"of course systems have to be evaluated! But most system designers don’t take “serious” seriously: Tool-makers usually lack connection to a serious context of use.

Observing how your theories (represented in systems) interact with reality can yield insights which help improve your theories. The character of those insights will depend on the context in which the system was used. If the system isn’t used seriously, the insights will be more like those which a pure theorist could have seen. Those were possible without actually building a system."

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"Such tools might look mathematical (or whatever) on their surface, but they’re not seriously trying to answer hard problems in those domains—often because the creators don’t actually know what those problems are or understand how to solve them. Effective system design requires insights drawn from serious contexts of use

Startups and technologists often fool themselves by working with and talking to early adopters who are mostly interested in playing with new technologies. But it’s not just a “tech industry” problem: academic tool-makers generally evaluate their systems in artificial settings with artificial data, against artificial validation criteria."

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