Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...
how to measure what matters + philosophical musings on whether the important things can be measured
sari and
Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...
“One of the reasons the tech industry is so creatively bankrupt is that people just focus on attributes you can measure,” said Jony Ive, when told of the insecurity Kushner had confided to Rick Rubin. “I was very lucky at Apple, because Steve [Jobs] showed me there was a way to articulate things like sensibility, intuition, taste, which all start... See more
The New World: Joshua Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American dream
Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law
Jascha Sohl-Dicksteinsohl-dickstein.github.ioThe concept of efficiency — how much one can accomplish per unit of time (or per dollar, etc.) — requires a quantitative numerator as well as a denominator. It requires a metric. Therefore, it tells us nothing about results we cannot quantify or measure. When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while... See more
But ambiguity, taste, meaning, value, these remain hard to attain within the hierarchy of verifiability. “Intelligence” races ahead wherever the rewards are liquid and the outcome is easy to check, but it lags at the edges: in murky context, slow feedback, or spaces where the answer is more felt than measured.
While it’s tempting to believe a model... See more
While it’s tempting to believe a model... See more
Market of words
listen for truths that language cannot name
How did people respond? Did I strike an emotional nerve? This goes beyond easy, legible metrics like pageviews or social media likes, or even comments, which are at best hazy approximations of external resonance. It’s about looking for signals that something genuinely MATTERED to one or more humans, and elicited a response that’s out of proportion with the average digital interaction. Lots of likes is an okay-ish signal. Lots of comments is a clearer signal. A small handful of comments or private replies from people saying they’ve never felt so seen or understood by a piece of writing – that’s the kind of thing I’m trying to discern and quantify here.
Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals
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