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Topic · 5 articles

Care

Care is easy to declare and hard to instrument. These articles walk what happens when a product that means well hands the question of whether it is working to a number, and the number turns out to have been chosen, shaped, or pointed in a direction nobody examined. The order runs from the sign of a metric to the independence of a measure to the accuracy that flatters a system while describing a smaller life, then down to the parameter underneath and out to the person the whole apparatus was built to help.

Start reading The five-minute version

The through-line: The craft and The honest instrument and The owed disclosure , the long reads these articles expand on.

  1. 1 Start with the sign of the number, because a tool built to develop a person records its best outcome as a decline, and nothing further in this topic makes sense until that is on the page. Success looks like disuse
  2. 2 If the direction of a metric can be wrong, so can its independence, and the next failure is an instrument validated against a paraphrase of itself. The tautology trap
  3. 3 A circular measure at least reports something about wording; the harder case is a number that is genuinely accurate and still says more about the person's constraint than about the model. What accuracy measures
  4. 4 Behind every one of those numbers sits a smaller one that nobody argued about, set once in a configuration file and binding on everyone the system touches. The parameter is a policy
  5. 5 End where the measuring meets the person being helped, at the finding that identical guidance helps one of your users and costs the other at every moment, and that you cannot tell which without measuring them rather than the content. The expertise reversal

You have walked Instruments of care end to end: the metric whose good direction is down, the scale that agrees with itself, the accuracy that reads out a narrowed life, the parameter nobody voted on, and the guidance that crosses into interference. A tool that claims to care for its users is making claims that can be checked, and every one of them is a number somebody chose.

Practice Take one tool that claims to care for its users, including yours. Write three lines about it. What its graduation metric is, meaning what it records when someone no longer needs it. What question its evaluation begs, meaning where the thing being asked and the thing being proven are the same sentence. And which parameter somebody chose once, on behalf of everyone, without writing down who paid for it. If none of the three exists, you have not failed the exercise. You have measured the tool.

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