Twaddle tendency
People emit confident nonsense. It crowds out real work.
Munger's term for what philosopher Harry Frankfurt would call bullshit: confident-sounding talk that doesn't connect to truth, made primarily to fill space, signal effort, or claim status. Meetings, consulting decks, business books, and corporate communications are saturated with it.
The reason it's a bias rather than just a vice is that twaddle clouds the listener's judgment too. Confident-sounding nonsense is hard to refute (see [brandolinis-law]) and tends to get adopted by default in groups that don't have the discipline to call it out.
For operators, twaddle is a real productivity drain. Meetings spent on twaddle don't produce decisions. Strategy decks full of twaddle don't move the company. The discipline is to call out twaddle when you hear it, in yourself and others, and to insist on specifics.
Examples in the wild
Most strategic plans contain large fractions of twaddle: "We will leverage synergies to drive customer-centric value creation." The cure is to ask, for every claim: what specifically? By whom? Measured how?
Earnings calls contain large fractions of twaddle, especially in struggling companies. The questions that cut through it are usually about specific numbers, specific customers, specific contracts.
Self-help and personal development is unusually twaddle-rich. The advice that actually changes lives is usually specific, mundane, and slightly boring.
Twaddle tendency is one of the mental models we apply through real cases inside the Pareto MBA — a part-time program for professionals who want to think clearly about business.