Reflections 14th December

Myths under the Microscope.

Myths create powerful temporary truths. They make the incomprehensible manageable, give shape to uncertainty, and coordinate action across communities. But they are not truth itself; they are signposts towards it, provisional agreements that serve until they don’t.

Max Planck once remarked that new scientific truths don’t replace old ones by convincing established scientists that they were wrong; they do so because proponents of the older theory eventually die, and generations that follow find the new truths and theories to be familiar, obvious even.

We are in a time of new truths and theories, yet we cling to old myths with remarkable tenacity.

Myths Around Metrics

Peter Drucker is alleged to have said that “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it” (although, to be fair to the great man, there is no clear evidence that he ever wrote or said it. )

Whether he said it or not, it has become dogma.

There is another view on the record. In “The Tyranny of Metrics”, Jerry Muller shows how a f…