Paul Cantrell
What @saraislet said, I basically want to yell at everyone and everything within 1000m of somebody saying “KPI” in basically every business every.
quantification ≠ objectivity
quantification ≠ empiricism
quantification ≠ methodological soundness
quantification = mapping non-numerical things to numbers, and that’s it. The rest is up to you. https://infosec.exchange/@saraislet/115544576545095979
Paul Cantrell
Numbers never lie. Numbers never tell the truth, either. Numbers just •are•. It’s humans who tell the stories.
Cat Hicks
We barely scratched the surface on it in my Dev Office Hour today but much of the same came up!
(a slide from the slides I'm going to post up on it)
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina @saraislet
Good stuff.
Who was it who said: “All models are wrong. Some models are useful”?
Cat Hicks
@inthehands @saraislet https://www-sop.inria.fr/members/Ian.Jermyn/philosophy/writings/Boxonmaths.pdf :)
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina @saraislet
Should have known right off the bat, since it’s in my own course materials!
https://f25.comp127.innig.net/activities/bicycle/
see “Modeling sits at the heart of software development”
(My definition of “mental model” is probably wrong, and if so you should bop me over the head, Cat!)
David Smith
@inthehands it's fun how subtle this gets even in "objective" things like software performance.
When we did the iOS 12 launch time improvement push we intentionally chose the "wrong" metric: arithmetic mean instead of geometric mean. The rationale was that over-weighting the slowest apps would actually get us better results for our purposes.
Paul Cantrell
@Catfish_Man
That’s a great example! Even choosing an average is (1) a values decision and thus (2) a subjective decision.
One of my pet peeves: people taking the numeric mean of Likert scales mapped to numbers. (Oh, so you’re saying “(rarely + often) / 2 = sometimes”?? That’s a hell of an assumption right there. Linearity is a pretty strong constraint.)
David Smith
@inthehands "what incentives does this create?" has become a durable meme in at least one of my social circles as a result of that project
Paul Cantrell
@Catfish_Man It’s a really, really good question.
Cat Hicks
@inthehands @saraislet @ddrake no I think it's great! What nice materials!!
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina @saraislet @ddrake
💙💙💙
Cat Hicks
@toxi @inthehands @saraislet are we all co-writing a mastodon intervention science textbook right now?! 😄
I vote in the section with cobra effects we need to talk positive spillovers too
Paul Cantrell
@grimalkina @toxi @saraislet
something about how receiving •any• medical care improves overall health
something about how that same thing happens in teaching, too; riff on social dynamics in the classroom, peer relationships, and especially hierarchy in education
then something about class sizes, which students get to have meaningful human relationships at the center of their schooling, how this maps to privilege and power and marginalization and inequality
(The detailed thread is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Karsten Schmidt
@grimalkina @inthehands @saraislet Perfect companion to a recent thread about the Surrogation and the Perverse Incentive over here:
Paul Cantrell
Such a fantastic track on a fantastic album
Tormod
"...
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
…"
Crosseyed and Painless, Talking Heads, 1980
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