C. Thi Nguyen

And that these are the two...

I don't know if this is right, like the two cutting edges that go together intrinsically.

And I think to understand the heart of what metrics are doing for us, I mean, it's really easy, and I often am guilty of this, of just pointing out terrible metrics.

They're just crap metrics that we know about.

Like my new favorite is a friend of mine who's a student advisor says that the new metric for his student advising system is being judged by how many keystrokes go into the student advising computer system per minute.

That's how they're advising.

Obviously, that's terrible.

But I think it's really good to focus on the best metrics we have, like the ones you're talking about, to really understand the core difficulty.

There are a few ways to put it.

So one is to say it's not that these metrics aren't measuring something real and they aren't objectively tracking something that we want to know about.

It's that they speak so loudly that

that they threaten to drown out other nearby qualities that are also incredibly valuable, but are harder to measure.

And I think there's a particular kind of quality or character to what's easy to metrify.

Um, and, uh,

So I think maybe you'll have examples of this from economics, but an example I think about a lot is in health policy, because it's extremely easy when you're making recommendations about how much saturated fat to consume.

Correlations to...

Lifespan, the heart attack rate, those are clear measurables.

And then there's the other stuff, like the deliciousness of brie, the joy of a perfectly ripe cheese, the tradition involved, right?

Just the happiness of it.

And these are much harder to quantify.