Choosing your metrics, KPIs, etc...

how to measure what matters + philosophical musings on whether the important things can be measured

Overpowered Metrics Eat Underspecified Goals

Which leads on to my next point. See, not only do numbers not capture what matters (love, happiness, awe, spirituality, creativity are by definition unquantifiable beyond mere surface appearances) they are also extremely open to manipulation.

thomasjbevan.substack.com • The Tyranny of Numbers - By Thomas J Bevan - The Commonplace

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Too Much Efficiency Makes Everything Worse: Overfitting and the Strong Version of Goodhart's Law

Jascha Sohl-Dickstein sohl-dickstein.github.io

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Measuring what matters

Rob Hardy ungated.media

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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.

There is a common issue of over-optimizing the metrics in business, which can damage the whole system. Doing the wrong thing efficiently is actually worse than doing the right thing badly. – Rory Sutherland

phoebe

Human pain is too abstract to be represented in spreadsheets.

Craig Mod • Offscreen Magazine Interview

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How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

Douglas W. Hubbard • 6 highlights

amazon.com

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aura = body

Finding the right metric

Ted Merz, who used to be the Global Head of News Product at Bloomberg, has an insightful article about how the company's founder (Mike Bloomberg) uses metrics as a management tool. One metric that is prominently displayed around the office on TV screens is the number of Bloomberg terminals sold year-to-date.

This single... See more

andrea