# What does ‘working’ mean? Often we will declare that something ‘works’ or ‘doesn’t work’ without specifying what the counterfactual would entail. This is fine in situations where the system fulfills a real end goal like preventing someone from dying, or satisfying a desire. However, [[Most steps are intermediate steps]] — how do you know that a subsystem like a DNA-based hinge or a rocket control system ‘works’ before it fulfills a role in the bigger system? One way to decide whether something works is via metrics. If it’s a situation that is actually amenable to metrics, that’s great! Many engineered systems can actually be described by a finite number of metrics. Of course there are many problems with metrics: [[Goodhart's Law]], [[Making a game more fair reduces its variance]], [[Streetlight Effect]], In addition to the problems with metrics, especially for new things, it’s unclear what the metrics should even be and there may not even be a metric at all. There had been steam engines before the [[Newcomen Engine]] and [[Mechanical Reaper]]s before McCormicks that ‘worked.’ However, the canonical version of a technology tends to cross some nebulous threshold to actual ‘working.’ What working means could also be incredibly context-dependent. [[Lithium-ion batteries]] ‘worked’ in a lab long before they ‘worked’ in [[Cellular Telephones]] long before they ‘worked’ in cars long before they (might as of 2021) ‘work’ in airplanes. There’s some connection between the idea of working and the framing of technology in [[arthurLogicInvention2005]]: we could say that ‘working’ means that the technology fulfills a perceived purpose by reliably exploiting a base phenomenon through some principle of use. Both pieces of this are important: the fulfilling a purpose without a specified base phenomenon is just a different technology and hasn’t satisfied the full goal (though from a business sense it may be perfectly adequate). Exploiting a base phenomena through a principle of use without actually fulfilling the purpose is a shitty proof-of-concept. ### Related * [[Risk needs a metric]] * [[Uncertain things basically have infinite risks]] * [[Knightian Uncertainty]] * [[There might be many situations with intractable uncertainty or randomness in the highest order bits]] [Web URL for this note](http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+does+‘working’+mean) [Comment on this note](http://via.hypothes.is/http://notes.benjaminreinhardt.com/What+does+‘working’+mean)