"Two years ago, I started learning Japanese on Duolingo. At first, the daily accrual of vocabulary was fun. Every lesson earned me experience points a little reward that measured and reinforced my progress. But something odd happened. Over time, my focus shifted. As I climbed the weekly leaderboards, I found myself favouring lessons that offered the most points for the least effort."
"He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don't want. Value capture, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur. You internalise the metric in some sense it supplants your original goal until it has redefined your core sense of what's important."
People and institutions often substitute narrow measurements for the underlying goals those metrics were meant to indicate. When metrics become targets, individuals optimize for point accumulation rather than genuine achievement, producing perverse behaviors that undermine original aims. Value capture occurs when the measurement internalizes and supplants the original goal, reshaping priorities. Ranking systems that compress complex missions into single numbers incentivize gaming the metric, diverting resources from substantive activity toward appearance management. Educational institutions may prioritize measurable outcomes like graduate salaries or applicant numbers over teaching quality, thereby neglecting experiences that make life worthwhile.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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