The Legendary Dragon Alephwyr, named Alephwyr, BA

"inconsistent" and "wrong" seems tautological from my perspective

Like what does it mean to "not do anything"? Who litigates what counts as a valid thing? It's not litigated. It's not even talked about. It's arbitrary, based on sentiment. Inconsistency can be valuable though, like when what you're doing is basically gambling.

There aren't any Midas Mulligans in this world who can tell a sound business proposition by a handshake and eye contact and the people who think there are just create incentives for incompetents to invest all their energy into shaking hands well and maintaining eye contact.

shaking hands and maintaining eye contact isn't necessarily worse than the alternatives, if the technology is based in sound theory

It's consistently worse. It's the same thing as a college degree these days. You're expected to do it precisely because it's worthless. The expectation didn't shift to think "this isn't informative", but "anything below this line must somehow be even worse"

not actually sure it isn't informative

It tells people you reason conventionally, respond to incentives conventionally, and have the same predictable fallacies as others (sunk cost for instance). This is useful but it shouldn't be foundational when you are trying to select principally for capacity to do things.

convention is institutional- it tells people that you can operate inside institutional contexts, a valuable piece of information