Just Write

My fiancee is deep into trading and it has become an interesting system that I draw parallels from. In trading, there is a concept of “edge” - the thing every trader is hunting for. With automated trading and sub-second information flow based decision systems in place for trading by big quants and massive players that can execute trades before you can blink, the way to actually make money as a small fish boils down to finding the inefficiency in the market. That’s the edge. And you need to keep it guarded because once it is broadly known, the market adjusts for it and the inefficiency closes. Your edge “ages” and “retires” and will soon “die”.

I keep thinking about it and I am starting to realize that personal voice is hitting the same market efficiency problem. With everyone using AI to write perfectly, the only difference in voice comes down to what LLM subscription you have. “Polished” isn’t an advantage anymore when when everyone’s work is polish, smooth, optimized, structured, and just perfect. It’s just a mass-produced commodity that was “Made in AI Labs”

There’s something deeper here around being “perfect”. I feel like we have this intense yearning to be perfect but deep down we know humans cannot be. So, we project this fantasy into technology and pour that desire into machines hoping they will be the “child” that gets to see the world because parents were too busy making a livelihood. But, even the discrete binaries of zeros and ones aren’t that clean under the hood. At the hardware level, a zero is just a voltage range that we’ve agreed to call zero. The whole foundation of digital computing is itself messy all the way down. We just drew clean lines around the mess and pretended.

So, that’s where the edge is. Your messy writing, your mispellings, your unusual picking of words that do not confirm to standards. That’s the inefficiency in the market that algorithms won’t be able to reproduce because they are being “trained” to do perfect things, not being trained to make mistakes.

To be imperfect is a far more distinguishing quality of a human than to be perfect now. Your flaws are your fingerprint. Spiraling in your thoughts is far more beautiful now than to be a calm LLM model that does not get tired. In trading terms, that’s alpha that we will soon yearn for.

So, get your writing out there, and don’t run it through an LLM to polish it. Use emdash, endash, eodash, lodash, whatever you need to get your thoughts out, because AI fatigue is already real and your voice will be the non-sensical designer clothes that we will all pay more for.