Attention & Growth
Growth Through Feedback
- Personal interest
- Observed in experiments
- Philosophical question
- Working interpretation
I like treating daily life as a series of small experiments and lessons. But growth also needs room for spontaneity, and not every human moment should be turned into a number.
What useful feedback can I accept without turning my life into a dashboard?
The idea
A feedback loop has three parts: try something, observe what happened, adjust. Science runs on a strict version of this (Results That Hold Up When Rerun): write down what you did so someone else can check it, and don't trust a result just because it is exciting. Personal growth can borrow some of that honesty, within limits, since a person is not an experiment to be fully controlled.
What I think (and don't know)
Measurement has two failure modes. One is overreacting. My Process Stability Lab is built around this: every process varies, and the hard part is telling a real change from ordinary noise. A single bad day is usually noise. The other failure mode is the number becoming the goal. Love Is Not Something to Maximize names what is at stake: some good things are distorted the moment you try to maximize them.
An example
DAD OS, one of my side projects, changed direction on exactly this point. Earlier versions emphasized dashboards and child-development metrics. The revised version follows a rule its page calls "Notice, don't score": accountability sits with the parent's presence, listening, repair and memory, not with a score for the child. Steady makes the same bet from another angle: small repetitions beat a giant dashboard.
Where it connects
Feedback only helps if I can see myself clearly enough to use it (Thinking About My Own Thinking), and if I can take bad news without harsh self-judgment (High Standards Without Harsh Self-Judgment).
Questions I'm still exploring
- Which parts of my life improve with measurement, and which are harmed by it?
- How do I tell a real change in my progress from an ordinary good or bad week?
- What kind of reflection helps without becoming endless self-monitoring?
Sources and further reading
- Kluger & DeNisi (1996), "The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory", Psychological Bulletin 119(2) — Found that more than a third of feedback interventions lowered performance.
- 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.
Working interpretation: drafted from my notes and interests for review. It is not a direct quotation, and I may still change it.