moneyball

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

It's scary to admit that you can't control the future; it's a lot easier to distract yourself by trying to optimize every decision, no matter how insignificant.

“Grunt work” can be central to building community, but only if you do it yourself.

The Unaccountability Machine by Dan Davies is a fantastic book, which argues that people create these models because if you can reduce decision-making to an algorithm, or a formula, or a process, or a procedure, you avoid the risk of blame.

What emerges is a system where intimacy is reframed as economics, and selfhood becomes something to trade. And while it presents itself as rational, even strategic, it ultimately functions as another form of performance: engineered for attention, sustained by anxiety, and constantly escalating.

It’s hard not to see this as a kind of cultural... See more

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.

We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour. 

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.”