Two limitations of our knowledge of quality

TL;DR

This paper explores the limitations in measuring quality due to issues of validity, incompleteness, and high-dimensional complexity, proposing heuristics to better understand strategic and necessary qualities in decision-making.

Contribution

It introduces a complementary quality notion and heuristics to address the challenges of measuring quality in high-dimensional spaces.

Findings

Quality measurement is limited by validity and incompleteness.

Categorizing qualities into strategic and necessary helps in decision-making.

Heuristics are needed to navigate the curse of dimensionality.

Abstract

This article develops a quality notion that is complementary to the system notion. As a major consequence, it becomes clear why quality can be measured only to a certain extend based on the issues of validity and incompleteness. First, there is an inherent conflict between the applicability and validity of quality measures and second, quality considerations almost always refer to high-dimensional spaces with only sparse knowledge also known as "curse of dimensionality". The resulting gap of knowledge has to be filled by experienced based heuristics. To deal with the curse of dimensionality, the heuristics of categorizing qualities into strategic and necessary is proposed. Strategic qualities provide contrast, while necessary qualities rather diminish contrast. In an economic context the presence of strategic qualities motivate a buy-decision and the absence of necessary qualities motivate a don't-buy-decision.