Plato's Dashboards

A rant on the significance and meaningfulness of metrics, or lack thereof

2021/12/22 Plato's Dashboards original images: [1] , [2] In the allegory, Socrates describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch graphs projected on the wall from metrics passing in front of a dumpster fire behind them and create dashboards for these metrics. The metrics are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. Socrates explains how the engineer forced to use their own product is like a prisoner who is freed from the cave and comes to understand that the dashboards

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