I recently saw a sassy T-shirt that read, "Without data, you're just another person with an opinion." I found this funny because with data, the person is still in the same situation. The further we drive along the road of data-centric culture, in fact, the more subjective data seems to become.
Data scientists off the clock will readily tell you that researchers can make data say whatever they want it to say, but that issue is hardly worth discussing. What strikes me as I get older is that reliance on a particular indicator pulls me farther from what I cared about originally.
I began to notice this when I was younger, playing--of all things--Madden, a video game simulation of the NFL. I loved taking a franchise through decades and building player skills along the way. Once I could win games most of the time, I tried to get as many yards per game as possible to improve my player's "skills" (these were graded from 1-99 and improved based on yards). But something funny happened: the more I would try to maximize my team's yards, the more I would lose. The game was no longer fun at this point, but I took grim satisfaction at fielding players with superhuman attribute scores. And still, my distraction would lead me to lose more and more often. Only on taking an overdue break and reminding myself to just play the football game could I get back to winning. Otherwise, the metrics I was relentlessly pursuing obscured the game itself.
This robust empirical study aside, certain tendencies seem evident. It seems to me that the metrics we adopt to propel progress convert to impractical abstractions in proportion to our dedication to them.
There are no shortage of examples pointing toward this theory. They could be public policies designed to ease the costs of homeownership or college that ultimately drive the prices skyward. Or the relentless focus on GDP itself, which has ostensibly made everyone better off most every year since the great depression (yet young people can't afford houses, children, or anything besides a meal at McDonalds). A gambler might confuse the win with an indicator of his singularity such that his original object (presumably winning money) becomes more and more remote with time. A parent might look to the USA News Ranking of a school rather than their child's impression of campus. In Law firms, the analogy is ubiquitous: BigLaw incentive structure does not reward good legal work but the number of hours spent on legal matters.
Less interesting but perhaps more precise is the mileage a car gets. I have a car. I have sometimes recorded the mileage it got each time I refill at the gas station. Now, mileage (high ratio of miles travelled per unit fuel) is great, but it is an indicator of very limited usefulness. Namely, to answer the question: how efficient is a car in certain driving conditions? Given the typical uses of a car--getting from origin to destination safely, in the least amount of time--it is really pretty silly to pay attention to. Because the outcomes of optimizing on mileage are to be 1) fooled by randomness or 2) to modify my behavior to make the car appear more efficient.
I might take a highway route to work to boost efficiency. Even if it took the same amount of time as the other route, it would not necessarily save me money. Rather, I likely would have traveled more miles and thus driven the mpg figure marginally up. Or I might buy a higher octane fuel. This, too, would undercut my personal economy merely to improve the apparent efficiency of my vehicle! And while most readers are more circumspect than I am, I still extrapolate that this bent to metrics subsists in society much more broadly and contorts social purpose everywhere.
SMART goals are efficacious as much because they are specific as because they are time-limited. The importance of iterating goals and changing course hedges against the teleological entropy I have described without defining. The entropy is as inevitable as the gravitational pull.
When federal authorities predicated funding on standardized test scores in the early 2000s (No Child Left Behind) schools at or below the cutoff needed to make changes. Those changes improved students' ability to take the test, but at the cost of local and general educational goals. Some schools outright facilitated cheating. Others taught to the test at the expense of curricula developed over decades. That educational metric had swift consequences, not all of them bad, but the irony was that it left a great many children behind. Both those whose schools fell below standards and those whose schools had recalibrated to the test suffered.
Iteration of purpose can help mitigate blunting, entropy, or perversion of purpose but, seemingly, in inverse proportion to the size of the adopting community and the sweep of the metric.
There may be limited escape from teleological entropy in society at large because of the mutuality of this progressive delusion, however. (Does the marketplace and the exchanges it allows correct for individual myopia? That I value a good more than its price and the seller value it less might rectify a degree of skewness. But what if the distortions are qualitative?)
An ambitious law student is unlikely to get the most challenging work unless they are hired by a great law firm. Great law firms look first to the law students' GPA. Law students ensure a high GPA working hard at taking comparatively easy classes and kowtowing to their professors. This strategy will land them the job but seems unlikely to prepare them for the challenge. It's a simplified model, but it shows that even a mutual focus on a metric, in this case GPA, leads to gamification and frustration of purpose.
The Romans and Pharisees meant to make Christ an unambiguous sign. They raised his broken body as an altar to their worldly power. Happily, their pursuit achieved something very different from their purpose. But did they ever learn that lesson? Did their sons, daughters, or descendants learn it? Or is theirs a lesson each community must learn itself in large scale and small?
Data scientists off the clock will readily tell you that researchers can make data say whatever they want it to say, but that issue is hardly worth discussing. What strikes me as I get older is that reliance on a particular indicator pulls me farther from what I cared about originally.
I began to notice this when I was younger, playing--of all things--Madden, a video game simulation of the NFL. I loved taking a franchise through decades and building player skills along the way. Once I could win games most of the time, I tried to get as many yards per game as possible to improve my player's "skills" (these were graded from 1-99 and improved based on yards). But something funny happened: the more I would try to maximize my team's yards, the more I would lose. The game was no longer fun at this point, but I took grim satisfaction at fielding players with superhuman attribute scores. And still, my distraction would lead me to lose more and more often. Only on taking an overdue break and reminding myself to just play the football game could I get back to winning. Otherwise, the metrics I was relentlessly pursuing obscured the game itself.
This robust empirical study aside, certain tendencies seem evident. It seems to me that the metrics we adopt to propel progress convert to impractical abstractions in proportion to our dedication to them.
There are no shortage of examples pointing toward this theory. They could be public policies designed to ease the costs of homeownership or college that ultimately drive the prices skyward. Or the relentless focus on GDP itself, which has ostensibly made everyone better off most every year since the great depression (yet young people can't afford houses, children, or anything besides a meal at McDonalds). A gambler might confuse the win with an indicator of his singularity such that his original object (presumably winning money) becomes more and more remote with time. A parent might look to the USA News Ranking of a school rather than their child's impression of campus. In Law firms, the analogy is ubiquitous: BigLaw incentive structure does not reward good legal work but the number of hours spent on legal matters.
Less interesting but perhaps more precise is the mileage a car gets. I have a car. I have sometimes recorded the mileage it got each time I refill at the gas station. Now, mileage (high ratio of miles travelled per unit fuel) is great, but it is an indicator of very limited usefulness. Namely, to answer the question: how efficient is a car in certain driving conditions? Given the typical uses of a car--getting from origin to destination safely, in the least amount of time--it is really pretty silly to pay attention to. Because the outcomes of optimizing on mileage are to be 1) fooled by randomness or 2) to modify my behavior to make the car appear more efficient.
I might take a highway route to work to boost efficiency. Even if it took the same amount of time as the other route, it would not necessarily save me money. Rather, I likely would have traveled more miles and thus driven the mpg figure marginally up. Or I might buy a higher octane fuel. This, too, would undercut my personal economy merely to improve the apparent efficiency of my vehicle! And while most readers are more circumspect than I am, I still extrapolate that this bent to metrics subsists in society much more broadly and contorts social purpose everywhere.
SMART goals are efficacious as much because they are specific as because they are time-limited. The importance of iterating goals and changing course hedges against the teleological entropy I have described without defining. The entropy is as inevitable as the gravitational pull.
When federal authorities predicated funding on standardized test scores in the early 2000s (No Child Left Behind) schools at or below the cutoff needed to make changes. Those changes improved students' ability to take the test, but at the cost of local and general educational goals. Some schools outright facilitated cheating. Others taught to the test at the expense of curricula developed over decades. That educational metric had swift consequences, not all of them bad, but the irony was that it left a great many children behind. Both those whose schools fell below standards and those whose schools had recalibrated to the test suffered.
Iteration of purpose can help mitigate blunting, entropy, or perversion of purpose but, seemingly, in inverse proportion to the size of the adopting community and the sweep of the metric.
There may be limited escape from teleological entropy in society at large because of the mutuality of this progressive delusion, however. (Does the marketplace and the exchanges it allows correct for individual myopia? That I value a good more than its price and the seller value it less might rectify a degree of skewness. But what if the distortions are qualitative?)
An ambitious law student is unlikely to get the most challenging work unless they are hired by a great law firm. Great law firms look first to the law students' GPA. Law students ensure a high GPA working hard at taking comparatively easy classes and kowtowing to their professors. This strategy will land them the job but seems unlikely to prepare them for the challenge. It's a simplified model, but it shows that even a mutual focus on a metric, in this case GPA, leads to gamification and frustration of purpose.
The Romans and Pharisees meant to make Christ an unambiguous sign. They raised his broken body as an altar to their worldly power. Happily, their pursuit achieved something very different from their purpose. But did they ever learn that lesson? Did their sons, daughters, or descendants learn it? Or is theirs a lesson each community must learn itself in large scale and small?