Comment by WJW
4 days ago
> Consistency is good but consistent mediocrity is an unworthy ambition in many fields.
Sorry to take only a small part of an otherwise great comment but is this actually true? It seems to me that there is a great many fields in which consistency is more important than excellence, especially if the striving for excellence produces great misses as well sometimes. In a well-designed system with some allowed tolerance, as long as it's good enough you are fine. Take the electricity grid for example: There's no prizes for maintaining the frequency to within a nano-Hertz of the spec. There are very large fines for being outside the spec (+/-0.050 Hertz for the EU grid). Being consistently within spec is much more valuable than occasionally performing much better than the spec.
It is only in extreme winner-takes-all fields like sports, spacefaring and entrepreneuring that being the absolute best is what you want. In most other fields being consistently decent beats out varying excellence. I definitely wouldn't want my dentist to take a risky moonshot in pursuit of excellence, for example.
"I definitely wouldn't want my dentist to take a risky moonshot in pursuit of excellence". Excellent comment.
I was aware as I was writing it that consistent mediocrity is indeed a profitable target. Perhaps we're quibbling over "mediocrity"? Staying within the spec seems enough of the challenge for a grid, I'm not sure that I'd define excellence as narrower and narrower variation around the spec there.
I was making a moral judgement in "unworthy". I like cars to come off the factory floor consistently good. I own a Tesla, this statement has high salience for me. That seems like a challenge. I wouldn't respect the Lada factory for consistently turning out cars that break down or fall apart, just as I don't respect McDonalds for consistently delivering underwhelming food. I acknowledge the consistency, I acknowledge it's profitable, but they're not achieving consistent greatness.