intangible value
sari and
intangible value
People who insist that every product decision should be metrics-driven would also have to logically admit that theirs will be the first job to get automated by AI.
They told us productivity would set us free. So we organized and optimized and checked all the boxes. We became very good at being very busy.
But in the quiet moments between tasks, I felt something missing. Not the missing of empty inboxes or completed lists. The missing of wonder. Of discovery. Of the slow, sacred act of paying attention.
So I buil
... See morequality has no discernable metric
-miter
The 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 t... See more
A quote from When breath becomes air:
“Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.”
one of my favorite rory sutherland anecdotes is about how people complained that an elevator took too long to arrive. it would cost ~ a million dollars to make the elevators 5% faster. they solved the problem for ~$100 by adding mirrors so people groomed themselves while waiting
excellent example of creativity in problem solving. the complaint is not necessarily the solution.
do you ever find it weird that as a culture we decided that “progress” just means advancement in technology and numbers on a spreadsheet,
and that things like moral advancement, human joy, positive relationships, fulfillment, psychological development, and purpose don’t count?
Not all value can be captured and supported in a commercial context.