(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Dear Fellow Tech Nerds Please Stop Being Stupid; Or Not Everything Is Meaningfully Measurable [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-08-10 Lincoln Michel has written about a fiction analytics site called Prosecraft and just typing that sentence makes me want to cry in frustration. Please, my fellow tech nerds, please, I am begging you, please stop being so incredibly stupid. First, go read Michel’s post. It explains in great detail what Prosecraft was attempting to do and precisely how stupid it was. I have breakfast. I can wait. (And then go buy Michel’s book. It is really good.) Back? Good. I don’t think the owner of Proesecraft had evil intentions, though they do seem to have a rather loose care for the concept of copywrite and permissions. But the basic idea was deeply flawed to begin with. You cannot turn art into a series of numbers. Human beings simply do not work that way, and anyone with an ounce of appreciation for writing who took a moment to think about the concept would have seen that. Trying to decide how vivid a book is based on the presence of too many adverbs or an arbitrary ranking of the vividness of certain words is certifiably insane. Look, I get the lure of trying to combine your loves. Chocolate and peanut butter really do taste great together! But pickles and peanut butter, not so much. Appling mathematical concepts to problems sometimes leads to great insights. Sometimes it can help find new medicines. Sometimes it ruins baseball. You have to know why you think applying those methods would bring value to a problem and what the potential pitfalls can be. Measuring something can, if you are not careful, substitute the tyranny of what can be measured for a holistic view of a situation, for example. It can lead you to lean on changing only what can be measured instead of approaching all aspects of a problem. You have to be thoughtful in the use of math and measurement, be willing to move to other methodologies when appropriate, and to be humble enough to listen to experts when they tell you it is time to make such a move. And if you do just throw statistical methods at all sorts of problems in the hopes of finding new insights, you have to understand that most times you won’t find anything meaningful. You have to be intellectually honest enough to look at your data and realize when it’s not telling you anything worth knowing. Or worse, lying to you. This, I think, is one of the problems of modern capitalism, especially in the tech world. So much funding for new companies in tech comes from venture capitalists who all seem to chase the same fads. As a result, the pressure to be in those fads leads to everyone trying to do the same thing. It is why a few years ago everything was an “Uber for busses” followed by everything being a “Blockchain for dogs” and now “AI for books” (though Prosecraft predates the AI marketing terminology, machine learning has been a buzzword in venture capital for a decade or so). There is precious little original thought in that world, and so you get people chasing the same ideas in smaller and smaller circles. We need alternate sources of funding, like a government industrial policy, to ensure that real problems get the attention they deserve. One of the best things the Biden Administration has done is to start that process with its infrastructure act. Life is too important to be left to the groupthink of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. When we do, we get, well Prosecraft. I am sure its owner was sincere in their love of both math and writing. But I am also sure that they hoped to profit from combining those loves. Maybe if we had a means of rewarding people outside the fences imposed by venture capital, Prosecraft’s creator could have put their talents to better use and indulged the love of literature by, well, reading literature. In the meantime, please, fellow tech nerds, think a little bit harder before you follow the latest Silicon VC fads. You are making us all look dumb. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/8/10/2185951/-Dear-Fellow-Tech-Nerds-Please-Stop-Being-Stupid-Or-Not-Everything-Is-Meaningfully-Measurable Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/