Metrics, models, and measurements are tools for understanding reality -- but when you start optimizing the metric instead of the thing it was supposed to measure, the tool starts shaping your reality instead.
| That uneasy feeling when a number that was supposed to help you understand something starts driving your decisions instead |
| The moment you notice yourself treating a model of a situation as if it were the situation itself |
| A growing awareness of when winning within a framework has come unmoored from winning in reality |
There is a special kind of disappointment when a system that was supposed to track something you care about starts changing the thing it measures. You set up a number to understand reality, and then the number becomes the goal -- and reality quietly slips out the back door.
That instinct to see every exchange as a contest -- if they are gaining, you must be losing. It is a deeply natural way to read the world, inherited from environments where resources really were fixed. But it quietly closes off the possibility that both sides could walk away with more than they started with.