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A short monologue on creativity versus the need for concrete and quantifiable metrics that align with actual goals.
cc: @HelmanDaniel
To start, creativity is indispensible for many types of work, and it needs to be understood to design useful measurements.
cc: @HelmanDaniel
To start, creativity is indispensible for many types of work, and it needs to be understood to design useful measurements.
@HelmanDaniel Creativity qua creativity isn't useful, however - in fact, it's usually just the opposite.
So creativity is important to understand, but NOT to measure or reward. We want to allow creativity when it is useful, not measure a proxy for being creative.
So creativity is important to understand, but NOT to measure or reward. We want to allow creativity when it is useful, not measure a proxy for being creative.
@HelmanDaniel Measuring intermediate outcomes is always dangerous, since it doesn't align with the actual goal. That applies to creativity, which is not itself the goal, contra Prof. Cronin, below, and also to the opposite, narrow goals that strangle creativity.
@HelmanDaniel As a simplistic example, if I run a factory producing a strictly defined product, I have straightforwardly quantifiable outputs. I don't want people changing things just to be creative. I still want creative workers and ideas when there is a barrier that needs to be overcome.
@HelmanDaniel My metrics may strangle my workers.
They might, for instance, reward the person at station one if they input X items / hour. It's what they should normally do, but if there is a hold-up at station three, I want him to show flexibility to slow the line, and perhaps assist there.
They might, for instance, reward the person at station one if they input X items / hour. It's what they should normally do, but if there is a hold-up at station three, I want him to show flexibility to slow the line, and perhaps assist there.
@HelmanDaniel In academia, a similar issue exists. Publications and citations are rewarded, so academics in many disciplines are strangled into shorter-term projects that get them tenure, get funding, and get recognition. That's true even thought studies will be small-n, and not reproducible.
@HelmanDaniel Perelman's proof of Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture (which implied the Poincaré conjecture, with a $1m prize) took a decade of work. In the interim he published nothing of note since 1994 - so it's a good thing he didn't take the jobs offered at Princeton or Stanford.
@HelmanDaniel Rewarding creativity in mathematics wouldn't have helped. What mattered was the recognition of the result that got people to work on the hard problems, not some measurement of impossible-to-correctly-evaluate progress, or worse, rewarding measured creativity.
@HelmanDaniel No one knew that his work would pay off - not even himself. Perhaps some amount of cleverly designed peer-review of scholars or qualitative evaluation is helpful in the interim, but I suspect it isn't.
That's why we want to measure goals, or at least things that cause the goals.
That's why we want to measure goals, or at least things that cause the goals.
@HelmanDaniel Here's a link to my sound-cloud and patreon!
ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/09/goo…
mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/90649/1/MPRA_p…
i.e. my blog posts and paper on metrics and metric design.
(I'm gonna assume the tweetstorm blew up. I turned off notifications for likes and retweets b/c they aren't my actual goals.)
ribbonfarm.com/2016/06/09/goo…
mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/90649/1/MPRA_p…
i.e. my blog posts and paper on metrics and metric design.
(I'm gonna assume the tweetstorm blew up. I turned off notifications for likes and retweets b/c they aren't my actual goals.)
