| ▲ | ianhorn 3 hours ago | |
Two things come to mind: - Whatever you measure gets optimized. - When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate. But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things. In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org. | ||