Like claiming townhouses not facing out into the street somehow produces X $ in mental health costs due to "lack of inclusion" and the footnote links to a study where non-english speaking communities in Australia were having real health costs due to lack of access to translation services. Which is something that passes for "evidence based" planning. Doing experiments in social sciences is a lot harder tho.
Maybe it's too easy to do experiments in Software and like you said
> Sometimes it feels a bit like we're sitting around so focused on measuring whether guests prefer one dish or the other and arguing over which experiment is best, that we don't notice a forest fire is blazing outside
I do think they're a useful tool but I see what you're saying.
Part of me feel some of that is risk aversion, but also maybe some of its process dependence when you have a number that provides strong certainty on a number of things, and because there's that feedback loop they get drawn to the things that cause the number go up. Similar to how people become dependent on LLMs to get stuff done or affirm if they did the right thing, and when they're in a space that's harder to measure they don't know to judge if they've done a good job or not.
I'm spending less time working on software, as I decided to get an econ degree, specifically econometrics, so I do spent a lot of time trying to think how to better measure stuff specifically in public policy, so I might be bias lol
But I do get what you're saying, hope things are well for you