The Triumph of Counting and Scripting | Hacker News Reader

The Triumph of Counting and Scripting

slate.com

46 pointsviburnum10 comments

Reminds me of an observation from a podcast done by a successful creative (sorry, can't remember who, I think Rick Rubin was interviewing the person):

Our society thinks it is normal to have a creative work evaluated by accounting, but never the reverse.

It would be fun to reverse that. "Ok, Jones, you made a profit of 30M, but we don't really see that you released that much creativity. We're going to have to cancel your project."

> Our society thinks it is normal to have a creative work evaluated by accounting, but never the reverse.

It is normal because it makes sense: people can spend the money as they wish, but the same cannot be stated for creativity.

Material conditions apply. True profit occurs when our actions improve material conditions in pareto efficient way. Art that makes us better off is more valuable than art that does not... definitionally.

The market isn’t great at measuring whether art improves the lives of those within it.

The art market is a very interesting one - in both that it's driven in large part by human factors ( psychological ), and it's quite open to manipulations of various sorts.

If you want to study pathologies markets can accrue then in my view the art market is a very good area to study.

This sort of exists, but unfortunately only as slow trainwrecks. It is how Bobby Kotick was finally ousted from Activision-Blizzard, and similarly with Amazon's Rings of Power, and Boeing's 737-Max, and also with the crap Disney puts out in the last 25 years (new star wars movies). With Kotick however, I fear he was just replaced with more competent bean-grubbers.

I think there are two different things here.

1. Are the things that are being measured the right things?

ie for teachers, you might look a pupils future job prospects, suicide rates, incarnation rates, or some measure of happiness, rather than the immediate test scores.

The wrong targets can cause damaging distortions.

2. Often the aim is to reduce poor performance by being prescriptive - but you have to be careful not to do that by reducing variation at both sides ( ie which includes constraining high performers ).

Surprising that the author doesn't mention Arlie Russell Hochschild's idea of "emotional labor," which Hochschild first wrote about over 40(!) years ago.

- Emotional labor seemed to be a term coined for non-obvious work that is not directly tied to a worker’s duties: service workers don’t have it as their work duties, but simply “being nice” and accommodating can take effort (work)

- Caring professions are more directly interpersonal and intimate; that there is an emotional component is more obvious and less incidental

- This is about administrative work that is completely separate from interpersonal work duties

everybody will be accounted AND scripted for.

freewill will first turn into a political debate, then an economic issue. finally it'll be realized as too expensive for "average joes" and hence we will have an answer to whether the universe is deterministic. A resounding YES. equivalently, we will know if we have free will, a resounding NO for that would not be as efficient.

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