> Writers who are not driven by metrics will push on society. Writers who are driven by metrics will be pushed by society.
It's intriguing to think of this in the context of Plato's _Republic_. A simplistic conception of the philosopher-king might interpolate the positive relationship between knowledge and justice, and argue that the more knowledge one can obtain of reality, the better a leader one would be. Such a leader would seek out every metric available, right? But, as in the Allegory of the Cave [1], where people might become very skilled at interpreting shadows but never recognize the true Form of the hidden objects casting the shadows, metrics are only good when they convey the Truth... which, in the case of publication quality, may indeed be that justice is ill-served by journalistic pandering, and that metrics are inherently short-term.
Of course, Plato was also an advocate of censorship in the very same work [2], so any reading should be taken with a grain of salt. It's very interesting, though, that the idea of an "uncanny valley" of knowledge, of wrongly optimizing on a subset of the Truth, is an idea millennia old.
It's intriguing to think of this in the context of Plato's _Republic_. A simplistic conception of the philosopher-king might interpolate the positive relationship between knowledge and justice, and argue that the more knowledge one can obtain of reality, the better a leader one would be. Such a leader would seek out every metric available, right? But, as in the Allegory of the Cave [1], where people might become very skilled at interpreting shadows but never recognize the true Form of the hidden objects casting the shadows, metrics are only good when they convey the Truth... which, in the case of publication quality, may indeed be that justice is ill-served by journalistic pandering, and that metrics are inherently short-term.
Of course, Plato was also an advocate of censorship in the very same work [2], so any reading should be taken with a grain of salt. It's very interesting, though, that the idea of an "uncanny valley" of knowledge, of wrongly optimizing on a subset of the Truth, is an idea millennia old.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%... [2] http://www.iep.utm.edu/republic/#SH1c