A couple comments. The first is that my former boss had a really good rule about, "We can disagree, we can be uncomfortable, we can take risks, but we must always be safe." Those instructions take some breaking down of the half-hour meeting type but for those in the know of the details, it was really great guidance.
Secondly, this:
"It is this indifference to engagement, which in our learning community of young people looks like a willingness to put aside big differences and find ways to navigate the space together to minimise conflict, which the feed and the algorithm can’t measure. It is the essence of human life."
When I worked at a movie theatre, the district managers always gave us these scripts to upsell customers to larger concessions or combos. They argued that every additional 25¢ we could get from each customer made a big difference in the long run.
True. But!
The time it took to try to upsell a customer slowed down the concession lines. And these were for going to see movies with strict start times. Think about it: the point of being at the theatre is to see the fucking movie! Concessions are nice, but not worth missing the movie you came for.
The point is that while we were trying to extract an extra 25¢ per customer, people lined up with $20 to spend would give up and catch their movie.
I told a district manager that, and his response was jaw-dropping: "we don't have any data to show that people are choosing not to buy concessions for that reason." No shit, because choosing NOT to buy a thing doesn't create a receipt at the register!
This gave me a theory I call "the null receipt hypothesis": a TON of business / economic decisions that human beings make, typically on the going without side, missed by the people studying those systems simply because they don't create a "0" entry, they just don't create an entry at all: a null entry. There is a very big difference between a spreadsheet with a zero in the cell, and a spreadsheet without the cell to fill.
That null can never be fully filled. The theatre could start counting people who get in line, then counting people who leave it, but that wouldn't grab the people who never bothered joining the line because of it's length even if they wanted to.
A couple comments. The first is that my former boss had a really good rule about, "We can disagree, we can be uncomfortable, we can take risks, but we must always be safe." Those instructions take some breaking down of the half-hour meeting type but for those in the know of the details, it was really great guidance.
Secondly, this:
"It is this indifference to engagement, which in our learning community of young people looks like a willingness to put aside big differences and find ways to navigate the space together to minimise conflict, which the feed and the algorithm can’t measure. It is the essence of human life."
When I worked at a movie theatre, the district managers always gave us these scripts to upsell customers to larger concessions or combos. They argued that every additional 25¢ we could get from each customer made a big difference in the long run.
True. But!
The time it took to try to upsell a customer slowed down the concession lines. And these were for going to see movies with strict start times. Think about it: the point of being at the theatre is to see the fucking movie! Concessions are nice, but not worth missing the movie you came for.
The point is that while we were trying to extract an extra 25¢ per customer, people lined up with $20 to spend would give up and catch their movie.
I told a district manager that, and his response was jaw-dropping: "we don't have any data to show that people are choosing not to buy concessions for that reason." No shit, because choosing NOT to buy a thing doesn't create a receipt at the register!
This gave me a theory I call "the null receipt hypothesis": a TON of business / economic decisions that human beings make, typically on the going without side, missed by the people studying those systems simply because they don't create a "0" entry, they just don't create an entry at all: a null entry. There is a very big difference between a spreadsheet with a zero in the cell, and a spreadsheet without the cell to fill.
That null can never be fully filled. The theatre could start counting people who get in line, then counting people who leave it, but that wouldn't grab the people who never bothered joining the line because of it's length even if they wanted to.
Thus, "engagement" data must always be suspect.
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