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Comment by briantakita | Hacker News Reader

As some of the quantitative metrics improve, many of the metrics (particularly of qualitative nature) degrade. Think ecosystems, our usage of resources, quality of life for the average person, etc.

> There are many other indications (such as infant death ratio) supporting this.

This is one of the many metrics that matter; much more than the percentage of people making > $1.90/day.

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I would like to see some kind of metrics/information showing that quality of life of a person has been declining. Because I do believe quality of life has also been increased globally.

Edit: "quantitive" is replaced with "some kind of metrics"

I'm not so sure about infant deaths - this might be a "fail early" mechanism evolved in nature.

Not really, if you look at the statistics of people who have had difficult births they're not much more likely to grow up to be disabled. Especially if you exclude certain categories.

I don't think eugenics is really relevant with this discussion.

what's a "qualitative metric"?

Im thinking of a score on qualitative data.

Understand that information is lost in its translation to numbers. It's also interpreted to have meaning.

Also understand that values of those assigning the scores plays a large role. For example, an indigenous persob rating quality of life as a score is probably nonsensical to him/her.

all true -- scores are quantitative metrics though. And yes, rather imprecise and subjective, and a lot of information is lost at all stages. Is there a better way to compare things like a quality of life though? Hmm, perhaps something could be inferred from pairwise comparisons? There are many people out there who have experienced multiple lifestyles; alleviating biases would be really tricky though...

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