I think there’s a lot of over-optimization, and that’s kind of a problem across almost any sector you’d want to talk about where data is being used. You’re kind of optimizing for a short-term equilibrium, and it’s much harder to measure the long term.
Before, if you couldn’t measure anything at all, then maybe your heuristics aren’t that bad. But if you can say, “What’s gonna make me really happy tomorrow? In my business, what’s gonna get my website the most traffic 36 hours from now?,” isn’t necessarily the best decision in the long run.
You can measure the short run and not the long run, and measure some things, not others. That can make you quite myopic and is a bigger problem than people realize, perhaps.
Nate Silver
Starting ≈10:16.