Motivation: Part Deux

So, an interesting bit about motivation occurred to me today, especially in the context of my thesis. So far I've been fairly unsuccessful at it, due to many reasons. Some key things that have come to mind about it can be summarized below:

• When you're just serving a cake, i.e. waiting around for something gruesome to end and hope of better things happening if you just sit tight and weather the shit, it's really difficult to get anything intelligent done. You just wait for things to end so you can progress again.
• When the shit does eventually end due to the fixed term (temporal sense) nature of it, things should improve. But if you're in limbo, the uncertainty is again a bit painful. You learn to live with it, and you might get some things done, but it starts digging at you fairly quickly again, because there's a small amount of hope that things will take a turn for the better.
• When finally you get put into a hole where there is no real chance for things to improve, you finally find yourself in a situation where merely sitting and waiting things out does no longer look attractive. It means that you finally find yourself in a situation where you have to start shovelling shit and get things done or the pain won't go away. That's the only alternative and the only hope.

With the third phase beginning and the cruel reality setting in, I guess we'll finally see whether things take a turn for the better. So far in respect to the thesis, I've been setting up a new environment with which to crunch the data, which should address the performance issues which were previously encountered. Additionally I've finally been able to sort out the mess with the corrupted data for 2007 and onwards, which previously caused a bit of demotivation as that would be the very interesting bit of data. But, let's see... I should have my priorities finally straight again, as counterintuitive as it might seem.

Commensurability

A great many things in life can and should be measured, as I believe I've previously written. Measuring different things is crucial to be able to track progress and speed and without metrics, we have to rely on gut instinct. In this respect a certain degree of formality is very welcome, because this relates to the problem of commensurability and comparing one point of data with another one.

Very often, however, it seems that people either on purpose or by accident devise and change metrics at whim. This makes longitudinal analyses of the data pointless; establishing trends becomes very difficult if you are encountered with a data set in which each point has been measured using different methods and perhaps even with a different logic behind. With heterogenous data sets transparency and formal descriptions of how the data has come about are needed if the data set is to be cleaned, and even then it might be tricky.

With this consideration, then, the obvious question is why are people so horribly bad at measurements and tracking different variables? A pessimistic view might be that this is done on purpose. Companies change their metrics on purpose to through stakeholders off by ensuring that a clear picture of trends cannot be established and if someone does attempt to clean the data, the analysis and results can still be questioned. Another reason could be that the people developing the metrics just need something to do to legitimize their existence in the organization, hence new metrics are devised every so often.

An equally worrying notion is that metrics are changed and tracking is executed in a very ad hoc fashion because the people responsible do not at the end of the day understand what they are doing and why. Sheer incompetence. Related to this, perhaps another annoying bit is that people tend to measure what is easy to measure, not what would be useful to measure. Proxy measurements are of course fine as long as you spend enough effort to establish that the logic by which you argue the proxy to be good is rigorous enough. This, sadly, is not the case too often either.

Overall, this is a topic which seems to pop up and cause immense headaches for me ever so often, and I believe the only solution will be to start whacking people with the Clue Stick every time I run across some offender in the future. Sheesh...

Build stuff

A more or less arbitrary quote from Joichi Ito's Innovation on the Edges piece:

Well, one thing is you've got to be anti-disciplinary because if you're in a discipline and you're worried about peer review and you're knowing more and more about less and less, that's by definition an incremental thing. You've got to be anti-disciplinary in the way that you've got to have the freedom to connect things together that aren't traditionally connected. You get that ironically by not being rigorous, and by building. It's practice before theory.

In general the piece relatively interesting and to a great extent.