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Since the rest is behind a paywall, just for fun let's deconstruct that intro paragraph! > MEASUREMENTS PERVADE life and society. Some parts of it, sure. And
by l0b0 8y ago
Since the rest is behind a paywall, just for fun let's deconstruct that intro paragraph!
> MEASUREMENTS PERVADE life and society.
Some parts of it, sure. And much more in some parts of the world than others.
> Infants are weighed the moment they blink into the world.
That practice is probably thousands of years old, because it is a good indicator of the health of both baby and mother.
> Pupils are graded.
Hundreds of years old, because if you want a standardized school system you have to at least seem to judge pupils by their merits in vaguely similar ways across a very diverse set of schools and educators.
> Schools are judged on their students’ performance, universities on graduates’ job prospects.
And this is where it starts falling down. Schools and universities in places with problems are funded so disparately that they are no longer standardized in practice, so stop-gap measures like these rear their ugly head.
> Companies monitor the productivity of employees
And studies have shown that measuring productivity is bad for morale and productivity, while being easy to game.
> while CEOs watch the share price.
... leading to short term thinking because human intuition is not very good at statistics.
> Countries tabulate their GDP,
Which seems to have been discredited.
> credit-rating agencies assess their economies,
Well, I'm just glad I've never had to live in a place where those are actually a thing.
> investors eye bond yields.
Very wisely.
> The modern world relies on such data. It would cease to function without them.
By this token most of the world has already ceased to function.
The subtitle, on the other hand, seems right on the money. Being someone who decides what to measure is a position of great power and responsibility, and I sincerely hope we get better at measuring the right thing, not measuring at all when it would do more harm than good, and knowing which to choose.
- poilcn 8y ago>Hundreds of years old, because if you want a standardized school system you have to at least seem to judge pupils by their merits in vaguely similar ways across a very diverse set of schools and educators. We can't know beforehand what is the right way to teach (or what one should learn). Only time can show. Imposing control over education makes everyone live by the same mediocre standards; you reduce dimensionality to just one scale from number A to number B and you cut out the randomness. At the end you get the same situation as in every field where you impose any sort of metrics: teachers and students just try to game them. >Being someone who decides what to measure is a position of great power and responsibility Humanity had whole 20th century to see how central planning works. One man or thousand can't do the job better for a multimillion society that each individual or groups of individuals can do themselves. Indeed it's a position of great power and it attracts corresponding type of people whom one should keep away from decisions that would affect millions. Whether they want to use with good will or malicious. >and I sincerely hope we get better at measuring the right thing, not measuring at all when it would do more harm than good, and knowing which to choose. That's sort of a fallacy. Using a broken or completely irrelevant instrument is not a good alternative to not having an instrument at all. Again, by imposing metrics on extremely complex things you reduce the number of dimensions (from infinite to calculable). It makes it look like it's under control, but that's just a self-delusion. At best it does not help at all, at worst it eventually produces a crisis.
- jfk13 8y ago> Since the rest is behind a paywall, just for fun let's deconstruct that intro paragraph! If you're interested in reading past the intro, https://outline.com/bXUSAW https://outline.com/bXUSAW should help.
- User1020 8y agoGreat post, though I disagree with GDP being discredited. GDP is the output of an economy, specificly defined. It isn't well-being, or some measure of how great a country is. It has a use for comparing countries in certain contexts. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm frankly surpsied at the number of posters coming out against "measurement" on a board that claims to be science and engineering oriented.