the margin · on perspective

What gets measured

What gets measured gets managed—and it sorts people into cohorts, deprioritizing the individual; game the metric and you corrupt the data.

To manage anything, you have to measure it—what gets measured gets managed. But measurement has a cost. To compare people you sort them into a cohort, and the individual gets deprioritized. The system accepts there will be outliers.

And the moment a number becomes the target, people start gaming it. Clinics chasing a star rating will falsify the data just to earn the star—and now the measurement is corrupt, measuring nothing real.

So respect what the numbers can do, and never forget what they flatten. Behind every cohort is a person the average was never quite about.

1 stroke · first noted june 2026 · lives in on perspective
see — perspective, motive, and the through-line · everything is a trade-off · altitude changes what you see

a thought from the margin · 1 return · back to the room