C. Thi Nguyen on Why Measuring Everything Ruins Everything
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I think there are two fantasies that people have when they approach metrics. One fantasy is that the metric captures everything that's important and we just need to optimize for it. And the other fantasy is a fantasy that I had lived in in the past, which is these things are just wholly terrible. They're evil. They miss everything that's important.
We should just get rid of them and enter some kind of non-metricized utopia. And what I've come to think is not only do metrics have a very powerful function and a very powerful cost, but those are inextricably connected. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. One of the questions that I keep returning to is how we should think about the role of metrics in modern life.
On the one hand, we need metrics. We need metrics in order to know when we're making progress and when we're not, in order to measure whether institutions are actually living up to their goals. They are an important motivation and accountability mechanism. On the other hand, metrics tend to flatten the genuine goals that we want to pursue into those artificial metrics. Metrics for universities, for example, have led to really adverse incentives in which universities spend enormously on the latest gym,
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