The Pleasure and Profit of Error
Cunningham comes home to roost.
Summary: Peter Banks reflects on how his writing errors have paradoxically enhanced his Substack article performance through Cunningham's Law—corrections and criticism boost algorithmic visibility and engagement. He describes a specific mistake about the UK Liberal Democrats' housing policy that drew reader corrections, illustrating the risks of writing about foreign politics as an outsider. Banks argues that while errors inadvertently drive success, writers must avoid deliberate mistakes for engagement, and readers should discern genuine errors from engagement bait.
I’ve been writing for about a year and a half now—the last six months or so with any degree of success—and in that time, I’ve made quite a few errors. Usually, my mistakes are small technical mix-ups (which I’d like to blame on my dyslexia), yet sometimes they’re more substantial and end up confusing the actual content. Most recently, in my article on the UK, I wrote the following paragraph:
In this case, voters seem to be coalescing around two main interpretations: either an 'abundance'-style liberalism (e.g., the Lib Dems), which argues that the [housing] crisis is caused by artificially constrained supply and that the solution is to boost housing construction rather than reduce immigration; or a Reform-style nationalism that holds immigration has been, likely, a net negative for native Brits’ incomes and quality of life, and thus should be reduced, regardless of what happens to housing supply.
I woke up this morning to comments from some of my favorite British Substackers informing me that I was wrong—the Lib Dems are, in fact, a NIMBY party of the highest caliber.
I’ll be honest: this took me by surprise. It wasn’t the impression I’d gotten from what I’d read online or from the Lib Dem voters I personally know. Alas! As I said at the start of the essay, this is the risk of talking about any countries politics as an outsider. Still, I think the general thrust of the article holds and is worth checking out.
What this has made me reflect on though is the extent to which my “errors” often turn out to be useful, by fulfilling Cunningham’s Law. People chime in—either by commenting or sharing my article—to correct a mistake, which in turn boosts the article in the algorithm and draws more eyes, leading to more corrections, and on and on. The whole time, I’m slowly picking up subscribers who either missed the error or don’t care. For example, in my article on Ezra Klein and signaling, I included a section that I, frankly, did a poor job writing. It inspired a huge number of people to comment in confusion or frustration. The result? That article is, without a doubt, my best-performing one.
There isn’t an obvious solution to any of this—other than, I suppose, adopting a zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who makes mistakes, which won’t happen. So ultimately, it’s on us as writers to avoid making deliberate errors just to drive engagement, and on readers to discern the difference between genuine mistakes and engagement bait slop. Yet as Substack continues to grow and draws more writers from the “prestige” corners of the internet down into the muck with us plebeians, the obligation to be careful only increases. None of us have fact checkers or editors and so even if Substack is increasing the signal it is also increasing the noise—only God knows if the ratio has changed.
In the meantime, though, we can all enjoy knowing that the articles recommended to us are often the ones that got it most wrong.