It's an old economists' joke. A person out walking at night comes across a man scrabbling on the floor under a lamppost. The man on the floor says he lost his keys. When asked when he dropped them he then replies, "Oh, I dropped them over there, but the light's better here."

It's an apt metaphor for how, if we're really honest with ourselves, sometimes we find ourselves working, or searching, or staying in the places where we find it easier rather than the places where we know we ought to be.

Looking under the lamppost

It's an old, old Eastern story about some blind men who encounter an elephant. As the blind make sense of what each feels it's also a memorable illustration of how our own views are shaped by our subjective experience and, as so often, that we don't see the full picture. In various versions the men may argue over what it is, convinced they themselves must be right, or collaborate to identify the elephant together.

Most of our experience is somewhat like this. We rarely see the whole truth. When we stay humble and accept others' experience we give ourselves the chance to learn a little more.

The blind and the elephant

Sir Arthur Eddington, an English astrophysicist, told a short story involving a scientist studying fish by pulling them up with nets. After checking all the fish hauled up, the scientist concludes that there is a minimum size of fish in the sea. But the fish seen were determined by the size of the holes in the net, the smaller ones having slipped through, unmeasurable. The instrument you use affects what you see. Or as Richard Hamming puts it: "You get what you measure."

This analogy provides a nice concrete example of a phenomena that affects us routinely in more subtle ways. What and how we choose to measure affects the conclusions we draw. So, a website may easily measure sales and bounce rate for its pages, while things like trust, authority or satisfaction, which may be more significant longer-term metrics, go unmeasured.

"There is always a tendency to grab the hard, firm measurement, though it may be quite irrelevant as compared to the soft one which in the long run may be much more relevant to your goals. Accuracy of measurement tends to get confused with relevance of measurement, much more than most people believe. That a measurement is accurate, reproducible, and easy to make does not mean it should be done, instead a much poorer one which is more closely related to your goals may be much more preferable. For example, in school it is easy to measure training and hard to measure education, and hence you tend to see on final exams an emphasis on the training part and a great neglect of the education part."

What gets measured gets better (an earlier take on this)

Quote from Chapter 29, You get what you measure, of Richard Hamming's, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn.

If you happen to be in the business of doing research or science Richard Hamming's Bell Lab's talk, You and Your Research (pdf), is an excellent read.

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