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   JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 10:15:10 JST JA Westenberg

   This is the paradox: The more we try to measure everything, the more we miss what matters.

   Choose to be measured by the impact you create, not just the data you collect.

   https://www.signalvs.com/the-quantification-fallacy/

   • Embed this notice
     Katy Swain (katyswain@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 10:15:09 JST Katy Swain

     in reply to

     • Cory Doctorow
     • mia duval 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

     @portugeek @Daojoan Something from @pluralistic I'm always quoting:

     "Quantitative disciplines – physics, math, and (especially) computer sci­ence – make a pretense of objectivity. They make very precise measure­ments of everything that can be measured precisely, assign deceptively precise measurements to things that can’t be measured precisely, and jet­tison the rest on the grounds that you can’t do mathematical operations on it."

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     mia duval 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 (portugeek@c.im)'s status on Monday, 10-Feb-2025 10:15:10 JST mia duval 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

     in reply to

     @Daojoan Until recently I was working for a massive European institution that was rolling out a new way to “measure” our work. Basically everything had to be a project, so everyone’s work can be quantified within PM tools. It doesn’t matter what the actual contribution of the individual is, if there isn’t a metric for it within a project, it wasn’t valuable. Even regular maintenance work had to be shoehorned into projects just in case upper management thought it useless and discarded it.

     This quantify everything trend is happening everywhere for every department. If it’s not measurable, it’s not important. If you can only see your organisation’s work via a spreadsheet, you don’t know diddly squat about it and the work it does. These people want to know the cost of everything, because they can’t understand the value of anything.

     Kit Rhett Aultman repeated this.