moneyball
on hyper-optimisation - what we gain and what we lose from it
moneyball
We’ve sacrificed nuanced judgment for a trend report without a methodology.
We’ve sacrificed white space thinking for whatever the average is doing.
And we’ve sacrificed the attributes we care most about (resonance, loyalty, fandom, influence and impact) for the metrics easily available to us (clicks, views and follows).
As Rick Rubin puts it,
We’ve sacrificed white space thinking for whatever the average is doing.
And we’ve sacrificed the attributes we care most about (resonance, loyalty, fandom, influence and impact) for the metrics easily available to us (clicks, views and follows).
As Rick Rubin puts it,
“If you... See more
Matt Klein • Self-Sabotaging Innovation: The Art of Doing Dumb Shit
My house plants became healthier and died less often once I stopped tracking their watering, stopped trying to use moisture meters or other tools, and learned to pick up on their vibes instead.
Many such cases.
Nat Eliasonx.comThe 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.
Adam Grant • Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent?
When everything is measured in terms of engagement, content will be optimized for addictiveness. Not entertainment or artistic merit. Not intellectual substance or creativity. Pure, plain addictiveness.
Mark Manson • Are you not entertained?
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.”
theconvivialsociety.substack.com • The Limits of Optimization
The data informs and influences us, but we choose based on the totality of our experience
learning to use data properly
Cultural Moneyballism, in this light, sacrifices exuberance for the sake of formulaic symmetry. It sacrifices diversity for the sake of familiarity. It solves finite games at the expense of infinite games. Its genius dulls the rough edges of entertainment. I think that’s worth caring about. It is definitely worth asking the question: In a world
... See moreOvertime 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.
Yet we so desperately need this “in between” and neither “yes” nor “no” thinking.
Matt Klein • Making Sense of Culture Amidst Contradiction
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.