alt Hacker News> The problem with data driven decision making is that data is numeric, and the act of counting is necessarily an act of approximation, by which we erase the difference between objects or events in order to bucket them into a category so that they can be counted.
Yes, this is exactly right. To put it another way: When we quantify something, we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable. So our thinking is only about a tiny aspect of that thing's existence.
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Once I quit my internet service, and someone representing the internet provider called me and asked if I'd agree to participate in an exit survey.
Sure, I said.
"On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied were you with..."
"Umm, can I just tell you why I cancelled my service, as if you and I were both human beings?"
"I'm sorry, I have to follow this script exactly."
So I apologized to the guy and hung up.
Everyone quotes Goodhart's law, but I think the McNamara fallacy is even more important nowadays. It should be read aloud to every CEO every day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy
TLDR: Making a decision based on only qualitative data, and therefore ignoring qualitative information and observations, can lead to bad outcomes. Not everything that is important can be easily measured.
> we abstract away everything about that thing that is not quantifiable
It's worse, we simply abstract away everything else, including innumerable things that are quantifiable.