The United States of Metrics
Others, though, are concerned. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the statistician and former options trader who wrote the best-selling book “The Black Swan,” about unexpected events, said he believes the current obsession with metrics is a seductive trap.
“The evil here is not having metrics,” he said. “The problem is that you start trying to maximize every metric you have and reduce everything else.”
“As a scientist, I can say that very little is measurable,” he said, “and even those things that are measurable, you cannot trust the measurement beyond a certain point.”
.. Mr. Taleb concurs. There are two schools of thought about metrics, he said. You can optimize everything, or you can do what the ancients did and say, “Good enough.”