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All measurements are in fact targets, whether intended or not; Goodhart's Law does not describe human error but a fundamental problem with measurement itself
60% confidenceUnless something can be measured, it cannot be improved; therefore the goal is to collect personal tools that assist in quantifiable measurement of the self
60% confidenceWhatever amount of personal data you are currently collecting will never feel sufficient; measurement begets more measurement as trackers continuously offer new metrics—heart rate variability, stress, exercise readiness, cardiovascular age
60% confidenceValue capture occurs when you adopt external sources of measurement and let them rule you without adapting them to suit your life, outsourcing your values and your own sense of meaning to an external metric or ranking
60% confidenceWhen a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
60% confidenceValue capture afflicts institutions across every domain: restaurants chase Yelp ratings over food quality; students chase GPA over education; scientists chase grants over truth; pastors compete on baptism rate leaderboards over spiritual development
60% confidenceMetrics inevitably redefine your core sense of what's important, whether you're aware of the trap or not; more personal or nuanced goals are ultimately replaced with simplified metrics or rankings
60% confidenceMetrics inevitably present one direction or option as better—longer lifespans, faster student graduation rates, more page views, higher customer satisfaction scores—making all measurements inherently directional targets
60% confidenceQuantification is a 'technology of distance' that minimizes the need for intimate knowledge and personal trust; metrics travel easily between contexts and are easy to grasp, but achieving that clarity requires simplifying the measured thing and jettisoning nuanced, qualitative information
60% confidenceWe have become so accustomed to seeing the world through numbers that it has deprived us of the language to express what is fundamental and valuable about our own humanity, which is urgently needed to answer what humans and AI are each for
60% confidenceAfter over a decade of tracking heart rate, steps, active calories, sleep, story engagement time, and stress levels, the author gained virtually nothing in terms of self-knowledge; the more he used numerical proxies, the worse he felt about everything
60% confidenceIf humans insist on expressing worth through attentional metrics and productivity scores, and turn intelligence and creativity into AI benchmarks, machines will always surpass us because that is literally what they are built to do; the answer is not to turn ourselves into machines
60% confidenceAny institutional quantification requires the evaluation procedure and its product to be comprehensible across contexts, which profoundly limits what the metric can measure; value capture results from internalizing that decontextualized nugget and guiding life by it
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