The Measurement Trap and the Path to Intentionalism

I’ve been writing a series of thoughts recently in order to clarify a point of view of mine. These are the original posts:

1. We Must Know, We Will Know
2. Foundation or Competition, That Is The Question
3. Idiocratic Much?
4. On Intentionalism

The goal of this post is to put them all together and talk about how they connect to each other. These posts argue that we’ve trapped ourselves in a destructive feedback loop where we use crude measurements as shortcuts for what we actually care about, then forget they’re just proxies and optimize for the metrics themselves. This happens everywhere—individuals reducing people to numbers, companies chasing competitive signals instead of solving real problems, markets rewarding manipulation over genuine value. The mechanism works through a lag between company behavior and our perception: companies initially succeed by solving real problems (early Google prioritizing search quality, early Apple revolutionizing interfaces), building trust and market power through genuine innovation. But once established, they gradually transition toward extraction—optimizing for revenue, removing features to sell accessories, making products harder to repair, building walled gardens. We don’t update our beliefs as fast as companies shift their priorities. We formed opinions like “Apple makes great products” or “Google is the best search” during the innovation phase, and carry those beliefs forward even as the companies pivot toward extraction.

Consider the iPhone: we still choose it assuming Apple’s $3 trillion valuation validates product quality, not recognizing that valuation reflects past innovation plus current extraction. By the time we notice something feels wrong, we’re locked in by switching costs and ecosystem effects, so we rationalize the degradation—convincing ourselves that missing headphone jacks, unrepairable devices, and walled gardens are actually better, sending market signals that validate the extractive practices. Crucially, once the market leader makes extraction acceptable, competitors follow suit. Samsung sees Apple successfully removing headphone jacks and interprets this as “users don’t actually want headphone jacks”—so they remove them too. Every competitor makes phones unrepairable, uses proprietary chargers, builds walled gardens. What started as one company’s extraction becomes the entire industry’s standard practice, eliminating our choice entirely. We can’t vote with our wallets for a repairable phone with a headphone jack when no major manufacturer makes one anymore.

This creates a much more insidious trap than individual company lock-in: the extractive practices reshape the entire market and transform what we expect and demand. We now want flagship cameras, facial recognition, titanium bodies—expensive features that only massive companies with extraction-funded R&D budgets can deliver. A startup trying to compete on repairability and openness can’t afford the camera technology we’ve been trained to expect, so we dismiss them as inferior before they start. The monopoly isn’t achieved through traditional means like predatory pricing—it’s achieved by changing us, shifting our preferences so fundamentally that competition on genuinely user-serving dimensions becomes impossible. When Apple and Google were startups, we valued simple solutions to real problems. Now we value specifications and features that only extraction-funded giants can provide, making the kind of disruption that created Apple and Google in the first place nearly impossible to replicate.

The mathematical structure of proposer-receiver dynamics explains why this trap persists and points toward escape. The Gale-Shapley algorithm proves that in matching systems, proposers systematically get their best possible stable outcome while receivers get their worst possible stable outcome. Most of us operate as receivers—we evaluate and choose from presented options rather than deciding what we want first and pursuing it intentionally. Companies operate as proposers—they decide what to offer and present those options to us. This structural position guarantees they get better outcomes while we get outcomes just good enough to keep us from leaving. Breaking this cycle requires becoming proposers ourselves: practicing intention in small decisions (deciding what we want before opening Netflix, defining our actual needs before shopping, identifying meaningful work before job hunting) until we rebuild the capacity to know what we genuinely want independent of what’s being offered to us. If enough of us make this shift and send different signals to markets—demanding actual utility over manufactured features—we might begin creating space for alternatives that currently can’t compete against extraction-funded giants marketing to our degraded preferences.