The Measure of Man

There’s a critical lesson in decision-making: patterns and rules are almost always better than human judgment.

(For an example, think about the book/movie Moneyball.)

Basically, if you create a list of criteria that determines what kinds of decisions get made, following that rule will almost always be better than trying to judge individual cases. People don’t like that, but it’s true. We don’t like being “impersonal.” Everyone thinks they’re the exception, or that they can spot exceptions, or whatever. But the measures work better.

But then again, here’s the caveat to that – the measures are written by people. And those people might be just as bad at writing the initial rule as they are at following it.

Let’s say I’m trying to predict which horses are going to win the Kentucky Derby. I know it would be a bad idea for me to just look at the horses and try to “get a feel” for which ones look lucky or fast. So instead I create a rule: I’ll sort all the horse names alphabetically, assigning a value of 1 for A-names, 2 for B-names, etc. Then I’ll do the same for the jockey’s last name. I’ll total the values and bet on the highest one.

That rule will definitely keep me from trying to make snap judgments if I follow it. But the rule is dumb!

So there’s the rub – you have to be sure that the measure isn’t, you know, terrible. And you can only get there by testing. So sure, use rules – they help cool your emotional bias, if nothing else. And they help you get actionable data that has some element of consistency to it.

But measures aren’t magic, and don’t forget it.