I just added a comment above which aims to provide a potential answer to this question—that you can use “approaches like those I describe here (end of the article; building on this which uses mini-publics)”. This may not directly get you something to measure, but it may be able to elicit the values needed for defining an objective function.
You provide the example of this very low bar:
I guarantee 100% that people would rather have the recommendations given by Netflix and YouTube than a uniform random distribution. So in that basic sense, I think we are already aligned.
The goal here would be to scope out what a much higher bar might look like.
I just added a comment above which aims to provide a potential answer to this question—that you can use “approaches like those I describe here (end of the article; building on this which uses mini-publics)”. This may not directly get you something to measure, but it may be able to elicit the values needed for defining an objective function.
You provide the example of this very low bar:
The goal here would be to scope out what a much higher bar might look like.