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ky3 | 5 years ago

Worth filing under: Gaming the System, in this case: image compression benchmarks.

Not everything that counts can be counted.

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krick|5 years ago

You mean more like "Not everything that can be counted — counts." If everything that counts can be counted is debatable.

ky3|5 years ago

No, I actually mean what I wrote: Not everything that counts can be counted. Take the happiness produced by a piece of software. Can we put a number on it?

Contrast Lord Kelvin: “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarely, in your thoughts advanced to the stage of science.”

And also this doozy writ large in our lives: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”