Another month has passed and here is a new rationality quotes thread. The usual rules are:
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I thought quite a bit about how to measure whether I'm good at Salsa dancing on a particular night. I haven't found a measurement that's adequete.
I could use a measurement like: "How close do woman dance with me?" If a woman enjoys dancing with me she's likely to dance closer than if she doesn't. If I'm however measure my dancing skills on that variable I'm likely to dance with some woman in a way that to close for them and makes them uncomfortable.
I could use a metric just as counting how often a woman asks for my name. If I'm however using that metric I probably won't be the first to ask for a name to increase the chances that the woman asks on her own.
If I'm using a metric such as being asked by woman to dance, I'm less likely to ask on my own.
If I would hand a woman a sheet after a dance to rate my dancing, I would probably be seen as strange.
The average business school grad probably isn't doing very much Quantified Self on his own life. He doesn't know much about actually measuring what he cares about.
Women are not going to enjoy dancing with me more when I try to intellectual control their enjoyment by having a tight feedback loop about some proxy variable that I use to measure their enjoyment. It just doesn't work that way.
On the other hand, if I'm empathic, if I'm in a happy mood and get outside of my head I'm more likely to have success in making woman enjoy dancing with me.
The idea that being in your head and being focused on specific measurements is the only way to care is just flawed.
In your life, salsa dancing ability is definitely not the sole metric you wish to be optimizing for.
Things you presumably want to optimize might be something like personal happiness, bettering the world or wherever you find meaning.
If one truly wanted to drop resources into optimizing salsa ability, I'd imagine filming the dance floor from a few cellphones every week, uploading the video to youtube and paying a few experts on a salsa forum to give the dancers a rating and feedback would give a somewhat valid metric that you could go about tracking, quantif... (read more)