David R. MacIver's Blog

On Mediocrity

This post was originally published at https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/on-mediocrity.

I’m in the middle of a very long draft post, and after I’d already written a very large number of words I started going off on a digression explaining the way I use a particular word and how it differs slightly from the normal meaning. This seemed like a sign that that bit should be its own post, so here it is as its own post.

The word is, as you can probably guess from the title, “mediocre”.

Used normally, “mediocre” means something like “only adequate”, which is compatible with my meaning, but for me it includes overtones of “and could never hope to be better without fundamentally changing its nature”.

The easiest way you can tell I mean something slightly different from the normal meaning is that English is a tonal language, and when I say this word it is usually pronounced somewhere between tinged and dripping with contempt. In my idiolect, mediocre is a much harsher judgement than “terrible”.

This doesn’t, exactly, mean that mediocre things are worse than terrible things. A mediocre meal is edible even when a terrible meal might not be. But it is possible to produce a terrible meal and not have me judge you for it, while I will always judge a mediocre one at least a bit.

(This is not, you understand, to say that I do not ever produce mediocre things. I absolutely do, somewhat regularly. And then I judge myself, at least slightly, for doing so)

Let me illustrate with two examples of adequate meals that I somewhat regularly cook. Both are “low energy” meals - they don’t require much in the way of time, energy, or planning, and they fulfil the requirements of actually having something resembling a real meal:

The first is: Rice, stir fry greens from the freezer, a Thai omelette.

The second is: Leon’s frozen waffle fries, Leon’s frozen gluten-free chicken, frozen green beans cooked in the microwave.

Both of these are adequate meals. The second is mediocre, the first is not. What makes the difference?

It’s not effort or time. The first is a little more effort, and cooking rice takes longer than cooking waffle fries, but not much, and that effort and time can be reduced without the meal becoming mediocre. e.g. the stir fry greens I use microwave just fine, and I often have leftover rice in the fridge that can be reheated, at which point this meal becomes almost trivial. There’s a decent chance that if I’m in low effort mode I’ll fuck up the Thai omelette, but a Thai omelette that you’ve slightly fucked up cooking is still delicious.

It’s also not quality. I made a variation of the rice one the other day where I swapped out the Thai omelette for Tofoo sriracha tofu fried in Schezuan pepper oil. The results were, if I’m completely honest, kinda bad. I hadn’t used this Schezuan pepper oil before and greatly misjudged its flavour profile, and the result was too sour and made your mouth go unpleasantly instead of pleasantly numb. If you asked me to compare this and the fries-and-chicken meal, I’d have to in full honesty admit that the latter was tastier. But I still wouldn’t judge this meal as mediocre, it was just kinda bad. Perfectly edible - I still ate the leftovers for lunch the next day - but I would never choose to cook it that way again.

Fries, chicken, and green beans is, in contrast, honestly a pretty OK meal. It’s filling, reasonably tasty, contains a somewhat adequate amount of nutrition. I wouldn’t evangelise it as a good choice, but I could do a lot worse. Fries aren’t obviously worse than rice, breaded chicken isn’t obviously worse than a Thai omelette. It is still, however, extremely mediocre.

What’s the difference?

Well, if I’m honest, some of it is vibes. This is a bit like the real vs fake thing all over again, and there are parts of this distinction that I can’t quite defend. There are a couple quite specific concrete things I can point to about it though.

The first is that the the rice dish is just more interesting. It has more variety of flavour profile built into it, and permits more variation around that. I will often season it differently - sometimes adding pickled chinese vegetables, or chilli crisp, usually adding some subset of soy sauce, rice vinegar, and sesame oil, etc. It provides more of a base of variation, and is an easy target of creativity.

Chips and chicken in contrast, I will serve with both types of condiments, ketchup and mayonnaise.

This, I think, is the basis of the second and more important part of the distinction: What happens if I put more effort into the dish?

The rice dish, I can very easy turn into a pretty respectable meal. If I add a second vegetable dish to it, it’s starting to look like an actually good meal. I can turn the Thai omelette into a side dish accompanying a main. The stir fry vegetables are easily doctored up with the addition of e.g. extra ginger and some spices. I could do a coconut rice instead of a plain one, or swap it out for a more interesting rice than a basic Thai jasmine white rice. There are a million directions to go in to make the dish better, many of them easily accessible.

I do not, to be clear, that often go very far in those directions. It’s common for me to do maybe one improvement, typically in the form of some sort of accompanying condiment, slight improvement to the vegetables, or replacing the omelette with something equally easy. But even at its most basic version of this dish, the possibilities are there.

In contrast, the fries and chicken… where do I go from there? I can put more effort into getting good results, e.g. by putting some fat and salt on the waffle fries and making sure they’re well separated on the pan before cooking them, but the fundamental character of the dish is pretty stable and putting in more work doesn’t really produce a better dish, just a better execution of an adequate dish.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s possible to do very good fries and chicken. I’m not sure I can make my own waffle fries easily enough to be worth it, but I can certainly do something in the space of crispy potatoes with breaded chicken and a vegetable side dish and get a very good result. This is a fairly big step change in the recipe though.

Sure, I can make my own fries, but that’s a hell of a lot more work than putting some waffle fries in the oven. Breading and frying my own chicken is even more work. Sometimes that’s work worth doing! I like fried chicken, and I like putting work into meals. It is not, however, at all contiguous with the lazy meal I started with, it’s its own separate thing with a passing resemblance to it.

This is, I think, the core thing I am pointing to when I describe something as “mediocre”.

With the basic rice meal, I am operating in a process where I can decide how good a dish I want to make, and then make it to that standard. I choose to make an adequate dish, because that is currently the right trade off for me - I have limited time, energy, and ingredients to hand, and limited motivation to do something great, so I’ve chosen a level of quality appropriate to that and executed on that.

Frozen fries and chicken, in contrast, I’ve rather locked myself into the quality level as soon as the process has been chosen. If I wanted to produce a good meal, I wouldn’t put in a bit more effort, I would choose an entirely different plan.

Mediocrity is not just about quality, it is about acting in such a way that you can be responsive to level of quality the situation demands. If you produce something merely adequate because you decided adequacy was sufficient, or because you failed in your attempt to do better, that’s one thing. If you behave in such a way that you can cannot hope to be better than adequate, that’s mediocre.

My running example makes it sound like this is about premade goods, which do indeed tend to lock you into a plan, and probably are the easiest way to produce mediocre results, but I don’t think this is essential. There are, for example, plenty of mediocre writers - people who produce slop, even without the assistance of an LLM.

Many of these people are writing every word from scratch themselves, but they are doing so to make quota, without putting much thought into it, or in response to whatever will get them clicks.

Sometimes this produces mediocrity because they are operating in an environment where they have to churn something out too fast for thought - I can just about produce good work daily for a few months, but I pretty rapidly lose the plot after that, and if I had to produce five new pieces a day you’d pretty rapidly find what my version of slop looks like - but I think often it runs deeper than that. The reason the process is not sensitive to the needs of quality is that the person executing it is not.

This is a very easy place to end up if you are just naively following incentives. The short-term rewards for “good enough” are not actually much less than the short-term rewards for “actually good”, and it takes a lot less effort. If you don’t develop your own aesthetic sense that you can follow independently of external reward signals, you will very rapidly converge into the aesthetic equivalent of frozen chicken - broadly palatable, but incapable of becoming better without fundamentally changing your character.

This might be what you want. That’s allowed. We cannot choose excellence in all things. I, for example, have a fairly mediocre dress sense. I don’t dress badly, but I don’t dress well, and I would need to profoundly change my approach to clothing in order to do better.

I’m also mediocre at editing. It’s probably my greatest weakness as a writer - shortly after writing this sentence I’m going to finish this piece and click publish on this piece, probably without so much as rereading what I’ve written so far. Unlike the dres sense, this is something where I’d like to do better, but it requires a genuine investment of effort and practice that I simply never manage to budget the time for.

I do, for the record, judge myself slightly for both these things. The editing more than the dress sense, but I do consider both to be flaws. That’s OK, human beings are flawed, but it doesn’t make the flaws not problems.

More importantly, it doesn’t mean we get to ignore our flaws.

It is, more or less, OK to choose mediocrity, particularly in specifics domain where there’s no compelling reason that you need to be good at. But if you are mediocre at something, let it be because you’ve chosen to be, not because you’ve unconsciously slid into that state.

More, if you’re mediocre at something that I should be able to depend on you being actually good at, I’m probably going to be furious at you in a way that I will not not be if you are just bad at it, because to me mediocrity means something worse than failing: It means you don’t care to do good work, and I can forgive almost any failure but that.