Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers

I've been thinking a lot lately about this little old lady who lived in my neighborhood in Chicago. It was on this street lined with interesting old brownstones with cool little apartments. She lived in a garden level apartment (for those who don't know, this essentially means street level apartment) From what I understand she was a florist so she didn't make a ton of money and sometimes struggled to make ends meet but had been scraping by, renting the place for like 20 years. I'm not really much of a "flower" guy, but the flowers and plants she had on her little like 6 foot by 6 foot patio/stoop were fuckin awesome. Seems like she planted them so there was almost always something in bloom. Most of the buildings in the neighborhood had a flower pot or two out front, but hers were pretty impressive. I was fresh out of college and had been renting in the neighborhood for about 3 years before she passed away. After she was gone it was impossible not to notice that the new people who moved in had no plants. Over the next few years all of the buildings stopped putting flowers out on their stoops, the burnt out porch lights were no longer being changed, etc... I don't want to imply the neighborhood fell apart, it was a nice neighborhood, it was just that the neighborhood was noticeably less pretty, the details were missing. I'm totally aware that I'm making a leap here, but after talking to some neighbors, I truly believe her love for flowers and her beautiful little garden had a ripple effect, 2nd and 3rd order effects that none of us really understood until she was gone. That her little garden inspired other renters to add their own little piece to the neighborhood. I don't know how we measure and reward someone like her, how we measure someone who's little daily actions cause positive ripple effects, but fuck I really wish we knew how.

I think we'll always measure with numbers, be governed by numbers, but more and more I find myself hoping we get better at it--that we figure out better metrics by which to measure success and quality of life--to notice the ways things ripple out. Lately every time I hear someone degrading someone else because that person isn't rich enough or educated enough, her little garden pops into my head.

Just to be clear, I recognize that markets often do a good job of measuring certain things, but lately it feels like our current iteration of measurements, if we really wanted to, we could maybe make them better.

To the extent this is a real phenomenon, it's because of competition and not measurement. Competitions that are judged qualitatively have the same effects, and measurements without competition (e.g. measuring the height and weight of babies) don't result in power accruing to the folks doing the measuring.

That said, people systematically overvalue anything with numbers attached due not understanding the epistemology of measurement and statistics. That's why managers at software companies are obsessed with pointing tickets, why scientists are obsessed with p-values, why the school system is obsessed with grades, etc. So if you want people to compete more fiercely over something, coming up with some numbers is a good way to make that happen. (At least for a while.)

It'd be nice to believe that this is just a temporary quirk of our current cultural values. But we may also have just topped out, at least for the foreseeable future, in terms of just how well people can really understand the world given a relatively fixed level of intelligence. Even though individuals are ostensibly becoming more transmodernist, it's difficult (as a layperson) to see how that or something like it could ever really could become the dominant philosophical paradigm behind our institutions.

We're doing a very dangerous thing here. We're crossing the line between computers computing, and computers advising. When a computer computes, you can be assured the answer is correct. When a computer advises, the average person takes that information at the same value. There's a long laundry list of reasons why this is horrible. I went over a few in my essay about platforms being the enemy. http://tiny-giant-books.com/Entry2.html?EntryId=recEUbufzhAv...

There's a deeper moral/ethical issue at stake here. If you program a computer, you are responsible for that computer never presenting a misleading view of reality to the user. People don't distinguish between their tax program, GPS, and voting on reddit. When you use the interface to guide or subtly mislead people? You're hurting millions of people just a tiny bit at a time.

So many net-level effects involve these tiny changes that are impossible to evaluate. That delays or completely obfuscates the feedback loop. Very bad stuff here.

I have always, falsely, taken it for granted this is common knowledge.

The fact that everything is quantified doesn't necessarily remove bias from the forthcoming decisions. Instead it provides additional fuel to hone and precision tune that bias for maximum manipulation. This occurs even unintentionally. The safety check to reduce bias is to ensure the quantified data is available to a wide number of stakeholders and open to scrutiny.

is there not some formal "rule of thumb" describing that attempts to improve a system through "point based" incentives ultimately lead to undesirable outcomes as the incentives naively skew focus away from the starting goal of improving the system to simply gaming the point structure?

what I wrote feels hard to put cleanly into words, but does that makes any sense to anyone else?

Reading the thread there is a lot of pessimism in regards to whether measuring could ever be a positive and "life-giving" (in the sense of that flower story).

I'd like to argue that yes it can be just that, there's two reasons why I think so. First is Christopher Alexander and his work on wholeness.

Second is that I think the fundamental problem with our economic measurements is the "single source of truth" problem. When there is a just a single entity / stakeholder that prints currency and thereby defines baseline value then all the economic actors have less power to affect the definition of value. The development I'd like to see is democratization of stocks, making them the currencies of day to day life, and the phasing out of national currencies.

I haven't figure out yet exactly how to implement the intricacies of such a system but the general idea is that we need economic systems to acknowledge relativity in value better and stop hoping for a concrete truth to base our reality on.

... That economists get to pretend matter, while ignoring all the numbers that they can't measure and will kill us.

Economics on its own can't measure the impact of unknowns like global warming impact. It just gives the tools to the rich and elite and corporations to resist paying for it and dealing with it for as long as possible.

Everything is NOT QUANTIFIED. The theory of computation, physics, math, the uncertainty principle, and chaos GUARANTEE we do not have accurate quantification.

What does exist is bullshit quantification in favor of the powers that be that fund the studies and think tanks to justify their existence and political desires.

Yet another example of gross overreach of the pseudoscience of Economics.

This could also be phrased '[...] are increasingly reduced to numbers', in order to be rationalized by algorithms. How much wealth is counted multiple times by multiple models all recognizing the same qualities under different enumeration schemes?

I expect to see more and more references to Goodhart's Law as this increasing bias in favor of numerically digestible value amplifies the (often unacknowledged) premise that 'that which cannot be counted, doesn't count'

Company performance reviews, apart from their asymmetry (managers rate employees but employees can't rate their managers), assume you can sum an entire person up with a set of say 6 5-star ratings in a little table.

Think of all the characteristics of a person that aren't captured in that little 6x5 table.

Numbers drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect

> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something. Now, this is not so true for the manual workers. The manual worker does not have to sell his personality. He doesn't have to sell his smile. But what you might call the "symbolpushers" , that is to say, all the people who deal with figures, with paper, with men, who manipulate - to use a better, or nicer, word - manipulate men and signs and words, all those today have not only to sell their service but in the bargain they're to sell their personality, more or less. There are exceptions.

-- Erich Fromm, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=1m34s

> What is finished... is the idea that this great country is dedicated to the freedom and flourishing of every individual in it. It's the individual that's finished. It's the single, solitary human being that's finished. It's every single one of you out there that's finished, because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It's a nation of some 200-odd million transistorized, deodorized, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies, totally unnecessary as human beings, and as replaceable as piston rods... Well, the time has come to say, is dehumanization such a bad word. Because good or bad, that's what is so. The whole world is becoming humanoid - creatures that look human but aren't. The whole world not just us. We're just the most advanced country, so we're getting there first. The whole world's people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered, insensate things.

-- "Network"

I don't think that's hyperbole, minus the futilism. If we reduce everything to "what can be objectively measured", we remove humans. In some way or another, sooner or later, either completely or as a form of soft lobotomy that begins at birth and never lets up.. just weighing things that can be measured slightly more, just keeping to erode everything else little by little.

> Humans, in so far as they are more than a completion of functions able to react, whose lowest and therefore most central reactions are the purely animal like ones, are simply superfluous for totalitarian systems. Their goal is not to erect a despotic regime over humans, but a system by which humans are made superfluous. Total power can only be achieved and guaranteed when nothing else matters except the absolutely controllable willingness to react, marionettes robbed of all spontaneity. Humans, precisely because they are so powerful, can only be completely controlled when they have become examples of the animal like species human.

-- Hannah Arendt

Insofar as we ignore everything we can't measure or somehow use to immediately "score", and therefore don't nurture it nor pass it on, it gets removed from the palette future generations have available. We can reduce humans to next to nothing in generations by simply not passing on things. The really devilish part is that the feedback is so delayed, and inflicted on people who have very little hope of connecting it with the lack of something they don't know.

I know this probably sounds like "tinfoil" stuff but personally I'm convinced we're doing this to ourselves, we're sleepwalking into it. Nobody is winning -- even being at the top of this compost heap of humanoids would not be as desirable as being a poor person in a somewhat decent society of humans. But with the comparison being in the memory hole, the only comparison will be people lower on the totem pole of humanoid society, so the obvious response to keep basically push even more in what I would call the wrong direction.

> Es ist typisch für die entmutigende Oberflächlichkeit des heutigen Denkens, daß das Wort "Größe", das eine Quantität und nicht eine Qualität bezeichnet, als ein Ausdruck der Anerkennung, wie zum Beispiel "Schönheit", "Güte", "Weisheit" verwendet wird. Was heute groß ist, wird also fast automatisch als schön und gut angesehen.

-- Sebastian Haffner

> It is typical for the discouraging superficiality of todays thinking that the word "greatness", which describes a quantity and not a quality, is used as an expression of appreciation, like for example "beauty", "kindness", "wisdom". Nowadays, what is big is nearly automatically considered beautiful and good.

Power accrues to whoever has power. That's the primary use of power.

Since the rest is behind a paywall, just for fun let's deconstruct that intro paragraph!

> MEASUREMENTS PERVADE life and society.

Some parts of it, sure. And much more in some parts of the world than others.

> Infants are weighed the moment they blink into the world.

That practice is probably thousands of years old, because it is a good indicator of the health of both baby and mother.

> Pupils are graded.

Hundreds of years old, because if you want a standardized school system you have to at least seem to judge pupils by their merits in vaguely similar ways across a very diverse set of schools and educators.

> Schools are judged on their students’ performance, universities on graduates’ job prospects.

And this is where it starts falling down. Schools and universities in places with problems are funded so disparately that they are no longer standardized in practice, so stop-gap measures like these rear their ugly head.

> Companies monitor the productivity of employees

And studies have shown that measuring productivity is bad for morale and productivity, while being easy to game.

> while CEOs watch the share price.

... leading to short term thinking because human intuition is not very good at statistics.

> Countries tabulate their GDP,

Which seems to have been discredited.

> credit-rating agencies assess their economies,

Well, I'm just glad I've never had to live in a place where those are actually a thing.

> investors eye bond yields.

Very wisely.

> The modern world relies on such data. It would cease to function without them.

By this token most of the world has already ceased to function.

The subtitle, on the other hand, seems right on the money. Being someone who decides what to measure is a position of great power and responsibility, and I sincerely hope we get better at measuring the right thing, not measuring at all when it would do more harm than good, and knowing which to choose.

In other words, datasets.

>When these technologies become embedded in society, he argues, life is reduced to checkboxes.

This idea is part of why I think it's so crucial to teach the humanities to all people, especially those in STEM fields where the humanities are lacking at best and received as hostile at worst. I firmly believe most of what it means to be a human is not quantifiable and we lose a tremendous amount of meaning in our lives when we're literally reduced to "going through the motions": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig