Fixated on Metrics

Brendan Patrick Purdy reviews the book The Tyranny of Metrics (emphasis added):

The use of quantitative-based rules is not limited merely to government agencies in the United States like public education and the military, but other spheres of society such as medicine, non-profit organizations, and even baseball. If this was merely a philosophical inconsistency between judgment and rules with no pragmatic import, then it could be safely ignored like most of which philosophers worry about. However, in his well-written and engaging monograph The Tyranny of Metrics, Jerry Z. Muller demonstrates that the government and other public entities reliance on metrics, i.e. descriptive statistics that are quantitative measurements of performance, result in a host of negative unintended consequences. A descriptive statistic is a single value that summarizes data, so a metric has the additional attribute of specifically being a statistic that measures performance in some way. A couple of examples of metrics that Muller discusses are the college and university rankings of US News and World Report and mortgage backed security ratings that were part of the financial crisis of 2008.

While Muller freely admits that his ideas regarding metrics are neither new nor original, he offers a compact synthesis from the disparate literature. The criticism of metrics in the literature has not only generally been isolated from one another by the archipelago of academic disciplines, but completely absent in the public conversation other than baseball. Muller ardently hopes to change the privation of public discourse on metrics with his approachable work on what he terms “metric fixation”. The best summation of Muller’s distinction between metrics and metric fixation can be found in the Introduction.

The whole scouts versus stats argument was settled by realizing there was value in both. It appears more areas need to reach this type of conclusion.

from baseballmusings.com https://ift.tt/2LdQA3D