Crawford "the building stands, the car runs, the lights are on" — marketing's probabilistic outputs violate the GC's calibrated expectations

Claim: Crawford's argument in Shop Class as Soulcraft (see [[crawford-shop-class-cognitive-richness-trades]]) that manual work calibrates the worker's expectation that "the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on" creates an expectation problem for marketing as a service category. Marketing's output is:

1. Probabilistic (not deterministic) — leads come in distributions, not on schedule.
2. Time-delayed — months between investment and observable lead flow.
3. Attributable only with effort — to specific tactical work; multi-touch attribution is non-obvious.

Each of these properties violates a default the GC has spent his career calibrating.

Confidence: Industry-consensus (Crawford-derived; consistent with marketing-vendor field experience).

For Candid: Make the work product as visible, durable, and inspectable as possible — a website, a published portfolio, a written case study, a measured lead-source attribution dashboard, deployment logs, before/after CWV runs. All concessions to the GC's deep expectation that work has a physical or documentary footprint. The flip side is to refuse to claim probabilistic outcomes as deterministic — see [[rule-be-explicit-about-marketing-cannot-do]].