# I should have a lower bar for shipping things <div class="pills-container"> <span class="pill">Published: April 24, 2026</span> <span class="pill">Reading Time: 4 minutes</span> <span class="pill">This is a linkpost to <a href="https://halfbakedtheories.substack.com/p/20260424">Substack</a></span>. </div> # There is a haunted folder that sits on my desktop <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; align-items: center;"> <img src="https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1601415104543-6f2d703a21d1?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wzMDAzMzh8MHwxfHNlYXJjaHwyNXx8cmV0cm8lMjBjb21wdXRlcnxlbnwwfHx8fDE3NzY4NzY3MjJ8MA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080" style="width: 600px;" /> <figcaption style="width: min(600px, 100%); text-align: center; font-size: 0.85em;">Photo by <a href="https://unsplash.com/@senadpalic">Senad Palic</a> on <a href="https://unsplash.com/">Unsplash</a>.</figcaption> </div> There is a folder on my desktop that I open once in a while. It's a folder of notes and drafts and ideas; some of them maybe two years old, some newer. I probably opened these markdown files a total of forty times over the past six months and published exactly none. The strangest part is that I already know I should just ship them. I have literally given the same advice to other people. I just don’t follow my own advice, I guess. This is funny to me because I am the same person who spent two whole semesters taking programming classes with only an iPad and a clunky IDE, and still got pretty good grades on those courses. What I'm saying is I believe I have a demonstrated ability to get things done and finish them under objectively worse conditions than "sitting at my desk with a working laptop." Anyway, the drafts are still sitting there. If you asked me why I haven't touched them, I would tell you something that sounds reasonable, like the argument in section 3 has a hole, or I want to read two more papers before I commit to the framing, or I've been super busy at work and have had no time to proofread. Yeah, sure. But honestly, I’m just scared of being wrong in public. Okay, maybe not scared of _being wrong_, exactly, but scared of being perceived as someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about. I’m scared that a senior researcher will find the gap in my argument and read it as a personality trait rather than a work in progress. I’m scared that the people who see this will update their perception of me in a less favorable way and I can't correct it because I couldn’t defend myself from a static piece of text. # Perfectionism is just quality control for your ego I like to think that perfectionism is just a culture thing. Filipinos are proud people. [We love to celebrate every little thing that can position us well to others](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinoy_pride), and we hate shame so much that we have a very specific word for the feeling of shame due to not meeting a standard (_[hiya](https://saliksik.upd.edu.ph/storage/submission/pdf/manuscripts/r4acQ1zfCG6SXVcjJrdqCRgJC9DVd6WSXsFUmhcM.pdf)_). I also think it affects so much of how we work. Maybe the most blatant difference between working with a Filipino team vs non-Filipinos is how the meetings are done. Filipinos would usually never answer exactly what they think on calls. They would privately message me on Viber just to say what they want to say, even if we are already together in a Google Meet. Again, _hiya_. I can almost hear my friend saying _“but Lenz, it’s not ego but trust. People trust us and we don’t want to fail them.”_ And maybe that’s true. Filipinos do have a habit of breaking down everything you did wrong even if it were clearly a work in progress. But some people will hate what you ship anyway. At least shipping can help you make it better. # The cost of not shipping is real but you will never know about it Here is what I actually lost in those six, eight, twenty-four months. - No feedback that would have sharpened the argument. - No way to find out which parts resonated and which were just me talking to myself. - No track record of shipped work, which is the exact thing I lack since I have no independent output under my own name. There was no bad day I could point to because the loss was entirely counterfactual. This is what makes perfectionism hard to correct for. **The cost is systematically invisible.** You see the risk of shipping because it is concrete. You see when someone misreads the thing you wrote, when a senior researcher finds the gap, when you look uncertain. You do not see the risk of NOT shipping because it is a distribution of futures that quietly just…stops existing. The asymmetry in visibility produces an asymmetry in decision-making that has nothing to do with actual expected value. # I already know all of this Just last month, [I decided to scrape a bunch of bills and publish them on GitHub](https://github.com/policyobservatory/ph-corpus). It got enough people interested that it actually got some funding. Just last quarter, I asked for 1:1s from folks I had not talked to in three years because I felt so insecure about what I’m doing, and most of them said yes and gave me sane advice. Just last year, [I cold-emailed a guy from MIT to see if I could contribute to his project and he said yes](https://airisk.mit.edu/team/jan-llenzl-dagohoy). This is essentially the same logic. Just ship the thing, see who responds, and update your priors based on what breaks. The version in my head will never get cited. It won’t ever get me into places I want to be. People will not know there is a hole in section 3 of that one draft I wrote because I never showed it to anyone. I don’t think lowering the bar for shipping things means that you’re okay with shipping slop. I just think that you will never know if it’s slop or not until you ship it. And if it turns out to be bad, at least now you have something to ‘unsloppify’ together with the folks who cares.