Thread · 5 tweets · 4 Apr 2020

We have decided that our entire cultural production should be controlled exclusively by what engineers know how to measure. As an engineer, let me tell you: we don't know how to measure jack shit but poor proxies for the real thing.

The people who decide if your work will be found (search, social) and how much money you make when someone finds it (ads) are the same small group. The resulting groupthink means that only what can work in their view of the world gets to live. Cultural impoverishment ensues.

This is made worse by a deeply-seated belief that what they've set up is scientific and rational. Sadly, much of that world has a cartoonish, reductive understanding of science, of the "learn digits of pi" variety.

Running A/B tests doesn't make anything rational, or even grounded in data. No A/B testing will tell you you're asking the wrong question, it will just happily deliver the answer prompted by your unexamined assumptions.

This is not an anti-engineering view. We need to reclaim computing from the people who thought Java, real-time bidding, or AMP were good ideas. Maybe that is what we should call computer lib!