Family, Love & Legacy

Love Is Not Something to Maximize

Personal interest
Philosophical question
Working interpretation

Some important things get bent out of shape when I try to score them or push them as high as possible. Family love reminds me that a system's purpose can be to protect a good that cannot be measured.

What is worth doing even if it can never be measured?

Why it attracts me

I spend a lot of time making numbers move the right way: less waiting, less waste, more output. Finding the Best Plan Within Limits is the formal version of that habit, finding the best plan within limits. Family life is where I notice its edge. Some good things get bent out of shape the moment they become a score.

The idea

A measure is useful while it points at something we care about. Once it becomes the target, people start serving the number instead of the thing. In a factory that might mean hitting a quota while quality slips. At home it could mean counting minutes spent together and missing whether anyone enjoyed them. Love, trust and play seem to do best when they are protected, not maximized.

Where it connects

Game theory (Choices That Depend on Other People) can describe parts of relationships, but love is not used up by payoffs. Engineering That Respects How People Work makes the same point at work: people are the reason for engineering, not just inputs to it. And Growth Through Feedback holds both sides: feedback can help growth, but not every human moment should be turned into a number.

An example

DAD OS, one of my side quests, changed in exactly this direction. Earlier versions leaned on dashboards and child-development metrics. The current version follows the rule "notice, don't score." It puts responsibility on the parent, through presence, listening, repair and memory, and keeps private notes about moments rather than performance scores for a child.

Questions I'm still exploring

Where does measuring help family life, and where does it start to distort it?
Can I bring engineering habits home without turning love into a target?
How do I protect something I have decided not to measure?

Sources and further reading

Marilyn Strathern (1997), "'Improving ratings': audit in the British University system", European Review 5(3) — Source of the popular wording of Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Jerry Z. Muller, The Tyranny of Metrics (Princeton University Press, 2018) — A book-length look at how measuring performance can backfire when numbers replace judgment.

Working interpretation: drafted from my notes and interests for review. It is not a direct quotation, and I may still change it.

In short

To optimize is to pick a number and push it as high, or as low, as possible. That works well for costs, delays and defects. It works badly for love, trust or play, because the number starts to replace the thing it was meant to track. A well-known version of this is called Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Some goods are better protected than maximized.

Why this matters to me

Much of my engineering work is optimization: shorter waits, less waste, better schedules. I enjoy it. Family love shows me where that habit should stop. If I tried to score how good a parent I am, or how a child is doing, I suspect I would start serving the score instead of the person. I think a well-designed system can exist to protect something it never measures, and that is how I want to treat home.

Connections

Choices That Depend on Other PeopleTension

Relationships involve choices that affect each other, but love is more than a calculation of who gets what.

Engineering That Respects How People WorkValues

People are the reason engineering exists, not just inputs to be optimized, and love at home makes that easy to remember.

Fatherhood as a Source of PurposePart of

Being a father makes plain that some goods, like love, are meant to be protected rather than measured and maximized.