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1/ All bad decisions in life arise from having optimized for the wrong metric (THREAD)
2/ Unfulfillment arises from using metrics chosen by others as proxies for personal success (e.g. a new car as a proxy for happiness).
3/ Sustainability problems arise from using short-term success as a proxy for long-term one.
4/ Failed relationships arise from choosing a person using widely-desirable traits as a proxy for personally-desirable ones.
5/ In general, regretful choices arise from using a widely accepted metric for success instead of a personally defined one.
6/ I once wrote "Humans are extremely good at succeeding at their priorities, and extremely dishonest about them".
7/ Meaning: we are great at acting in such a way to succeed at the metric we chose, but often choose the wrong one…
8/ …or don't realize we subconsciously chose another one.
9/ Even when we choose a proxy that is initially correlated with the ultimate outcome we desire, we fail at misunderstanding a keyconcept.
10/ Optimizing for a proxy reduces the correlation with the ultimate metric.
11/ E.g. running an ad to get more followers selects followers based on their ad sensitivity, not on their propensity to buy.
12/ If before the ad 2% of followers would end up as customers, after it it's likely on 1% will.
13/ As a consequence, using proxies is never a good idea.
14/ Prioritization is the art of spotting proxies and exclude them from our to-do list.
15/ Sadly, almost all educational advice is about how to optimize a given metric, not about choosing the right one to optimize.
16/ Of course, this itself happens because educators are using a proxy (knowledge transferability) as a substitute for educational impact.
I made a long post from this thread, adding more pieces of information. medium.com/@LucaDellAnna/…
