Mediocratopia

Under stress, there are those who try harder, and there are those who lower their standards. Until very recently, the first response was considered a virtue, the second was considered a vice. The ongoing wave of burnout and people quitting or cutting back on work when they can afford to suggests this societal norm is shifting. I want to propose an inversion of the valences here, and argue that under many conditions, lowering your standards is in fact the virtuous thing to do.

A mediocritizing mindset typically doesn’t bother with such ethical justification, however. It typically rejects the idealism inherent in treating this as a matter of virtue vs. vice altogether. Instead we mediocrats try to approach the matter from a place of sardonic self-awareness and skepticism of high standards as a motivational crutch. This tweet says it well enough:

This is less cynical than it seems. Motivation, discipline, and energy are complex personality traits. While they are not immutable functions of nature or nurture, they do form fairly entrenched equilibria. Shifting these equilibria to superficially more socially desirable ones isn’t merely a matter of consuming enough hustle-porn fortune cookies or suddenly becoming a true believer in a suitably ass-kicking philosophy like stoicism or startup doerism. Life is messier than that.

You can’t exhort or philosophize your way into a new regime of personal biophysics where you magically try harder or behave with greater discipline than you ever have in your life. Gritty, driven people tend to have been that way all their lives. Easy-going slackers tend to have been that way all their lives too. People do change their hustle equilibria, but it is rare (and pretty dramatic when it happens). And the chances of backsliding into your natural energy mode are high. Driven people will find it tough to stay chilled out, and vice versa.

Emergencies and life crises can trigger both temporary and permanent changes. Type A strivers might let themselves relax for a few months after a heart attack, or make permanent changes. A slacker might find themselves in a particularly exciting project and turn into driven people for a while, and occasionally for the rest of their lives.

But the stickiness of these equilibria means the response to stressors is typically something other than behavior change, and that’s a good thing. Typically it is lowering standards while retaining behaviors.

A key insight recently struck me, and it is one that I should have worked out and written up earlier, but I didn’t think of — one of the biggest reasons mediocrity gets a bad rap is conflation with what I call Somebody Else’s Optimality, or SEO (the rest of this post is just me attempting to manufacture justification for this joke 😆).

Situations and conditions that suck, and attract the label “mediocre” (as in “why is service so mediocre?”) usually aren’t mediocre at all, but designed to optimize Something Else for Someone Else; some aspect that is less visible than whatever aspect you’re responding to.

It’s usually not even particularly disguised or denied. You just have to stop to think for a second. Quite often, the “something else” is cost to owners of the assets involved. Aggressively driving cost efficiency by cutting corners in services is obviously not mediocritization, it is optimization of something other than service quality for somebody other than customers. Actual mediocritization creates slack and mediocrity along all dimensions. The point of mediocrity is slack and reserves for dealing with uncertainty, as I’ve argued elsewhere in this series several times.

SEO is an important phenomenon in its own right, but in this post, I mainly want to untangle it from mediocrity.

Meant to blog this earlier but forgot. A couple of months ago, Eric Platon shared an image of a couple of French books (not available in translation) on mediocrity with this comment:

Just discovering that the meaning of mediocrity changed with Renaissance in Europe (don’t know which one yet). Mediocrity was apparently not pejorative before!…The back cover is rich: Mediocrity used to mean anything “median”, finding compromise , perplexity, mood balance, notion of androgyny, intermediary positioning in politics and religion. Very different from post-Renaissance apparently.

This tracks for me. Mediocrity used to mean something closer to the Buddhist middle path doctrine. It got recoded somehow to mean low quality, apathy, sloppiness and so on.

The point about being on the middle of various spectra rather than at an extreme is that it forces you to acknowledge it as a spectrum. Being at 0 or 1 on an (normalized) parameter allows you to essentially drop a dimension and build in a degeneracy. Being at 0.534 forces you to model the dimension thoughtfully. I’ve said before that mediocrity is about fatness — reserve resources. Now we can add — it’s also about fullness. Full rank. Max dimensionality. No unnecessary reduction to binaries or absolutes. Everything in the nature of the thing is also in the tradeoff space of dealing with the thing. This also means there is something tentative about a mediocre thing. All options are open. None have been foreclosed.

“Excellence” is also about optimization, and to the extent optima occur at boundary extrema rather than interior points, you get a similar degeneracy from the mere fact of using optimization frames. If you’re on a boundary you don’t need to model the interior. This is why mediocritization is the opposite of optimization. The Taoist fable, Maybe so, maybe not, we’ll see captures the spirit of this idea.

The drive to excellence is often a pathological drive towards degeneracy and legibility via a leaning-out of fatness and fullness. And false determinacy. Converting maybes into yeses and noes by fiat, and not waiting to see. It is high modernism — an aesthetic pretending to be an ethic.

I want to connect up one more thought I might elaborate on later. Mediocrity is often more thorough in its consideration of things in all their fullness. Excellence often has a focus on some notion of efficiency. Every notion of optimality is also a notion of efficiency that sacrifices thoroughness to some degree. By the efficiency thoroughness tradeoff (ETTO) principle, you can’t have both at once.

Thoroughness is often associated with craft where efficiency is associated with industry. Craftsmanship does not manifest excellence in the sense a quality industrial product can. It is a not-even-wrong standard to apply. But a well-crafted thing often expresses the fullest nature of a thing. A beautiful wabi-sabi bowl may look rough butcaptures the nature of the bowl, including its transience and mortality, in the fullest way. But it seems strange to think of it as excellent.