The Triumph of Counting and Scripting

Reminds me of an observation from a podcast done by a successful creative (sorry, can&#x27;t remember who, I think Rick Rubin was interviewing the person):<p>Our society thinks it is normal to have a creative work evaluated by accounting, but never the reverse.<p>It would be fun to reverse that. &quot;Ok, Jones, you made a profit of 30M, but we don&#x27;t really see that you released that much creativity. We&#x27;re going to have to cancel your project.&quot;

I think there are two different things here.<p>1. Are the things that are being measured the right things?<p>ie for teachers, you might look a pupils future job prospects, suicide rates, incarnation rates, or some measure of happiness, rather than the immediate test scores.<p>The wrong targets can cause damaging distortions.<p>2. Often the aim is to reduce poor performance by being prescriptive - but you have to be careful not to do that by reducing variation at both sides ( ie which includes constraining high performers ).

Surprising that the author doesn&#x27;t mention Arlie Russell Hochschild&#x27;s idea of &quot;emotional labor,&quot; which Hochschild first wrote about over 40(!) years ago.

everybody will be accounted AND scripted for.<p>freewill will first turn into a political debate, then an economic issue. finally it&#x27;ll be realized as too expensive for &quot;average joes&quot; and hence we will have an answer to whether the universe is deterministic. A resounding YES. equivalently, we will know if we have free will, a resounding NO for that would not be as efficient.