I’m here because I’ve spent the last few months unable to shake a feeling i keep getting day and night now, and that’s making it hard to just go along with the standard path everyone around me moves towards. At this point I seriously need to think out loud with people who actually engage with ideas rather than just silently ignore them.
Everywhere I look these days I see metrics. Engagement on social media. Ranks and scores in education. Salary numbers. GitHub contributions. CGPA percentiles. Even friendships seem quantified now, and i feel more and more distant from my old friends. I started to notice something as i was going through my college, we are consistently optimizing so hard for measuring proxy metrics, that we’ve lost track of what they were supposed to measure in the first place.
I got into tech and data science because I genuinely wanted to understand analytical systems and solve real problems around me, like actually , even if it meant losing the popular high paying tracks. But the more I learn about things in my domain, the more I see that most of them are just… gaming metrics. And I’m not sure I know how to move through the world without compromising on what I actually care about.
So I’m here to think about that. I don’t have answers. I’m not looking for a pep talk. I’m looking for people who’ve thought about this stuff and can offer actual perspective.
My perspective has been you have to get into spaces before they are mainstream to find more authentic signals. Web3/crypto was a super engaging crowd when it was a small group of nerds working to build an alternative to the banking system. The only people who were using terminal to download opensource code and set up wallets for tokens that were worth pennies, were people doing it for interest or strong beliefs. The same was true for gene editing before CRISPR or protein folding before AlphaFold. Basically, metrics and rankings tend to pop up more in crowded and well known spaces to deal with organizing everyone trying to get into the space.
Some metric mainstream optimization (salary, GPA etc) is worth it just to have a base foundation to navigate into spaces, but over focusing on it is definitely counter productive to finding interesting subcultures before they devolve or become overcrowded.
Greetings in whatever form you appreciate!
I’m here because I’ve spent the last few months unable to shake a feeling i keep getting day and night now, and that’s making it hard to just go along with the standard path everyone around me moves towards. At this point I seriously need to think out loud with people who actually engage with ideas rather than just silently ignore them.
Everywhere I look these days I see metrics. Engagement on social media. Ranks and scores in education. Salary numbers. GitHub contributions. CGPA percentiles. Even friendships seem quantified now, and i feel more and more distant from my old friends. I started to notice something as i was going through my college, we are consistently optimizing so hard for measuring proxy metrics, that we’ve lost track of what they were supposed to measure in the first place.
I got into tech and data science because I genuinely wanted to understand analytical systems and solve real problems around me, like actually , even if it meant losing the popular high paying tracks. But the more I learn about things in my domain, the more I see that most of them are just… gaming metrics. And I’m not sure I know how to move through the world without compromising on what I actually care about.
So I’m here to think about that. I don’t have answers. I’m not looking for a pep talk. I’m looking for people who’ve thought about this stuff and can offer actual perspective.
My perspective has been you have to get into spaces before they are mainstream to find more authentic signals. Web3/crypto was a super engaging crowd when it was a small group of nerds working to build an alternative to the banking system. The only people who were using terminal to download opensource code and set up wallets for tokens that were worth pennies, were people doing it for interest or strong beliefs. The same was true for gene editing before CRISPR or protein folding before AlphaFold. Basically, metrics and rankings tend to pop up more in crowded and well known spaces to deal with organizing everyone trying to get into the space.
Some metric mainstream optimization (salary, GPA etc) is worth it just to have a base foundation to navigate into spaces, but over focusing on it is definitely counter productive to finding interesting subcultures before they devolve or become overcrowded.