Very interesting long read on “value capture” — when measurements like grades, citation counts, or step counts take over the true values (learning, writing, health) you actually care about. Also related to “stop the numbers game” by David Parnas (“Counting papers slows the rate of scientific progress”).
From the abstract this sounds a lot like Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." Or is there more to it than that?
@jesper Indeed. But value capturing as I understand it is more about the impact on people, when they become obsessed with external metrics instead of following their heart / intrinsic motivation.
I'm fascinated by this. I began #SocialCoding movement ("Coding is Social") from observations on social dynamics in grassroots movements, particularly #FOSS and #Fediverse, where the former is inherently unsustainable (for participants) and the latter needs "substrate formation" (people + processes to evolve ecosystem/standards), which is ultra hard. We defined the #FSDL, a holistic Free Software Development Lifecycle. Research-to-practice is also part of it.
Given grassroots social dynamics + inward focus in #FOSS projects, "herding cats", how can ppl be incentivised to collaborate at ecosystem level, spend time that doesn't directly benefit their project, but is a win-win long-term?
And how can all that be supported by decentralized social networking? (In my book any direct/indirect online interaction is a social networking use case).
Right now what we see is that tremendous fragmentation is the norm. So much overlap, reinventing of wheels, people working unaware of others.
Research projects for new internet technologies, individually R&D funded, but what is the pathway to their adoption? Which growth path is needed to facilitate that.
There are so many angles to explore.
If we want to consider postgrowth economy where it isn't BigCorp pulling the cart, then the "small initiative" must be empowered.
@smallcircles@avandeursen@jesper I think multiple solutions will be needed an emerge :) I think solutions can come from small changes to existing social systems and governments (charity and government incentives and programs), and broader changes. I believe in both (a) Stimulating spontaneous donations from individuals (toward what matters); and (b) Creating institutions specialized in evaluating what matters (like grant evaluators already do) with a broad view.
@smallcircles@avandeursen@jesper What do I mean by broad view? I mean evaluating all fronts: (a) Long term impact on wellbeing of society in general -- that's the guiding principle. But in a sense it's hard and debatable, so it is complemented by other approaches (that just specialize in aspects of this goal); (b) Environmental impact (more objective specialization); (c) Psychological impact on users; (d) Technical benefit (to other projects, e.g. for tool development).
@smallcircles@avandeursen@jesper I believe there's a duality to fragmentation (local, small) and unification (global, large), and it needs to be understood and respected. Both have their value: too big scale disallows nuance, closeness and intimacy; too small scale leads to disintegration and too low flow of ideas.
I think we went too quickly from small (local newspapers) to too big (twitter?). The scale is in favour of global news, which does favor global peace, but it can be too much.
and so on. I think Netflix's idea of "Attention economy", that it needs to capture as many viewing hours from people as possible, is a disaster, compared to the notion that it should simply improve people's lives (with genuinely great content that does so). Hours viewed should be just another metric to get to that goal.
@smallcircles@avandeursen@jesper My life might be much better watching a single show that really speaks to me, rather than watching a number of shallow shows that try to have me glued to the screen. My hours of rest and everything else I have to do in life is important. I don't want a service that tries to maximize my time with it, I want a service that wants to help me, to make my life amazing, and to make me a better person too.
> [..] there's a duality to fragmentation (local, small) and unification (global, large)
re:Fediverse I often quote:
“Any decentralized [ecosystem] requires a centralized substrate, and the more decentralized the approach is the more important it is that you can count on the underlying system.”
I avoid the word "scale" and see that mostly in light of Big Tech services conquering market space. In a decentralized web "Small is Beautiful" (E.F Schumacher) and 'smallness within large organization' to be sought.
The 5 years since spec Recommendation status saw slow organic emergence, not spec evolution. The emergence was valuable, needed, to foster unique culture and social environment.
"Substrate formation" by the Commons is needed for open ecosystem.
This substrate formation didn't happen, and hence the ecosystem - though it has some resilience - is quite weak now that corporate entities take an interest for the Fediverse.
A quite likely outcome is a corporate takeover on the level of the technology substrate. And FOSS and the Commons did their free beer work again, and may now explore other areas to hand over to corporates later on.
We miss what empowers FOSS in a leading, long-term sustainable role.
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