The Pull Toward Writing Up Successes

Nobody decides to only publish the wins, and almost everybody does.

The bias is structural rather than dishonest. Successes have a shape that fits a post: a problem, a change, an improvement, an ending. Failures trail off. They lack a conclusion, they leave you unsure what actually caused what, and they are harder to write because you do not know how the story finishes. So the successful attempt gets written and the muddled one does not, and over time a body of writing accumulates in which the author appears to have a considerably better hit rate than any teacher has ever had.

The effect on readers is corrosive in a slow way. A person reading a run of accounts in which things work tends to conclude that things generally work and that their own frequent misfires are unusual. They are not unusual. They are the ordinary texture of the job, invisible only because nobody writes them up. The teacher who publishes a clear account of something that did not work is doing more for that reader than three accounts of things that did.

The correction is deliberate rather than natural. Notice when a draft has fallen into the improvement shape and ask whether the shape is true. Write the account of the attempt that went nowhere, and write it before you have a tidy explanation, because the tidy explanation is usually invented afterwards. A post that ends with genuine uncertainty about the cause is more honest than one that ends with a confident diagnosis you constructed to give the piece an ending.