moneyball

I believe the “ tyranny of numbers ” has atrophied people’s abilities to listen to their body. Numbers can be helpful, but often cause me to lose the plot. I’ve found that I feel better when I let my body tell me what I really want, instead of the non-actionable anxiety associated with metrics.

remember, "interesting" "inspiring" and "informative" are all at odds with "optimized"

Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life - its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness - conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.... What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more

Are we undertaking the project of breaking down big giant ideas like ‘i feel weird and alone sometimes’ or ‘Why does life feel like its passing me by’ into smaller more manageable ideas because that’s a helpful framework to think about them or because its a helpful market framework to sell weird little solutions like fuckin headspace and better hel... See more

Overtime we’ve begun to treat this nuance and ambiguity as friction and something to program out. Computers don’t like it. Algorithms can’t categorize it. So we remove it.

Yet we so desperately need this “in between” and neither “yes” nor “no” thinking.

The data informs and influences us, but we choose based on the totality of our experience

In his own fine post on baseball and optimization a couple of years back, Rob Horning cited Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek.

Generally speaking, quantification and the logic of optimization which it encourages tend to transform our field of experience into points of aggression, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has aptly put it. Data-driven optimization is, in this sense, a way of perceiving the world. And what may matter most about this is not necessarily what it allows u... See more