Be So For Real.

I recently started working as a new grad and was thinking back to my last internship. Amidst the imposter syndrome and information firehose of my first day, I recall being Slacked for a same-day dinner with the head of the org. The other interns and I went around introducing ourselves, and eventually the conversation shifted to the pace of AI development. One question that came up was what becomes most important to prioritize in order to do good work, particularly in a world where the previous standard barometer, effort, is being eroded by automation.

I remember saying something about taste, and choosing how to focus on the most impactful things. We all nodded sagely and someone added on. But despite having elicited the appropriate reactions to make a good impression, I’m realizing I missed the mark. Taste alone isn’t sufficient. For one, it can be approximated very well, without ever really being internalized: this feels disingenuous. Execution is another aspect that was missing — it doesn’t matter if you intend to do great things but never act on it or fumble through poorly — but doesn’t encompass what I was trying to express either. But there’s also this component of honest intention and deep personal drive that’s not accounted for just with taste, and I think it’s this that one should value most.

What I’m describing is some imbrication shingling together earnestness, authenticity, voice, sincerity, self-realization, and personality. As shorthand, I’ll refer to this as earnestness. These glimmers of genuine determination, even if the taste or execution is bad, seem to be what’s craved most nowadays. This is why certain clanky prototypes resonate with people and go viral on Twitter despite being poorly executed. This is why slop website designs pale in comparison to indie sites and hand-bodged HTML although their visual designs follow more best practices. Earnestness can paper over misjudgements in taste, and when combined with taste and execution, gets you far further more than taste alone.

This is a post collecting some thoughts I had around earnestness. I hope you’ll see why I appreciate it more over raw taste and execution, and why I now think past-intern-dinner me was wrong.

I. EuroSys

Attending EuroSys this year was an incredible opportunity. It was the first research conference I’d attended, and many surprises were in store. Most of these were pleasant — the lovely new friends and the breadth of research novelty. I had high hopes for the presentations, too, but I was actually quite disappointed in their quality overall. There were a lot of sloppy slides and monotone, drilling-syllables-into-your-head deliveries.

With regards to the slides, I made a game out of catching dead giveaways in all the AI generated decks. There’s a telltale overcrowding of vague bullet points that don’t say much. Usually, there’s also a thin header or footer unnecessarily redeclaring the subsection of the presentation. Some models also seem to have a penchant for lots of blocky sections and quadrants, again filling up the whole slide¹. I understand these are CS PhD students, and perhaps their time could be better spent than balancing margins and proportions: I’m not opposed to this work being replaced by reasoning tokens, but from what I’ve seen the presentation’s clarity gets actively hampered — poor execution.

I harp on this because I pride myself on my own slide decks and appreciate when others put thought into clear visual presentation. This takes effort. I spent a couple days on-and-off on my own slides for a short workshop paper. I’m no graphic designer either, but this work is important to me, because the friction of figuring out how and what to communicate is a forcing function for distilling one’s work. Outsourcing this to an agent wholesale comes across a bit as misprioritizing — missing the forest for the trees, except you also miss this particular presentation-design tree that determine how others perceive and value your work. It’s also a missed opportunity to give the presentation more personality and demonstrate one’s taste. If you play the long game, this could play into branding, but on a lighter level it’s just fun to see someone’s slipped in references to a show in their examples or chosen their favourite colour scheme. For me, presentations are unseriously serious: the contents and form of the presentation should demand consideration and craft, but within reason people should feel free to highlight personal flair.

It’s okay if this taste lacks delicatesse, or is, well, in poor taste. I’d rather see genuine effort: earnestness without execution still means something to me. For example, besides the AI slides, there were other times where I could tell the slides were done by hand, from a free SlidesGo or built-in template. Sometimes these were also fairly cramped with far too much text, sometimes they would be inconsistent with font sizes or weights. This bothered me much less, as I assumed (perhaps overly charitably) at least some conscious thought went into this.

I have similar critique for the talk deliveries as well. For most presentations there was exceedingly obvious reading-off-the-script-while-staring-at-monitor². I realize the challenges that language barriers or other considerations may pose, but it’s very possible to use a script but make eye contact with folks. There was a pronounced difference between presentations that sped through reciting a script without taking a breath and presentations where the presenter looked in the general direction of the audience and sounded like themselves, even if the former’s subject matter was more technically interesting to me. This type of talk missed the mark on both earnestness and taste and was really unengaging besides. Improving speaking skills is certainly not beyond the grasp of most people, and I’d have loved to hear the same enthusiasm and sincerity that I caught in the main hall after the talk on the stage as well.

In all, it seemed like the presentations were often an afterthought, a chore to tick off on the flight over. I don’t think an academic conference is an inappropriate place to express taste, and in fact I’m sure a little extra pizzazz could have really drilled in more takeaways and research opportunities. I was at EuroSys expecting authenticity and personality, or at the very least, solid execution. For the most part I got dry, rattled-off lists of X% improvements instead³. I spent a lot of the conference sitting in the rangs of perfectly-spaced blue chairs, wondering when or if I’d hear a presenter’s real voice.

II. Coffee Chats

Adapting to the SF standard of casual intro conversations was a jarring culture shift last summer. Sometimes meeting folks at events would feel like friendship fencing. There seemed to be this jockeying to ask the most incisive, deep questions, like we were all trying to regurgitate the right words to pull out Paul-Graham-level insights from new acquaintances. If one didn’t deliver, they’d float over and start assessing the next potential cofounder over. There’s a certain lingo, a distribution of verb choices and conversational cadences, that threw me off. This was not all people, but enough to catch onto patterns.

I’d describe this as taste without earnestness — though sometimes, rarely, it’s earnestness without taste, depending on how they come across. Either way, both are lacking on the execution too. As well, while I mentioned taste without delicatesse can be fine above, earnestness without delicatesse usually feels more off, more brusque. I think this coffee chat verbal jousting is a good example.

I appreciate efficiency as much as the next INTJ, and because most of these conversations were in the context of work or work-adjacent events, I can see why cutting to the chase can be desirable. But the fastest way through to someone’s core ethos is also the fastest way for me to feel disarmed, as if I were not talking to get to know someone as a person, but merely as a data source to be figured out and labeled and value-extracted. I would have appreciated a bit more easing into things, but after all in this city, nothing is easy.

There’s a tension in SF where the actual work serves to make things easy, reduce friction, and automate everything to pieces, whereas the grind culture associates doing things the hardest way possible and toughing it out with high signal. It seems like here, people also want to take the hardest route to building rapport and seeking authenticity.

I once saw a LinkedIn post that, amidst its general lunacy and call to action to “build”, feels relevant. To laud SF as the place to be, the author compared it to NYC. Apparently in NYC, people seem warm on the outside, making small talk easily, but it’s hard to break into their inner circles and feel truly connected — there’s a lack of earnestness. On the other hand, in SF people can seem overly upfront, blunt, or elitist in the beginning, but they’ll bring you quickly into their close friend groups and network — they do care, just don’t demonstrate it in a way most people’d expect. I’ve not spent long-term time in NYC, so I can’t really corroborate, but the coming months in SF will tell if this holds true here.

III. Substack

One day I found myself doomscrolling Substack, of all platforms. Somehow, it felt more acceptable than swiping through Reels or Shorts. For one, I was perusing longform articles and newsletter posts, which seem a bit harder to consume mindlessly. I told myself it was better than TikToks of Subway Surfer two-ups with neon flashing captions — at least I was wasting time with the written word. But reflecting later, I think the main reason Substack’s feed feels (relatively) appealing also comes back to earnestness.

On Substack, people mostly seem to write like they’d really talk. There are fewer listicles and more all-lowercase rambles. If the conference presentations I mentioned earlier lacked personal taste and earnestness, Substacks have both in spades. Both aspects come together in this concept of voice: having something unique to share, and doing so in a way that your best friend would roll their eyes at and pronounce “so you”. This is where execution takes a backseat: strictly speaking the prose is not always top-tier or flowy, but the personality and juice would still make me rate most posts positively.

Earnestly finding one’s voice and making use of it is such a pure expression of taste. Writing, in particular, is one of the clearest articulations of it. It can also be a way to connect with others whose taste aligns with yours, as Henrik Karlsson writes, and Substack’s social features support this too.

Substack is, in the end, social media built around sharing. In this context, this sharing acts as a forcing function for genuineness, though, as it selects for people who are willing to bare their hearts in some way. When I went on exchange a couple years ago, I had this schtick about never letting people know what music I listened to — my Spotify recommendations may have well been state secrets. This was mostly a joke, and it would have only been mildly embarrassing to reveal my playlists and preferences. On a deeper level, though, to share and assume one’s taste, one has to be rather earnest and brave. This combination, and the way it’s possible to build reach without performing on Substack, makes for more authentic, engaging content.

I like the indie web because all the sites I visit feel so individual and genuine. But as Maggie Appleton points out, this cozier side of the internet is often quite underground. It’s impossible to search for them amidst a sea of SEO-optimized entries, so stumbling upon something usually happens by chance, perhaps via an outlink on a blog I already frequent or via recommendation by a friend. Substack is one of the few places where finding real voices feels easy. It’s a curation (albeit algorithmic) of primarily indie creators in one place, serving up earnestness right on tap. There is much to be said about the types of voices that are promoted by the algorithm and whether lowering the barriers to entry to finding these communities also affects their value to the reader⁴ and whether this is just a poor-man’s parasocial parody of earnestness, but on a whole it’s nice that Substack makes getting this personal ambiance straightforward.

Conclusion

Earnestness matters regardless of the pace of technological progress or upheaval. Early 10X-engineer rockstar-programmer culture prioritized execution, but tools to automate this are on the horizon, if not here. As tech Twitter and online discourse then shifted to touting taste, it’s been Goodharted to the point of “tasteslop”. This leaves a gap, invites people to go one level deeper, to size up the sources and reasoning behind the taste — and this brings us to earnestness.

While taste controls for what one does and execution for how, earnestness governs the why. To be clear, there’s some base level of all three that’s needed, but I find that earnestness seems to be the central compass, determining the extent to which the other two matter. I hope the above examples have shown how lacking earnestness goes wrong, and how prioritizing it takes steps in the right direction.

I had a friend whose Discord status for some time was “trying to be an earnest bean”. It’s a bit cutesy, but I’ve been trying to embody this more recently: being more vulnerable, saying what I mean, and trying real hard to do my work on solid foundational values. I think we could do with more of this energy as the world churns on.

See also: Paul Graham on earnestness.