---
id: 70
title: "Grifting is authority you haven't earned"
kind: note
status: current
date: 2026-09-17
updated: 2026-09-17
ai_assisted: true
authors:
  - "Theo Zourzouvillys"
tags: [culture, principles, ic, leadership]
references:
  - id: feynman-cargo-cult
    title: "Cargo Cult Science (Richard P. Feynman, Caltech commencement address, 1974)"
    url: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm
    abstract: "Feynman's address on scientific integrity, which he describes as a kind of utter honesty, a leaning over backwards to report everything that might make you wrong rather than only what supports you. Its most quoted line is the whole discipline in one go: you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."
  - id: dunning-kruger
    title: "Dunning–Kruger effect"
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
    abstract: "The finding that people with low ability in a domain tend to overestimate it, because the judgement needed to rate your own competence is the same judgement you currently lack. It describes a miscalibration the person is genuinely unaware of, which makes it the harder version to fix rather than the more forgivable one."
  - id: impostor-phenomenon
    title: "Impostor syndrome"
    url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
    abstract: "The experience of doubting your own competence and feeling like a fraud despite clear evidence of achievement. It is the same instrument miscalibrated in the opposite direction, authority genuinely earned but never felt, and it distorts a team's picture of who knows what just as effectively."
summary: "Grifting is talking with more authority than your knowledge supports, usually without one false statement in it. Ambition isn't the problem and neither is inexperience. It costs the same when it's unwitting, so learn where your own edge is and be humble past it."
supersedes: null
superseded_by: null
aliases: []
crossrefs:
  ZFN-27: "The same discipline applied to a different label. There the argument is that 'asshole' has to stay narrow or it silences dissent; here it is that 'grifter' has to stay narrow or it punishes people for being new."
  ZFN-28: "The code-level form of this, already open. Shipping a change you can't explain is claiming authority over it, whoever or whatever wrote the diff."
  ZFN-29: "Where the line actually falls. Blameless culture protects honest mistakes and stops at dishonesty, and deliberately overstating what you know is that dishonesty before the incident rather than after it."
  ZFN-41: "The thing unearned authority makes impossible. You can only put your name behind a call your experience actually covers; performing the experience gets you the signature without the backing."
  ZFN-26: "Co-signing is this position stated as a rule for published work. The co-sign is exactly the claim that you can back what went out under your name."
  ZFN-50: "The same muscle, pointed outward. Saying 'I don't know' and saying 'I think this is wrong' both cost something in the moment and are both owed."
---

## TL;DR

Grifting is talking with more authority than your actual knowledge supports. Most of the time there
isn't a single false statement anywhere in it. You discuss a topic the way somebody who has been
inside it would discuss it (the right vocabulary, the confident asides, no hedging anywhere) and the
room draws the conclusion you never actually made.

Ambition is not the failure mode here. Really aggressive goals are good, pushing at boundaries is
good, and taking on something you're not certain you can land is how most of the interesting work
gets started. Missing a hard target is just missing a hard target. Inexperience is fine too. The
problem is the authority, not the gap.

It's just as bad when nobody's doing it deliberately. Plenty of people aren't knowingly grifting at
all (they genuinely can't see how much they don't know) and every decision built on top of them goes
wrong in exactly the same way. So the obligation is the same either way: learn where your own edge
actually is, and be humble about what sits past it. Attach the provenance to what you say, treat "I
don't know" as a complete sentence, and don't let the word "grifter" turn into a stick for beating
newcomers with.

## Context

### Symptoms

The tell isn't what someone claims. It's that the confidence doesn't move.

Real knowledge is uneven - someone who has actually built things is certain about the parts they
burned a weekend on and vague about the parts they've only read (you can watch the confidence change
as the conversation crosses that terrain). When a person is equally sure about the system they ran
for three years and the one they saw a conference talk on last month, the confidence has stopped
tracking the knowledge and started tracking something else.

The other signs follow from that. Answers arrive complete and immediately, with no "let me check".
Proximity gets narrated as ownership, so having been in the room becomes having made the call, and
having been on the team becomes having built the thing. And the detail thins out on the second
question rather than the first, because a good summary survives one question from anybody.

What isn't a symptom: not knowing something, saying so, being new, being wrong in public, or holding
a position you can't yet fully defend and saying that's where you are. Nor is ambition. Committing
to something hard that you might not pull off isn't overclaiming (it's how anything difficult ever
starts) and I'd far rather work with someone who reaches too far and misses than someone who only
ever promises what's already in the bag. All of that is the work.

### The unstated claim

The sharpest version of this contains nothing you could point at and call a lie.

Nobody stands up and announces "I am an expert in distributed consensus". They just talk about it
the way somebody who has implemented it talks about it, and everyone updates accordingly. Go back
afterwards and every individual sentence is defensible. The claim was never made - it was left lying
around where people would pick it up, and technically nobody put it there!

Which is why "did they actually lie?" is the wrong test, although it's the test most of us reach for
first. Authority doesn't travel in claims, it travels in register: how much you hedge, what you
volunteer, whether you say "I think", and what you do with the question you can't answer. You can
mislead a room comprehensively without saying one untrue thing, and the room will go away and make
its decisions on the impression rather than on the sentences.

### The engine

I've watched this closely in enough people, at enough companies, to be reasonably confident about
the shape of it (although this is one person's observations, not research). What's usually
underneath is an insecurity, a chip on the shoulder, a felt need to be more than you currently are.
The performance is downstream of that. Almost nobody sets out to defraud a standup! They set out to
not be found out, and the overclaiming is what that looks like from outside.

Which raises a question I haven't settled: does framing it as insecurity rather than dishonesty let
people off too easily, or is it just accurate? My feeling is that it's accurate, because the
alternative framing (that these are simply bad people) predicts behaviour badly and suggests no
remedy at all. But I'm aware that "it comes from a wound" is an extremely comfortable thing to
believe about something that costs other people real money and real weekends, and I don't fully
trust myself on it.

There's a second engine, and it involves no performance at all. Some people just don't know how much
they don't know. That's the [Dunning–Kruger effect](ref:dunning-kruger), and the mechanism is
nastier than it first sounds: the judgement you'd need in order to rate your own competence in a
domain is the same judgement that domain is still busy teaching you, so the less of it you have, the
better your position looks from inside; the error hides behind the thing that would reveal it.
Nobody in that state is grifting - they're reporting honestly on a picture that happens to be wrong.

I don't think that gets anybody off the hook though, because the cost doesn't care. A decision made
on overstated depth goes the same way whether the depth was overstated on purpose or by accident,
and the accidental one is arguably the harder problem (the person can't see it from where they're
standing). That's what makes "know what you don't know" a skill you develop rather than a virtue you
either have or you don't.

> [!aside] What I did at nineteen
>
> I'm not writing this from outside the failure mode. Between nineteen and twenty-one I claimed
> things on my resume that weren't true, in order to get positions. I'd left school and never gone
> back, so no education and no background in tech. Looking back on it I feel shame and guilt, and I
> also understand exactly why I did it.
>
> I don't read that the same way I read somebody significantly older doing the same thing, and I
> don't think I should. A twenty year old lying their way through a door they can't otherwise open
> is survival. The same act well into a career is identity, a story somebody has settled on being
> rather than a door they're trying to get through. Age and stage change what the act actually is,
> including in tech.

### The cost to a team

The reason this belongs in a field note and not only in a diary: engineering runs on people
reporting their own confidence accurately.

Every technical judgement is a self-assessment being passed upward as an input. "Yes, that'll hold
at ten times the load." "No, that failure mode can't happen here." "This is a two week problem."
When somebody conveys ninety percent and the real number is forty, they don't only get their own
work wrong, they corrupt every decision made on top of it by people who had no way to discount it.
The damage turns up months later in a design chosen on a capability that never existed, and by then
it's nobody's fault in particular (which is the worst kind of failure to have).

It also drags on everybody honest. Calibration is a public good - it only pays if it's the norm. In
a room where the confident answer wins, the person who says "I haven't done this, here's my best
guess and here's what would change my mind" is the one who looks weak, and the incentive quietly
points the wrong way for everyone.

That's why the hard line in [ZFN-29](/zfn/29-blameless-culture-with-a-hard-line/) sits where it
does. Blameless culture protects honest mistakes and stops at dishonesty, and deliberately
overstating what you know is that same dishonesty committed before the incident rather than during
the post-mortem. The unwitting version isn't dishonest at all, although it lands on the same people
in the same way (which is the whole reason the standard has to be wider than the accusation).

### The same pattern outside tech

None of this is a technology problem - it's the same mechanism as people living in houses they can't
afford and driving cars they can't afford: a projection of success that isn't there, maintained at
real cost, because the alternative is being seen at your actual size. The resume and the leased car
are the same move with different props.

### Utah

Living in Utah is what made me want to write this down. There was intense cultural pressure to
appear perfect, and underneath it there were grifters everywhere. Multi-level marketing schemes,
products that didn't exist, people selling things that were never going to be delivered. The
performance of perfection and the grift seemed to feed each other, and being surrounded by both at
once made the relationship between them impossible to ignore.

I don't know which way the causation runs, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise in a note about
exactly that. Does a culture demanding the appearance of success actually produce more grifters, by
making the gap between how you're doing and how you must appear to be doing too wide to admit? Or
does it just hide the ones it already had, by making the performance normal enough that nobody looks
twice? Those are different problems with different fixes and I can't currently tell them apart. It's
the part of this I most want to dig into.

## Recommendation

**Attach the provenance to the claim.** Not the hedging ritual of "I could be wrong" bolted onto the
end of a confident paragraph, but the actual source of the belief, up front. "I ran this in
production for two years." "I've read the spec but never implemented it." "This is a guess from the
shape of the problem." Those are wildly different statements and they shouldn't sound alike; it
costs you one clause, and it tells everyone downstream how much weight the sentence will take.

**Learn where your own edge is, and be humble past it.** This one applies whether or not you're
doing any of this on purpose, and it's a skill rather than a virtue (which means you can practise
it). Go one question deeper than is comfortable and notice the point where you start reconstructing
rather than remembering. Notice the topics where you've only ever heard yourself talk, and never had
to make the thing actually work. Ask the person who does know, and pay attention to how much of
their answer you couldn't have produced. What you're looking for is the specific discomfort of
finding a floor where you assumed there was more room, and the useful response to it is curiosity
rather than embarrassment.

**Stretch the goal.** Promise the ambitious outcome if you want to. Take the project
you're not certain you can land, commit to the hard date, reach well past what you've done before.
What you don't get to stretch is how well you understand the ground you're standing on, because
that's the part everybody else is navigating by. "I'll find a way to make this work" and "I've done
this before" are completely different sentences and only one of them is a claim about the past. That
is exactly the distinction I got wrong at nineteen: what went on that resume wasn't ambition about
what I'd deliver, it was fiction about what I'd already done.

**Treat "I don't know" as a complete sentence.** It's cheap on a Monday and ruinous in an incident
channel six weeks later. Following it with "here's how I'd find out" is better, although the
finding-out is a separate offer and not the price of admission for having admitted the gap.

**Separate what you built from what you were near.** Proximity isn't authorship. Having been on the
team is worth saying - it just isn't worth saying in the words you'd use for having designed it.

**Judge by age and stage.** A junior overstating themselves in an interview is a person under
pressure with no track record to stand on. A principal doing it is making a choice with alternatives
available. Same act, genuinely different thing, and the response should differ too: the first is
worth coaching and the second is worth taking seriously.

**Keep the word narrow and the standard wide.** This is the part I'd get wrong first if I weren't
careful, and it's the same failure [ZFN-27](/zfn/27-no-assholes-strict-definition/) warns about with
"asshole", where a useful word for a real behaviour turns into a weapon the moment it gets applied
loosely. Someone inexperienced isn't a grifter. Someone confidently wrong isn't a grifter - that's
just being wrong, which everybody who ships is, regularly. Someone reaching for a hard goal isn't a
grifter. And someone who genuinely can't see the edge of their own knowledge isn't one either.

That last one is where the word and the standard come apart. "Grifter" is an accusation of intent,
so keep it for the cases where there's intent, and remember you usually can't see intent from
outside anyway (which is a good reason to be slow with the label and quick with a direct question
instead). The standard doesn't move with the label though. The obligation to know what you don't
know lands on the person who isn't doing it on purpose exactly as hard, and telling them is a
kindness rather than an accusation. Don't use "well, they don't realise" as a reason to leave it
alone.

[Impostor syndrome](ref:impostor-phenomenon) is the same instrument miscalibrated in the other
direction: authority genuinely earned but never felt (people hedging claims they've comfortably paid
for). It distorts the team's picture of who knows what just as effectively as the Dunning–Kruger
case does, which is the tell that what we're actually after here is calibration rather than
confidence. The goal was never for people to claim less. It's for the claim and the knowledge to be
the same size.

Underneath all of it is something closer to a discipline than a trait. Feynman's name for it in
[Cargo Cult Science](ref:feynman-cargo-cult) is a kind of utter honesty, a leaning over backwards,
reporting the things that might make you wrong rather than only the ones that make you look right.
His line is the whole note in a sentence: *you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest
person to fool.* Note that it's aimed squarely at the case where nobody is lying to anybody. The
performed version does end up there eventually (a story you told other people until you believed it)
but plenty of people start there, having never told anyone anything false in their lives. Either way
there's nobody left checking, which is why this has to be a discipline you run on yourself.

I have this on [my about page](/about/) as one of the lines I try to hold to: *I speak the truth,
even when it costs.* This note is mostly that line applied to the case where the truth is about me:
what I actually know, what I've actually done, and how far past either of them I'm tempted to talk.
Choosing to be accurately who you are rather than who you wish you were turns out to be a daily
practice and not a decision you make once.

## Consequences

**Easier:** Technical judgements start to mean something, because they carry a known confidence.
Being wrong gets cheaper, since a guess you flagged as a guess missing is information rather than a
failure. Juniors will say "I don't know" in a room where seniors say it first. And you find out what
your team actually knows, which is the input every other decision quietly depends on.

**Harder:** You'll lose some rooms. There are hiring processes, sales calls and promotion committees
that reward the performance directly, and calibrated honesty reads as weakness in every one of them.
That's a real cost and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.
[ZFN-41](/zfn/41-choices-you-can-put-your-name-behind/) makes the same trade and gets the same
answer: the capital you spend being straight is repaid by still being believed on the fifth thing,
and there's no way to earn that back once you've spent it the other way.

**New obligations:** If you want people honest about the edge of their knowledge, you have to make
that edge survivable. React to "I don't know" as information rather than as a shortfall, or you'll
train it out of the room in about two weeks and be left with a team that tells you what you wanted
to hear (which is a much worse problem, and a quieter one). And apply it to yourself before you
apply it to anybody else, because without that all of this is just a licence to interrogate other
people about a standard you're exempt from.

## References

- [ZFN-26](/zfn/26-llm-assisted-content-cosign/) - the co-sign: what it means to be able to back what
goes out under your name.
- [ZFN-27](/zfn/27-no-assholes-strict-definition/) - keeping a label strict so it names a behaviour
instead of silencing people.
- [ZFN-28](/zfn/28-llm-brute-force-prs-understanding/) - the same failure at the level of a diff, and
still an open problem.
- [ZFN-29](/zfn/29-blameless-culture-with-a-hard-line/) - blameless for mistakes, hard line at
dishonesty.
- [ZFN-41](/zfn/41-choices-you-can-put-your-name-behind/) - owning a call your experience actually
covers.
- [ZFN-50](/zfn/50-see-something-say-something/) - the adjacent duty: saying the thing that costs
something to say.
- [Cargo Cult Science](ref:feynman-cargo-cult) - Feynman on utter honesty as a working discipline.
- [Dunning–Kruger effect](ref:dunning-kruger) and [impostor syndrome](ref:impostor-phenomenon) - the
same miscalibration in both directions.

## Changelog

- **2026-09-17**: Sharpened the thesis after feedback, which is a bit on the nose for this
particular note. Ambition was wrongly bundled in with the failure mode: aggressive goals and missed
targets aren't overclaiming, only overstated depth of understanding is. Added *The unstated claim*,
since the version worth worrying about usually contains no false statement at all. And rewrote the
Dunning–Kruger treatment, which previously excluded the unwitting case; it costs exactly as much as
the deliberate one, so the standard covers both even though the word "grifter" shouldn't.
- **2026-09-17**: First published as a Field Note.