// Perverse Incentives

Every metric you optimise for is a proxy. The moment you forget that, the proxy becomes the goal.

A bounty on dead cobras, a surgeon’s scorecard, and what happens when a product team optimises for “conversion” without asking what it’s supposed to be standing in for.

Also: Goodhart’s Law, a shed full of snakes, and why Google moved its own head of search out of the job.

// Information Appliances

Every function a device can perform is something your brain has to hold open as a possibility.

Jef Raskin, the Canon Cat, and why a device that only does one thing asks less of you than one that does everything.

Also: a language with only one variable, a phone that used to do one thing at a time, and the iPod again.

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