It’s not really new, to say that you should use simple heuristics to bound fancy math. Physics does it all the time — eg, unless you’re standing next to a black hole, your Newtonian and relativistic calculations should nearly agree.
The problems with simple metrics arise when you have complex distributions that are poorly represented by mean, eg the shell of a sphere.
If you design a product to appeal “center of sphere”, then it’ll be mediocre to everyone and you end up being out competed on every front by people who design slightly more “biased” products.
I spend a lot of my time explaining that to executives.
It’s not really new, to say that you should use simple heuristics to bound fancy math. Physics does it all the time — eg, unless you’re standing next to a black hole, your Newtonian and relativistic calculations should nearly agree.
The problems with simple metrics arise when you have complex distributions that are poorly represented by mean, eg the shell of a sphere.
If you design a product to appeal “center of sphere”, then it’ll be mediocre to everyone and you end up being out competed on every front by people who design slightly more “biased” products.
I spend a lot of my time explaining that to executives.