There is a growing feeling that our use of metrics is doing more harm than good. My title today is a mis-quote from Rebecca Solnit; she actually said ‘tyranny of the quantifiable‘ or perhaps it is combination of her quote and the title of a new book by Jerry Muller: ‘The Tyranny of Metrics‘ that was reviewed in the FT Weekend on 27/28 January 2018 by Tim Harford, who recently published a book called Messy that dealt with similar issues, amongst other things.
I wrote ‘growing feeling’ and then almost fell into the trap of attempting to quantify the feeling by providing you with some evidence; but, I stopped short of trying to assign any numbers to the feeling and its growth – that would have been illogical since the definition of a feeling is ‘an emotional state or reaction, an idea or belief, especially a vague or irrational one’.
Harford puts it slightly differently: that ‘many of us have a vague sense that metrics are leading us astray, stripping away context, devaluing subtle human judgment‘. Advances in sensors and the ubiquity of computing power allows vast amounts of data to be acquired and processed into metrics that can be ranked and used to make and justify decisions. Data and consequently, empiricism is king. Rationalism has been cast out into the wilderness. Like Muller, I am not suggesting that metrics are useless, but that they are only one tool in decision-making and that they need to used by those with relevent expertise and experience in order to avoid unexpected consequences.
To quote Muller: ‘measurement is not an alternative to judgement: measurement demands judgement – judgement about whether to measure, what to measure, how to evaluate the significance of what’s been measured, whether rewards and penalties will be attached to the results, and to whom to make the measurements available‘.
Sources:
Lunch with the FT – Rebecca Solnit by Rana Foroohar in FT Weekend 10/11 February 2018
Desperate measures by Tim Harford in FT Weekend 27/28 February 2018
Muller JZ, The Tyranny of Metrics, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Image: http://maxpixel.freegreatpicture.com/Measurement-Stopwatch-Timer-Clock-Symbol-Icon-2624277
In an echo of Henry Thoreau’s retreat to the woods around Walden pond, Sylvain Tesson escaped the ugliness of modern life and spent six months in a log cabin on the shore of Lake Baikal in Siberia. He wanted to surround himself with silence in the wilderness. He kept a diary ‘as a supplement to memory, to stave off forgetting’. He describes how the act of writing ‘makes life fruitful’; how ‘the daily appointment with the blank page forces one … to listen harder, to think more clearly, to see more intently’. I have similar feelings about writing a weekly post for this blog and being faced with a blank screen each week. Sometimes it is a joy to order my thoughts and commit some of them to writing; other times it is a chore and a challenge to dream up something vaguely interesting to tell you.
Realize Engineering 