Form doesn't help any more

The death of polish as a signal

My father grew up in a typical blue-collar, Italian immigrant family in Buffalo. As such, becoming a professional was hugely important to him, and the appearances of being a professional doubly so. He has always been a well-dressed and well-presented person. He’s now retired as a professor, and still working as a psychologist, and he still dresses the role. I was always a slob (thanks, ADHD! Squirrel!) To the point that my dad once said “you’ll never get a high paying, professional job where you can jeans and a t-shirt every day”.

Thanks, computer industry!

In Silicon Valley, there’s long been a tradition of suspicion of professional polish. It started with the idea that engineers were so valuable, that they didn’t have to bow to the “money” guys - they could show up in a ratty t-shirt and still get the job. Very true, for a very long time, and still pretty much the case.

So, I’ve always been skeptical of highly polished form. I find that it usually hides and emptiness of thought. If you don’t have much to say, you dress up in expensive, formal clothes, or put your report in the nice binder, to get yourself to be taken seriously. I think there’s a real correlation - the fancier the package, the less serious the contents.

Polish, in the pre-AI world, at least had a bit of value as a signaling function. It’s hard to be dressed in expensive suits - you have to have money, patience, taste, and the kind of lifestyle and work that doesn’t get them covered in junk all the time. So, there is some signal that you have solved hard problems and are of value, if you can do it - and there is some validity to looking at form as a proxy for substance.

But now, it’s hard to know how valid that signal is. I put images at the top of these posts. In a pre-AI world, that would have signaled something - at least that I cared enough to pay for them to be made, or that I had some skills. Now…we all know how easy they are to create, they don’t really count for anything.

Same with code. If someone showed me code they’d created, that was well designed, commented, had tests, etc, I would have had a certain opinion about them. Now, it’s almost meaningless. It mostly means you are technical enough to find Claude code and ask it for something coherent. This is coming for all knowledge work. That polished, 400-page, McKinsey market research report? Meaningless now, as a signal.

Likely this means that assessment will get harder. We will probably lean on AI for it (“Hey, AI model, is this 400-page report any good? Read it and summarize”). But of course, that’s just a slippery slope - do you know that the well-formatted, grammatical, intelligent sounding analysis is good, or not? In the past, speaking well was a good proxy for quality. Now, it isn’t. Form doesn’t matter.

You can see this in the media we consume too - it’s the problem of misinformation or AI slop in all of our feeds. It used to be hard to reach a million people - you had to wear a suit and convince a network to let you broadcast each night. Reasonable (but not perfect) proxy for the quality of the content - but not anymore. Anyone can have a YouTube, TikTok, Insta, whatever channel, and they’re pretty professional looking. That will only become more so over time. Form here doesn’t matter either.

When I talk to students about what skills they have, I always want to say something like “taste”. Until now, I didn’t know why, but now I think I do. Form is eroding as a signal, and it will be completely gone soon. We will have to develop skills of taste, understanding and discernment, in all domains.

Form doesn’t help any more.