Selection for selection criteria

The problem with measuring everything is that you usually get what you measure for rather than what you actually want. Two things triggered this thought this week: one a conversation with a female surgeon and another a decision about a website.

The surgeon found herself amongst a bunch of girl geeks and talked a little about the way that surgeons are selected now. Or perhaps always have been - I don't know much about surgeons. But the basic problem that she had was that despite several higher degrees, she probably has to now get an MBA because the people who choose surgeons take stock of how many different degrees each one has before they look at the person themselves (this is partly caused because there are currently too many junior surgeons chasing too few higher places).

The other decision was mine: I was going to bound upstairs at work and try to start rehabilitating someone by asking them to look over a researcher website that I'd just fixed up. I didn't because I was asking for a favour (part of the rehab) but thought they might reinterpret it as a work order, so I asked a nearby friend to look for me instead. And had a quick lunchtime chat about it, which in summary was being told that the person involved was most likely to have seen my request as demeaning and an attempt to assert dominance over them. I would say that some people are wierd, but on reflection I think I can understand where this is coming from. If you live in a world that does not assume that altruism or societal impulses exist, then what you do will be informed by what you want entirely for yourself. So someone asking for a favour could only be doing this to further themselves, presumably in some way at your expense.

It wouldn't be so bad if this thinking was confined entirely to individuals, but we appear to have an entire society worth of thought like this. We are so used now to being measured as individuals against individual quantitative standards that we are losing the ability to measure ourselves qualitatively as a crowd. And that's the real shame.