Why an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure

Like probably every boy with proud southern mom, I grew up watching Steel Magnolias. In that movie Shelby quotes her father, Drum, as always saying "an ounce of pretension is worth a pound of manure." I always thought it was just an amusing quip, but the reality of fearing the Lord in a world that rewards sweet lies over bitter truths has taught me that it is perhaps the most meaningful statement in the whole movie - which is no small accomplishment when the same movie includes such easy to appreciate jabs as "he's a real gentleman. I bet he even takes the dishes outta the sink 'fore he pees in it."

What I did not realize as a child (or until just the other day, and I am currently 34) is that what Drum was really saying was that an ounce of bullshit is worth a pound of bull shit. That is, manure's great for producing healthy crops, but a charismatic man can get a higher price for a middle-of-the-road tomato than a plain man can for a higher quality one. In today's corporatized world, the most striking proof of this concept is probably to be found in artificial intelligence. AI was sold as a way to "10x" productivity while cutting costs enormously. And for the most part the biggest companies have all bought that pitch hook, line, and sinker. Nevermind the fact that both the time and money spent fixing bad AI output as well as the cost of actually using the AI tools they have chosen to rely on in the first place dramatically reduce the actual return on their investment. Sure AI tools are improving all the time in at least one sense, but it can hardly be argued that they are currently what they were sold as.

Leaving the AI conversation though (there's plenty of argument online about that already, and it is not the point of this post), I'd like to share another compelling proof of Drum's philosophy. In particular, I am keen that no one should take this post as some kind of silly vendetta against AI as such. I assign no moral value to the tools themselves except in that many or all of them have been produced - at least in large part - by stealing the work of honest musicians, painters, writers, programmers, etc in order to "train" the models which drive their usefulness and nothing has been done to compensate those people nor to hold accountable those who used their work without permission. What I do assign moral value to is the attitude which drives that kind of mechanism, and that attitude is not in any way new.

So few years ago, I was in a role where I constantly fought with management to prioritize permanent solutions over band-aids for technical problems. For years I went back and forth with them. They'd always tell me that we did not have the time to focus on permanent fixes because of how many immediate fires needed to be put out, and I would tell them that the only reason we had so many fires is that we refused to prioritize the improvements that would have prevented them from existing in the first place. Not that I didn't see that we had to keep things running in the meantime, but there's a difference between balancing competing needs and neglecting stability entirely in favor of break-fixes.

Anyway, eventually one of my managers pulled me aside and advised me that the reason I was struggling to gain traction was that even if managers know I'm right, they will not act without data that they can present to their higher ups to justify what they were doing. Fine as far as it goes I guess, but the problem is that, since I view it as dishonest to say "this will reduce incoming support tickets by x%" when a the biggest portion of that percentage represents tickets that have not existed before and do not exist now but will very likely exist in the future if we do not do what I am suggesting, I could not produce the kind of "data" he was suggesting that managers need. That was disappointing. Effectively I was being told "we know you are probably right, but we are not going to do what we know we probably should because the sacred prophet data does not make it inescapably obvious to people who do not understand the work that it needs done." But it was only disappointing.

However, when I expressed my disappointment in roughly that way (though in something a little closer to Corporatese, lest I should get myself fired over it), the response just floored me. In one devastating blow, my whole image of what made a man effective in his career was shattered. I told him that it would be hard to produce that kind of data since it had to do with future events which had not occurred yet but which everyone knew would occur eventually. And he told me that "the numbers can say whatever we want them to say."

Do you see it? Even if he had said something like "if we have any ground on which to say that we know these things will happen, then the data should bear that out" I might have been able to hold onto my comfortable delusion that honesty and drive were some of the main drivers of career success. His real response denied me that entirely and gave me instead the realization that he was right. Data is a particular kind of thing. It is not so much truth as it is facts (a distinction which, until then, I did not know existed). And, as anyone who is at all good at lying to himself can tell you, facts are actually very easy to manipulate without strictly "lying." Consider the following example:

Jim and Bob work on a tech support desk. On average, the technicians on that desk close 10 tickets per week.

Jim closed 3 tickets last week and 6 tickets this week.

Bob closed 10 tickets last week and 13 tickets this week.

Each of them is asked to give their boss a report on their productivity this week compared to last week.

Bob includes a note that he closed 3 more tickets this week than last week.

Jim includes a similar note, but his says that he doubled his ticket closures this week vs last week.

Both of their reports align with the data, but unless the manager himself goes and looks at last week's performance, Jim comes out looking much more productive than Bob even though he closed fewer tickets both weeks than Bob did and even though both he and Bob closed exactly 3 more tickets this week than they did last week.

If I had been wiser back then or paid closer attention, I might have realized then that an ounce of pretension truly is worth a pound of manure. As things stand, I no longer work in the corporate world and would rather have money issues for the rest of my life than ever go back. I loved the work and enjoyed my colleagues, but I can continue to do IT work as a freelance consultant or an independent developer and hopefully my work will eventually be viewed as speaking for itself rather than requiring me to trade peace in my conscience for credibility in the data-cult of modern big business.

If as you read this, you find that you are in a similar position to the one I was in, I hope you will find encouragement in this post that you are not alone and that exiting the corporate world to preserve your mental health may be extremely difficult and even painful, but it is not a death sentence. It won't change the fact that an ounce of bullshit is still worth more than a pound of bull shit, but it will reduce the amount of pretension that you have to deal with in your daily life.