Trivial Pursuits | Hacker News Reader

Trivial Pursuits

lrb.co.uk

24 pointsdiodorus6 comments

If you don't like it when people make important decisions based on metrics because metrics can be abused, then you're really not gonna like what happens when people make important decisions without metrics.

Exactly this. They're a necessary evil and they require constant vigilance to minimize the "make what you measure" effect.

The original author's point is interesting, seeing rules as the constraints that, in one sense, spur creativity, give life. The reason the trumpet is the instrument of jazz isn't in spite of it having merely three valves, but because of it.

How about we make a competing metric for every metric that's being abused? Then at least there's some tension to the piece, instead of all-out paperclip manufacturing.

The distinction between good games and bad games here seems more like a distinction between games and things that are not games. The "games matter because games don't matter" thing seems more on point. Things like ranking colleges can never be games as long as they have serious real-world consequences.

> But it would take a writer of rare skill – which Nguyen is not – to make it compelling reading.

jesus

This line is basically the review in miniature.

In answering whether Nguyen's argument holds, Runciman decides Nguyen isn't talented enough to be worth judging, then judges him anyway. A book about scoring systems gets scored on the wrong axis. Runciman then uses this to great effect, blending this silly aesthetic complaint with a real structural one.

The structural point I even agree with. You can always take up a new game, but at the social level there is often no other game to play, and you can't opt out of a metric that has power over you. But Runciman doesn't trust the point to carry the piece, so the verdict on Nguyen's prose is enlisted to stand in for a verdict on Nguyen's case.

The irony: to fault the book for not being "compelling reading" is to let a convenient proxy displace the value it was meant to track. That is "value capture" as Nguyen puts it.

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