Alt text:
[later] I'm pleased to report we're now identifying and replacing hundreds of outdated metrics per hour.
this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2024
674 points (98.8% liked)
xkcd
8895 readers
8 users here now
A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's wildly under-taught. It explains like half of all problems in the world. Education: "teaching to the test." Economics: optimizing GDP at the expense of non-material well-being. Maximizing shareholder value by selling out employees and enshittifying your product. Software: "data-driven decision making" optimizing short -term gains over long-term because they are more measurable. That's just off the top of my head.
But how else can the corporate bureaucracy hold its grip on people otherwise? The metrics are as necessary as catehism for catholicism.
The corporate bureaucracy is as much a product of the overall system, and just as much a slave to its incentives, as you or I. Though granted, the level of self-awareness of their role in the system is on average pretty low. With few exceptions, there is nobody at the wheel of problems like these. Worrying about whose fault it is is usually a waste of time.