The measure of progress

What we count shapes what we build.

Field Notes8 September 20267 min read

Metrics are not neutral; they are instructions.

Topics

Why attention became the scarcest resource of the decade
Every platform competes for the same finite hours. We trace how the economics of attention reshaped media — and what it means for anyone trying to be heard.
The quiet return of industrial policy
Governments are picking winners again. The vocabulary changed before the policy did.
What frontier models still cannot reason about
Benchmarks reward pattern-matching. The harder test is judgement under uncertainty.