How To Break Anything

An important related implication of the above is that something being profitable doesn't necessarily mean it is valuable, either. In an excerpt from the post "Payola," Seth captures these ideas below:

The New York Times bestseller list is even more easily manipulated than Billboard ever was. It doesn't cost much to scam it and it's pretty straightforward to buy your way onto the list (I know authors who have done this and consultants who sell this service.) You can hire a bunch of old ladies who will go into the 'right' stores and buy books on the right day. As a result of this distortion, the books on the list get more promoted, and thus sell more copies. It's not pretty but it's true.

Certainly, there is in fact a kind of value that both popularity and profitability can measure. I see these as indicators of something being what I call "business-valuable," and I include them on the right side of what I'm calling a paradox in the image above.  

From Seth's excerpt above I can't help but be reminded about SEO and any number of other strategies that I generally think of as "putting business-valuable before wisdom/long-term valuable." It's easy to look at the first and notice that it is in fact a kind of value, without considering the other (I argue more important) kinds of value in the world.

The biggest culprit [contributing to rising costs of higher education] is the lack of objective, publicly available information about how well colleges teach and how much college students learn. Nobody knows which colleges really do the best job of taking the students they enroll and helping them learn over the course of four years. After decades of inaction, some recent efforts have been undertaken to collect that information: It now exists, but colleges and their powerful (and virtually unknown) lobbies will not permit the public to see it.

The above from today's Idea Of The Day article. It had me thinking a bit longer than usual, and it just occurred to me why: it has just illuminated to me why I've always leaned more towards qualitative analysis than quantitative.

The problem I have with metrics is that they have to be interpreted. This is usually done poorly, on some third-grade level like "more impressions/eyeballs=successful message. Quantitative!"

The above suggests that there is a set of data that can be used to determine - objectively - "how much students learn."

As you might imagine, the methods by which those metrics are determined and valued are entirely subjective. This is not to say that they can't be good, it is more to say that they have to be selected carefully.

What it means to "successfully learn something that will be valuable" is just a nebulous question as what it means to "successfully deliver a message." Determining what metrics will best measure those things is a qualitative processes.

In other words: on some fundamental level, it's all qualitative.

(Quant vs qual is obviously quite a complex subject so I'd imagine someone out there disagrees or has another perspective on this. Perhaps it's you? )

Just ran into this silly little short-sighted thought: 

"The most obvious way to turn AR into a money-spinner would be via advertising."

This is 3rd-grade level thinking.

Also, you could pretty much substitute for anything for "AR". Here are some examples, feel free to generate as much ROI as you'd like from them:

"The most obvious way to turn your blog into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn the internet into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn twitter into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn google buzz into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn baseball into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn legos into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn the Olympics into a money-spinner would be via advertising."
"The most obvious way to turn the national anthem into a money-spinner would be via advertising."

GS: Why can't you just tell people what the meaning of, say, polluting is?

GN: You can. It's called propaganda.

GS: Why shouldn't we use propaganda then? Why do you have to let people discover the meaning of such things for themselves?

GN: The discovery of radical alternatives happens in smaller steps and in individual minds and hearts. For example, I love baking and I used to do a lot of it in my big old gas oven. Then I put a sensor in my kitchen and learned that a lot of CO2 gets produced. Even after I turn the oven off, hours afterward, CO2 was still sitting in my kitchen to a tune of 2,000 parts per million. The cookies were long gone and I was still sitting in a soup of gas. Once I became aware of that, my wife and I got  a convection oven instead, and now we bake with that. I bake less and the oven is a little smaller, but I don't have a CO2 lake in my kitchen anymore. It became actionable to do less because of harm reduction, essentially.

Greg Niemeyer is an artist and game programmer working with interactive art at UC Berkeley. He integrates game mechanics and behavioral economics into projects that get people to change their behavior. I love the above quote from his interview with CITRUS, referencing one of his latest sensor projects that allows people to easily monitor their own air quality.

We try to force meaning onto people all the time. It's not just called propaganda. It's also called advertising.