measured progress
Nicholas Carr on how Google is measuring Google's impact on intellectual output. "Lord knows it's great that we can answer well-defined questions a lot more quickly today than we could 20 years ago, and that that allows us to ask more, and more-trivial, questions in the course of a day than we could before, but Varian's desire to apply measures of productivity to the life of the mind also testifies to the narrowness of Google's view. It values the measurable over the nonmeasurable, and what it values most of all are those measurable variables that are increasing thanks to recent technological advances. In other words, it stacks history's deck." Worth reading in full.