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kupperware.bsky.social
@kupperware.bsky.social

This episode has exposed the principal weakness of Chartism, which is its inability to deal with shades of grey. If I say you owe me $80k, but if you complete a survey I’ll lower it to $10k, nobody would consider that $80k of debt. But what if I tell you to complete surveys until I say stop?

Nathan Goldwag@goldwagnathan.bsky.social

In the Great Chart War I am unequivocally on the side of the Bloodless Quants, who are usually correct on the specifics, and totally correct in general on the need for quantifiable data analysis. But today they seem to be reacting *extremely* uncharitably to a Tweet that is, at worst, poorly worded.

kupperware.bsky.social
@kupperware.bsky.social

Those two situations show up on a ‘chart’ in an identical way, because they are technically the same in principle. With a certain amount of paper shuffling you can significantly reduce the debt you owe to the ‘proper’ figure.

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kupperware.bsky.social
@kupperware.bsky.social

You can’t graph bureaucratic friction, because it is a function of effort that is both difficult to measure and varies wildly between individual transactions. These are exactly the kinds of institutional failures one would expect from decisions made based on numbers.

kupperware.bsky.social
@kupperware.bsky.social

It can sound wishy-washy to say ‘feelings matter in public policy,’ but they do! What is the point of abundant resources if you live in a world that drives you to madness? Even if emotional concerns are sublimated by material ones, that doesn’t make them *totally* beneath our notice.

kupperware.bsky.social
@kupperware.bsky.social

I should add that data analysis is a powerful tool, and an excessively feelings-based world order is genuinely a back door definition of fascism. We just need to understand the limitations of data in order to use it properly.