Thread by @mipsytipsy

So @garthk drops this article as @mipsytipsy bait. forbes.com/sites/davidsha…

First sentence: "The dashboard is the potent symbol of our age" and I'm already drooling (or slavering). GO ON

"Dashboards are the physical manifestation of the ideology of big data, the idea that if you can measure it you can manage it.... [but increasingly] constant measurement often appears to be an end in itself."

It goes on to cite McNamara, Steven Levy, and experts from health, govt, academia saying awesome things like:

"The threat is that we will let ourselves be mindlessly bound by the output of our analyses even when we have reasonable grounds for suspecting that something is amiss."

The killer quote -- which should thump the heart of every engineer -- is,

"Metrics fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data."

👏🌷🙏🌈🙌

Metrics alone are not the answer. More metrics isn't necessarily better. The only answer is metrics **and good judgment**.

There is an excerpt of a paper I am now dying to read, on professional judgment. It concludes...

"Measurements are not simply imposed from the top down. They also colonize our own understandings of merit."

Colonize our understandings of merit. Holy fuckola.

The issue isn't the data is bad, it's that gathering it, using it, or deciding what to gather and use are all human fallible acts.

Once you confuse the dashboard with reality, you lose the game.

TIL "fractionated expertise", meaning that "there are situations where expert wisdom deserves to be trusted, and situations where it shouldn’t be."

Anyway. Go read the article, it's killer, and has a rad list of further reading in the footnotes! forbes.com/sites/davidsha…

p.s. I promised @monkchips I was going to stop snarking on dashboards, and I am! I have! this is just a potent measured analysis, I read it in Forbes!!! 🤞🤓