Adonis Diaries

Archive for May 27th, 2018

How to Measure without measuring? Are you measuring what’s Not important?

Note: In experiment, testing or evaluation, what is being measured is called dependent variable.

Seth Godin had to say this June 5, 2013 on “Measuring without measuring”

As an organization grows and industrializes, it’s tempting to simplify things for the troops.

Find a goal, make it a number and measure it until it gets better. In most organizations, the thing you measure is the thing that will improve.

Colleges decided that the SAT were a useful shortcut, a way to measure future performance in college.

And nervous parents and competitive kids everywhere embraced the metric, and stick with it, even after seeing (again and again) that all the SAT measures is how well you do on the SAT (Nothing to do with intelligence or effective performance).

It’s easier to focus on one number than it is to focus on a life.

Paypal and Chase and countless other organizations do precisely this: they figure out a metric, decide it’s important and then create a department to improve that metric.

Consider the Chase Fraud Prevention department.

It costs a credit card company (and especially their merchants) a lot of money when fraudulent charges are made, because they often have to eat the cost.

So this department of thousands of people works to make the number of fraudulent charges go down at the same time they keep expenses low.

Which sounds great until you realize that the easiest way to do this is to flag false positives, annoy honest customers and provide little or no fallback when a mistake is made.

Simple example: I regularly get an automated phone call from the bank with an urgent warning. But even when I answer the phone, the system doesn’t let me ring through to an operator.

Instead, I have to write every detail down, then call, wait on hold, prove it’s me, type in all the information, and THEN explain to them that in fact, the charge was mine.

And this department has no incentive to fix this interaction, because ‘annoying’ is not a metric that the bosses have decided to measure.

Someone is busy watching one number, but it’s the wrong one.

Or consider the similar problem at Paypal.

Stories of good (or great) customers being totally shut down, sometimes to the point of bankruptcy, are legion. There may be people at Paypal who care about this, but the security people don’t. That’s because they’re not measuring the right thing.

Measurement is fabulous. Unless you’re busy measuring what’s easy to measure as opposed to what’s important.

 

Tidbits and notes posted on FB and Twitter. Part 201

Note: I take notes of books I read and comment on events and edit sentences that fit my style. I pa attention to researched documentaries and serious links I receive. The page is long and growing like crazy, and the sections I post contains a month-old events that are worth refreshing your memory.

The deep reason for Brexit was that in the last 2 decades, the British establishment went through deep depression as Germany dominated Europe in economic development and world export market share. England started WWI because Germany became #2 in world export after USA

The rationale of depressed British establishment for quitting EU was: “If there is no way to catch up with Germany, it is better for our sanity to lick our wounds in isolation”

In a complicated night dream, I handed a friend a $5,000 bill (does it exist?). He busted his ass to gather me some change which amounted to $30. My lucid dream got me working 3 minimum jobs to make ends meet.  Woke up relaxed

Suppose Palestinian teenage girl 3ahd Tamimi was Not a white blonde girl? Would a dark skinned girl wearing a veil Not be already handicapped by soldiers at age 10 when she refused to blink first?

“L’Ecume des Jours” by Boris Vian. A beautiful title that I keep forgetting.

Les cannoniéres Israeliennes se sont données a Coeur joie, bombardant le camps Palestinien de Rashidiya en 1982. Elles auraient pu bombarder toute une journée, mais la politique limite le nombre des victims.

The various factions among Shias and Sunnis have always been political in nature: positions according to the power-to-be. The Sunnis sided with the Caliph of Islam, regardless of Umayyad, Abbasid, Fatimid… The Shias were considered the heretic opposition factions because they opposed the Caliph.

Elle avait des yeux oú il faisait si bon vivre que je n’ ai jamais su oú aller depuis.

Begun in 2005 by the largest trade union federations and organizations in Palestinian society, B.D.S. calls for ending Israel’s 1967 occupation, “recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality,” and the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes and lands from which they were forcibly dispossessed, displaced and transferred to Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria in 1948.

Since Hezbollah is the most powerful political and social movement in Lebanon in number, organization, military training, and in readiness, it has the potential to either drive Lebanon to a secular democratic system or strengthen the multi-theocratic structure that the Lebanese have been subjugated to since independence in 1943.

Estafeed min zafaraatikat al tawilat wa anta waa3i. Kteer ma bi sorlon yozforo wa2t al abadiyyat, min mashaakel wa tasa2oulaat hal denyyeh

Estejdaa2 colonial powers yastalzem mouwazanat lel Dawlet

Internal security Officer Khashfeh is back among the Mouyamimeen bil kahrabat? Kaal kellon ekhweto wa wlado: a3taked biyodrob wlado bil bayt kamaan


adonis49

adonis49

adonis49

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