This is just a draft of a post I'll share in much better shape next week. I just hadn't finished fleshing out all my thoughts. Happy to hear your feedback!
[In praise of bad writers]
A professor at Brown gave his students a take-home midterm. The average score was 96%. Incredible students... or lazy cheats?
Suspicious, the professor made the final an in-person exam.
Eighteen students dropped the course immediately, nine skipped the final exam, and almost everyone who remained performed substantially worse.
The results strongly suggested what you’d expect: many of the students had been mailing it in with AI. But somewhere in that mess was a more interesting character – a middling student who had clearly done their own work and performed only marginally better in the final.
Before the final, this student would have looked like the weakest in the class. Everyone else had perfect answers. They only had mistakes.
But once the stakes were evened out and all the unfair advantages were wiped away, their mediocrity became evidence of something valuable: they had actually been learning.
We tend to imagine achievement along a single continuum:
Unsuccessful ←————————→ Successful
This gives us two kinds of people: those who are good at things and those who are bad at them.
But I've realised this false dichotomy hides an important second dimension.
Bad work is not the opposite of good work.
Both of those at least come from submitting yourself to a reality capable of disappointing you.
The true opposites of good and bad work are fake work and no work.
That gives us four categories:
Theodore Roosevelt famously praised 'the man in the arena', whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, over the critic who points out how he stumbled.
The critic imagines himself somewhere on the unsuccessful end of the same continuum as the practitioner. Perhaps he hasn’t succeeded because he lacks connections, refuses to compromise or maintains standards the industry no longer rewards. He might even be right about all of this.
But he is not yet a failed practitioner. He hasn’t actually produced bad work. He thinks this is a boon, but it is actually a stain. Because he hasn’t entered the arena at all.
Bad work is not the bottom of the arena. It is simply the price of admission. Table stakes. Skin in the game.
Bad work earns you the opportunity to do good work later. No work earns you nothing.
Roosevelt’s model also misses another character: the person who appears to be in the arena but who has never actually experienced it.
The charlatan is in the arena in the same sense that WWE is UFC.
There is a ring, suree. There is an opponent, an audience, some sweat, some impact and, in the end, a victory. You hold a belt aloft.
But, of course, WWE is merely kabuki theatre. It's all a sham game. It just looks like the real thing. It is designed entirely for spectacle.
A boxer can join the UFC. A show wrestler, for all their muscles, for all their titles, doesn't stand a chance.
The practitioner does verbs until other people give them the noun. The charlatan acquires the noun (writer, scholar, founder) and simulates just enough verbs to keep it.
The Forbes 30 Under 30 pipeline is an almost perfect example of this.
Forbes confers the status of successful founder while many of the underlying companies are still mostly promises. Investors then treat the recognition as proof, providing money that makes the original prediction appear more credible. Eventually, the founder must either build the company everyone already believes exists or manufacture increasingly elaborate evidence that it does.
That's why so many people who appear on the Forbes 30u30 list go to jail, and often within 5 years of their appearance on the list.
This is why I find myself increasingly fond of bad writers.
AI has made it extraordinarily cheap to skip the humiliation of visible inadequacy. Anyone can now produce something polished enough to resemble the work of someone further along.
Bad writing is not admirable simply because it is bad. It may very well be lazy, careless or incurious. But honest bad work still contains something that counterfeit excellence never will: accurate information about its maker and the possibility of making them better.
If you take the test, you can get better at the next one.
If you simply cheat, you have no idea what the test truly requires of you.
The bad writer allows their ability to become a fact rather than a private opinion. This is a very good thing.
They may not be good.... right now. But they are in the arena, and will learn from their scars.
