Based on these, I am announcing my own theorem: "Prasad's Pizza Paradox" - when you eat pizza for lunch, and your family wants pizza for dinner that same night, and you willingly agree - and of course say nothing about your meal at lunchtime.
This piece could be stronger if it included specific policies McNamara championed as a result of his allegedly fallacious thinking
I know McNamara mainly due to his disastrous policy of sending low IQ troops to the front lines. And that policy appears less a result of only taking into account the measurable than choosing to ignore the measurable (intelligence) when convenient
When the easy measure is replaces the difficult-to-measure goal to establish success, the result is called "reafication" by program evaluators.
Program evaluators recognize 4 levels of measurement, of increasing relevance and difficulty to measure:
Capacity - How many customers could you serve (classroom size)
Process - How many customers did you serve (number of graduates)
Product - How many customers finished (number of graduates with jobs)
Impact - How many more customers succeeded due to the program (how many more got jobs through the program than would have without it)
Wow! 🎯
"Lines of code" - thank God I'm retired and no longer managed by people who think that way.
I’m glad you mentioned education. Standardized testing is the bane of every teacher. ugh.
Based on these, I am announcing my own theorem: "Prasad's Pizza Paradox" - when you eat pizza for lunch, and your family wants pizza for dinner that same night, and you willingly agree - and of course say nothing about your meal at lunchtime.
I have found this only works with pizza.
The "hello nurse": https://www.bmj.com/content/315/7101/143.6 and https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/metrics-matter-how-measure-what-really-counts-nursing-nicolas-qw7gf/
Super examples. Thank you.
This is a fascinating post - and seems especially relevant at the moment.
This piece could be stronger if it included specific policies McNamara championed as a result of his allegedly fallacious thinking
I know McNamara mainly due to his disastrous policy of sending low IQ troops to the front lines. And that policy appears less a result of only taking into account the measurable than choosing to ignore the measurable (intelligence) when convenient
Yes. Yankelovich named the fallacy, according to his article, from his experience working with Ford when McNamara was there, not because of his policies during the war. You can read about it here: https://archive.org/details/sim_sales-management_1971-11-15_107_11/page/26/mode/2upBut I agree more specific examples would help. There are various examples here concerning aspects of the war also, but I don’t know how much to attribute to McNamara and I haven’t read the books that these draw from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_body_count_controversy