Nestor G Pestelos Jr · Writing · Print
Polish Is Free. Thinking Isn't
Fluent writing was always a weak signal of good thinking, and language models now generate it for free. Real signal survives only in reasoning you can defend live and unassisted once the polish is gone.
A popular school of advice promises that a few frameworks (an album of your best ideas, Problem-Agitate-Solution, the Pyramid Principle) will make you, in Dan Koe's phrase, dangerously articulate. They work, but practice does not fill a blank slate. Twin and adoption studies put the heritability of normal verbal ability at roughly a quarter to a half of the variance. That caps no individual's ceiling, but it retires the promise that effort alone carries anyone to any level.
Practice also explains less than advertised. Macnamara and colleagues' 2014 meta-analysis found that deliberate practice accounts for about 14 percent of performance variance overall, and under 1 percent in professions. That share shrinks as domains get looser, and communication is as loose as they come. Articulation is trainable, but frameworks remain one modest input among several.
Frameworks treat clarity as a hard-to-fake proxy for clear thinking, assuming a bullshitter meanders while an expert states things plainly. Psychologists call this the fluency heuristic. People judge easily processed information as truer and more competent, regardless of accuracy. Fluency acts as a bias vector: it makes an empty claim sound authoritative and a hesitant expert read as unsure.
Large language models now produce fluent, well-organized prose on demand. The scarce element that made polished writing informative (the thought required to produce it) is gone. Commoditized generation renders fluent output dead as a competence signal.
Remove the screen and the live-interview copilot, and pre-packaged fluency vanishes. What survives is whether the thought holds. It comes down to whether you can take the next inference, absorb an objection, and name where your idea breaks. Delivery still sways the room, but only unscripted defense proves understanding.
An older rhetorical tradition points at that same surviving layer. Jordan Peterson argues against technique, urging speakers to find what they genuinely think and align words with belief. His reason is psychological, warning that false words leave you weak. The economic reality is colder: output is free, so polish no longer signals competence.
I have never been a natural performer. Easy, fluent delivery that reads as competence is not how I am wired, and for years that felt like a defect to fix. But sounding competent is a trick anyone can now automate. Distrust your own fluent drafts, this essay included. Easy prose does not prove you did the thinking. The remaining signal is reasoning you can defend when someone stops reading and starts asking.