If you want to some actual examples of how optimization based on data can be harmful, I suggest reading Seeing Like a State. If more people that made decisions

If you want to some actual examples of how optimization based on data can be harmful, I suggest reading Seeing Like a State. If more people that made decisions based on data read this book, the world would be a better place. The TL;DR is that data about a system does not reflect the underlying system perfectly, and thus is a distortion of the real system. Decisions based on this distorted data can be equally distorted, sometimes dangerously so. For software telemetry for instance, telemetry only gives the "what", not "how" eg. feature X is not used. Possible explanations: - Not useful to users -> Probably should be removed. - Not discoverable -> Probably should be kept and made more discoverable. - Difficult to use -> Probably should be kept and made easier to use. Most times (I'm looking at you here Mozilla and every commercial software provider ever) people take the shortcut of assuming the first explanation and removing it prematurely.