Derek Thompson

Real income, that is wages that are adjusted for inflation, is, I think, something that we should want to rise, and therefore it's important to look at that number and watch it rise, hopefully quarter after quarter, year after year.

So clearly,

Metrics, numbers can be incredibly useful, not only to make legible that which was previously illegible, but also to coordinate actors, to get many different people in many different places say, let's focus on pushing the poverty rate down, let's focus on raising average incomes.

How can metrics go awry if indeed they compress information usefully, coordinate action between actors that aren't initially coordinated, and even encourage action for providing some kind of agency?

Why do you see, despite metrics clearly doing some things that are useful, potentially them being dangerous in many circumstances?

That's such a profound idea.

It sparked a lot of different thoughts, and I'm hoping as I close my eyes now that I can find a way to recapitulate them in my response to you.

So first, you reminded me of sports.

I wrote a piece a few years ago now called The Dark Side of Moneyball.

about how the moneyball revolution in sports, which was the surge of analytics, initially in baseball, but eventually in basketball and other sports, made sports more efficient.

Teams got smarter about how to win.

In baseball, for example, teams focused more on base percentage, on walks and hits.

And as a result, in the last few years, we've seen the rise of what are called the three true outcomes of strikeouts and walks and home runs.

Teams have gotten smarter, but the overall product of baseball, I think, has gotten more boring as the teams got smarter, because there is no metric for what makes for an exciting baseball game.

So the individual actors coordinated on how to make game strategy more efficient, but there wasn't a metric for how do we make this game more fun.

And so by creating metrics for some things, attention was pulled toward how to make the game more efficient,

But attention was, one could argue, pulled away from how to make the overall game more fun.

When I think about that principle in individual lives, I think about the idea that it's very easy using my, and I'm now showing the camera, my aura ring, very easy to see what

what having a drink, especially after 7.30 p.m., does to my resting heart rate and to my HRV.

I can wake up in the morning and look at my iPhone rendering of my Oura Ring data and see, oops, my HRV absolutely frigging sucked last night.