Quantity vs Quality

I took this quote from Anthropic: Reflections on Qualitative Research

Early scientific fields are often quite qualitative and become more quantitative as they mature. For example, discovering cells is a qualitative result, which can then mature (over many decades) into quantitative tools like counting white blood cells in cancer research.

And one from Jeff Bezos:

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There’s something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

Or this S-curve diagram from Clayton Christensen, where new ideas, when iterated on sufficiently, overtake incumbents before becoming incumbents themselves.

There’s a focus on research these days to focus on “quantifiable data”, in the hunt for replicable studies. Increasingly, papers accepted to journals these days have more of a quantitative bent to them, because they’re easy to validate. You can compare them to other results that use the same scale and test them against each other.

But the hardest things to gauge are the most important. New innovations or new ideas that require new ways of thinking to solve an old problem. Good ideas are enduring, primarily because they don’t just encapsulate a slot of the problem space, but because they pitch a tent in that space. The cell, or philosophical ideas can’t be measured in a quantitative fashion. The current AI boom comes from a new idea in Machine Learning, the transformer. It wasn’t an incremental improvement on some other model that came before it – it was an idea that birthed a trillion dollar industry.

I fear that many companies have become short-term profit chasers, filled with the wrong type of management. They focus on oft used metrics like EBITDA or revenue growth to appease their shareholders. Running a company like a consultancy is a lazy way to mediocrity. It’s fine if you want to be taken down by a innovator.