably find truth is to know more about your opposite number than they do and to test every premise you can. Conversely the more you can control knowledge about your own position and obfuscate the more margin you have to present a position to your benefit. So long as you’re smart enough to understand what your opponent can know and can’t know it’s very easy to distort a picture.

Everyone can tell when someone is fronting and faking confidence, or faking being humble, nobody is fooled.

The folks who do it badly tend to stick out. But this is far more useful on the margins, where a firm's performance is genuinely not well-understood.

Companies understating/overstating their expected earnings to manipulate their stock price is a time-tested means of legalized insider trading. Firms, like Apple, used to do an exceptional job of sitting on products in development until the last moment, generating all sorts of ambient hype whether or not they had anything to brag about releasing. Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway is a textbook case of "talk small and carry a big balance sheet" and routinely outperforms its competitors as a result.

Exploiting gaps between your perceived and actual value is functionally how value-investors make money. If nobody ever got fooled, equities would never value themselves different from the perfectly predicted book value.

During WWII all sides used decoy vehicles, supply depots, factories. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't.

During the age of sail warships would sometimes pretend to be civilian vessels to lure privateers in. When the privateers closed in the warship would run up it's colors, their national flag, and open fire at point-blank.

There's a standard method for an infantry unit retreating from an ambush - Instead of running straight away from the ambush you retreat at an angle from the ambush. Troops leapfrog past each other, firing back at the ambushing for. Since they're moving at an agle it sounds like more soldiers are joining the fight from the flank. The purpose is to deceive the ambushing forces in to thinking you've got more soldiers than you do so they don't pursue you.

There's a famous story from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Zhuge Liang is famous for being the smartest sonoremovedun in China. He routinely pulled off brilliant strategic and tactical victories, achieving stunning results effortlessly. Well, one time, he was supposed to defend a city, but his army was still two or three days away, marching hard to catch up with him. An enemy army was approaching the city and Zhuge Liang had basically no forces to defend with.

This absolute fucking madman opens the gates, then sits out from calmly playing guitar. When the enemy general gets word that Zhuge Liang is sitting outside with the gates wide open having a jam session he says "Okay fuck this. I don't want to deal with Zhuge Liang's bullshit today. let's go attack somewhere else" and they leave.

More than one prisoner has escaped prison using fake guns carved out of soap or whatever they had handy. Lots of people have used a finger, or a piece of pipe, or whatever to convince a bank teller they have a gun when they don't.

Cold Reading is a classic tactic in most cons and in interogations where you pretend to know more than you do, using carefully worded questions to convince the person you're interogating that you already know what's up, to convince them to talk about what's up, when you really don't know what's up.

Counterpoint: Tesla, SpaceX and everything else touches

The whole "appear strong when you are weak, and weak when you are strong" nonsense is so easy to spot

I mean look at Wirecard, that shit works out