Thank you for highlighting that function and purpose it was what stumped me when I first come upon it a couple of years ago and did a similar put down and now I'm picked up
Yeah it's an odd one. Someone else (Megan over on Patreon) suggested that "aim" is a better term and I agree — I think it loses the teleological element while still retaining this sense of direction.
Now if I could just figure out how the rest of the pieces fit together we'd be doing well! Great book so far though
Great takeaways! “Good hart’s Law”-“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Could you elaborate for us? Does this affect the maxim “to begin with the end in mind”? And cautions us against preconceived assured outcomes?
Interesting question. One way of thinking about this that I've struggled with is reading. I used to have a goal to read 52 books a year. Average 1 book a week. The trouble with this is that it led me to reading more short books or more books that were easier to read. The big ambitious life changing books didn't get read so the goal of being a better reader got kind of compromised because of the measure.
That's at a personal level where I'm the only major variable so accountability is much simpler. When you scale that up to a monster system you get much stickier problems. We make carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the measure of our battle with climate change. This could lead us to develop carbon capture plants that lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere meanwhile deforestation and ecosystem destruction only gets worse (since we don't have an easy way of capturing carbon this hasn't happened and we're fighting every way we can including forestation)
So basically the metric you choose warps your system towards that goal creating blindspots. If I changed my metric to reading measured by time then I might read things I've already read or perhaps spend more time distracted while reading. It doesn't give the push onwards that the number of books does. Hope this helps
Thank you for highlighting that function and purpose it was what stumped me when I first come upon it a couple of years ago and did a similar put down and now I'm picked up
Yeah it's an odd one. Someone else (Megan over on Patreon) suggested that "aim" is a better term and I agree — I think it loses the teleological element while still retaining this sense of direction.
Now if I could just figure out how the rest of the pieces fit together we'd be doing well! Great book so far though
Great takeaways! “Good hart’s Law”-“when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Could you elaborate for us? Does this affect the maxim “to begin with the end in mind”? And cautions us against preconceived assured outcomes?
Thank you. This was very interesting to read.
Interesting question. One way of thinking about this that I've struggled with is reading. I used to have a goal to read 52 books a year. Average 1 book a week. The trouble with this is that it led me to reading more short books or more books that were easier to read. The big ambitious life changing books didn't get read so the goal of being a better reader got kind of compromised because of the measure.
That's at a personal level where I'm the only major variable so accountability is much simpler. When you scale that up to a monster system you get much stickier problems. We make carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the measure of our battle with climate change. This could lead us to develop carbon capture plants that lower the amount of carbon in the atmosphere meanwhile deforestation and ecosystem destruction only gets worse (since we don't have an easy way of capturing carbon this hasn't happened and we're fighting every way we can including forestation)
So basically the metric you choose warps your system towards that goal creating blindspots. If I changed my metric to reading measured by time then I might read things I've already read or perhaps spend more time distracted while reading. It doesn't give the push onwards that the number of books does. Hope this helps