8 ms·

Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers

184 points by jkuria 8y ago

KasianFranks 8y ago
In other words, datasets.
minikites 8y ago
>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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig
- whatshisface 8y ago
  >I firmly believe most of what it means to be a human is not quantifiable This is a tired argument, especially because it itself is taking the first step towards quantifying what it is saying can't be quantified. First you have Boolean categories ("what it means to be human," and "what it doesn't mean to be human"), and later on you refine them into more subtle models, models which sometimes use real numbers to express their parameters. Even by suggesting that "what it means to be human" is a coherent category into which things can fall, you are already on the road to quantifying it.
  - notduncansmith 8y ago
    While I think you have an excellent point, I believe what most people mean when they say “not quantifiable” is “not fully quantifiable” as opposed to “completely indescribable”. I think this phrase reflects acceptance of the underlying principle behind Gödel’s Incompleteness and the Halting Problem.
    - whatshisface 8y ago
      >I believe what most people mean when they say “not quantifiable” is “not fully quantifiable” as opposed to “completely indescribable”. Describing something and quantifying it are not distinct actions. If you think you can make any progress at all in describing something, then you are doing the same thing as those enigmatic "quantifiers." The only reason it seems different to say "this apple is red," versus "this apple weighs a half pound" is because people are a lot more handy with colors than fractions.
      - dwaltrip 8y ago
        Quantifying requires numbers, while description does not. I find your comment lacking (description), but I don't have a meaningful numeric value handy for how much so (quantification).
        User1020 8y ago
        Sounds to me like those against "measurement" are too lazy to argue to make their point or don't want to have their views challenged. That may be fine in isolation, but we are a community trying to solve problems; opinions ("lacking") are useless in this realm.
        whatshisface 8y ago
        >Quantifying requires numbers, while description does not. That statement is equivalent to, "Uantifying requires words that start with U, while in complete contrast Wuantifying requires words that start with W." Granted I should have said, "not meaningfully distinct," but the point is that the only reason there appears to be a boundary between Uantifying and Wuantifying is because there is one group of people that know a lot of W-words and almost no U-words, and another group of people that know almost no W-words but many U-words. Each group thinks they see a "material" boundary while in reality the only distinguishing line is edge of their own familiarity.
  - BWStearns 8y ago
    Found the haskeller.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - minikites 8y ago
    The fact that you're reducing my comment to mere categorization kind of proves my point. "What it means to be human" is not a category of activity, it's an ongoing process that we create through living in a world with other people and finding meaning in our interactions with our predecessors (e.g. examining ancient art or living with the insufficiencies of a building that was built centuries ago), our peers in the present, and our considerations for those that come after us in the future.
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      A number is the process of selecting a point out of infinite possibilities on a number line. Life is the process of selecting things out of not quite infinite possibilities but unimaginably large. These things are similar when you look at them like this, and numbers are richer than the real world, because they aren't finite.
- cmoscoso 8y ago
  And UI design?
- abtinf 8y ago
  I had more than enough mandatory garbage humanities classes in college. The humanities are incredibly important. Philosophy is a guide to everyday life. Literature can be uplifting. Art is a source of spiritual fuel. But the humanities in college deserves nothing but contempt, because it perverts every field. Philosophy is used to prove nothing can be known. Art is used to inflict depravity. If anything, the humanities need a lot more STEM thinking.
  - clydethefrog 8y ago
    Could you explain how art is used to inflict depravity?
    - dang 8y ago
      Please don't feed egregious comments by replying. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
- mrdodge 8y ago
  I think a lot of the problem is education. Without education a lot of these ideas wouldn't occur.
Alex3917 8y ago
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.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- sova 8y ago
  Yes but don't too readily dismiss the notion that he who is tabulating will eventually tabulate into his own favor. Of course, this notion holds no water when looked at from a bureaucratic point of person but if we look at how BANKS are doing we might start wondering if this "overdraft fee" is really a beneficial thing for all or some. To use one concrete example for this camp.
  - Alex3917 8y ago
    Fair enough, and to the extent that the zeitgeist is sort of retroactively determined by whatever technological and political things are going on at the time, I wonder what new beliefs people will have about the state of the world in 50 or 100 years as the result of DLT. On the surface the ability of banks to steal from folks seems like largely a different type of power than what the economist is talking about, which is the ability of metrics (and the people who define them) to shape human behavior. But maybe it just looks that way because it's difficult or impossible to really perceive the full extent of how living in a non-DLT world is affecting our behavior.
jtolmar 8y ago
Power accrues to whoever has power. That's the primary use of power.
- BurningFrog 8y ago
  If true, this makes power rather pointless.
  - xenihn 8y ago
    Why?
    - BurningFrog 8y ago
      Imagine a form of money that can only be used to buy more of that money, not any goods or services.
- sova 8y ago
  Power is happening naturally, it is our ability to harness it that is deft or dull.
l0b0 8y ago
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.
- poilcn 8y ago
  >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. We can't know beforehand what is the right way to teach (or what one should learn). Only time can show. Imposing control over education makes everyone live by the same mediocre standards; you reduce dimensionality to just one scale from number A to number B and you cut out the randomness. At the end you get the same situation as in every field where you impose any sort of metrics: teachers and students just try to game them. >Being someone who decides what to measure is a position of great power and responsibility Humanity had whole 20th century to see how central planning works. One man or thousand can't do the job better for a multimillion society that each individual or groups of individuals can do themselves. Indeed it's a position of great power and it attracts corresponding type of people whom one should keep away from decisions that would affect millions. Whether they want to use with good will or malicious. >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. That's sort of a fallacy. Using a broken or completely irrelevant instrument is not a good alternative to not having an instrument at all. Again, by imposing metrics on extremely complex things you reduce the number of dimensions (from infinite to calculable). It makes it look like it's under control, but that's just a self-delusion. At best it does not help at all, at worst it eventually produces a crisis.
austincheney 8y ago
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.
system2 8y ago
This is like a great https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ post, to be honest. This existed for thousands of years.
toofy 8y ago
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.
- Gibbon1 8y ago
  Your story reminds me of the McNamara Fallacy. Meaning it's a good example why the McNamara Fallacy is one. One of my points is there is a lot of necessary and beneficial things people do that don't fit into being exploited via paid work.
Proven 8y ago
Free people couldn't be governed by numbers unless they wanted to be. They are only because they have no say in how they're governed (or rather, handled). Thanks to technological improvements the State is increasing its grip on citizens. The NSA in the US, Communist Party in China, bureaucrats in the EU. The list goes on. Small government has no resources to spy and terrorize its citizens. Large does. The Economist on the whole favors technocrats and "effective" government, and are part the problem.
openfuture 8y ago
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.
DanielBMarkham 8y ago
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=recEUbufzhAvph8K1 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.
ausbah 8y ago
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?
- alehul 8y ago
  Good question! Goodhart’s Law fits this quite well. :) From Wikipedia: “Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
  - dr_dshiv 8y ago
    Yeah, but read his actual papers. Goodhart doesn't actually advocate against using measures. He just shows how measures can be corrupted and presents suggestions on avoiding this
- bschne 8y ago
  Goodhart‘s Law - „When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- NeedMoreTea 8y ago
  As well as Goodhart, there's also "People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets - even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it." W. Edwards Deming As seen everywhere including in hospital care outcomes, waiting lists and school standards.
vbuwivbiu 8y ago
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.
PavlovsCat 8y ago
> 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 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.
known 8y ago
Numbers drive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
AtlasBarfed 8y ago
... 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.
tCfD 8y ago
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'

184 points by jkuria 8y ago

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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therblig

whatshisface 8y ago
>I firmly believe most of what it means to be a human is not quantifiable This is a tired argument, especially because it itself is taking the first step towards quantifying what it is saying can't be quantified. First you have Boolean categories ("what it means to be human," and "what it doesn't mean to be human"), and later on you refine them into more subtle models, models which sometimes use real numbers to express their parameters. Even by suggesting that "what it means to be human" is a coherent category into which things can fall, you are already on the road to quantifying it.
- notduncansmith 8y ago
  While I think you have an excellent point, I believe what most people mean when they say “not quantifiable” is “not fully quantifiable” as opposed to “completely indescribable”. I think this phrase reflects acceptance of the underlying principle behind Gödel’s Incompleteness and the Halting Problem.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    >I believe what most people mean when they say “not quantifiable” is “not fully quantifiable” as opposed to “completely indescribable”. Describing something and quantifying it are not distinct actions. If you think you can make any progress at all in describing something, then you are doing the same thing as those enigmatic "quantifiers." The only reason it seems different to say "this apple is red," versus "this apple weighs a half pound" is because people are a lot more handy with colors than fractions.
    - dwaltrip 8y ago
      Quantifying requires numbers, while description does not. I find your comment lacking (description), but I don't have a meaningful numeric value handy for how much so (quantification).
      - User1020 8y ago
        Sounds to me like those against "measurement" are too lazy to argue to make their point or don't want to have their views challenged. That may be fine in isolation, but we are a community trying to solve problems; opinions ("lacking") are useless in this realm.
      - whatshisface 8y ago
        >Quantifying requires numbers, while description does not. That statement is equivalent to, "Uantifying requires words that start with U, while in complete contrast Wuantifying requires words that start with W." Granted I should have said, "not meaningfully distinct," but the point is that the only reason there appears to be a boundary between Uantifying and Wuantifying is because there is one group of people that know a lot of W-words and almost no U-words, and another group of people that know almost no W-words but many U-words. Each group thinks they see a "material" boundary while in reality the only distinguishing line is edge of their own familiarity.
- BWStearns 8y ago
  Found the haskeller.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- minikites 8y ago
  The fact that you're reducing my comment to mere categorization kind of proves my point. "What it means to be human" is not a category of activity, it's an ongoing process that we create through living in a world with other people and finding meaning in our interactions with our predecessors (e.g. examining ancient art or living with the insufficiencies of a building that was built centuries ago), our peers in the present, and our considerations for those that come after us in the future.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    A number is the process of selecting a point out of infinite possibilities on a number line. Life is the process of selecting things out of not quite infinite possibilities but unimaginably large. These things are similar when you look at them like this, and numbers are richer than the real world, because they aren't finite.
cmoscoso 8y ago
And UI design?
abtinf 8y ago
I had more than enough mandatory garbage humanities classes in college. The humanities are incredibly important. Philosophy is a guide to everyday life. Literature can be uplifting. Art is a source of spiritual fuel. But the humanities in college deserves nothing but contempt, because it perverts every field. Philosophy is used to prove nothing can be known. Art is used to inflict depravity. If anything, the humanities need a lot more STEM thinking.
- clydethefrog 8y ago
  Could you explain how art is used to inflict depravity?
  - dang 8y ago
    Please don't feed egregious comments by replying. This is in the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
mrdodge 8y ago
I think a lot of the problem is education. Without education a lot of these ideas wouldn't occur.

Alex3917 8y ago

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.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sova 8y ago
Yes but don't too readily dismiss the notion that he who is tabulating will eventually tabulate into his own favor. Of course, this notion holds no water when looked at from a bureaucratic point of person but if we look at how BANKS are doing we might start wondering if this "overdraft fee" is really a beneficial thing for all or some. To use one concrete example for this camp.
- Alex3917 8y ago
  Fair enough, and to the extent that the zeitgeist is sort of retroactively determined by whatever technological and political things are going on at the time, I wonder what new beliefs people will have about the state of the world in 50 or 100 years as the result of DLT. On the surface the ability of banks to steal from folks seems like largely a different type of power than what the economist is talking about, which is the ability of metrics (and the people who define them) to shape human behavior. But maybe it just looks that way because it's difficult or impossible to really perceive the full extent of how living in a non-DLT world is affecting our behavior.

jtolmar 8y ago

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

BurningFrog 8y ago
If true, this makes power rather pointless.
- xenihn 8y ago
  Why?
  - BurningFrog 8y ago
    Imagine a form of money that can only be used to buy more of that money, not any goods or services.
sova 8y ago
Power is happening naturally, it is our ability to harness it that is deft or dull.

l0b0 8y ago

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.

poilcn 8y ago
>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. We can't know beforehand what is the right way to teach (or what one should learn). Only time can show. Imposing control over education makes everyone live by the same mediocre standards; you reduce dimensionality to just one scale from number A to number B and you cut out the randomness. At the end you get the same situation as in every field where you impose any sort of metrics: teachers and students just try to game them. >Being someone who decides what to measure is a position of great power and responsibility Humanity had whole 20th century to see how central planning works. One man or thousand can't do the job better for a multimillion society that each individual or groups of individuals can do themselves. Indeed it's a position of great power and it attracts corresponding type of people whom one should keep away from decisions that would affect millions. Whether they want to use with good will or malicious. >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. That's sort of a fallacy. Using a broken or completely irrelevant instrument is not a good alternative to not having an instrument at all. Again, by imposing metrics on extremely complex things you reduce the number of dimensions (from infinite to calculable). It makes it look like it's under control, but that's just a self-delusion. At best it does not help at all, at worst it eventually produces a crisis.

austincheney 8y ago

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.

system2 8y ago

This is like a great https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/ post, to be honest. This existed for thousands of years.

toofy 8y ago

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.

Gibbon1 8y ago
Your story reminds me of the McNamara Fallacy. Meaning it's a good example why the McNamara Fallacy is one. One of my points is there is a lot of necessary and beneficial things people do that don't fit into being exploited via paid work.

Proven 8y ago

Free people couldn't be governed by numbers unless they wanted to be. They are only because they have no say in how they're governed (or rather, handled). Thanks to technological improvements the State is increasing its grip on citizens. The NSA in the US, Communist Party in China, bureaucrats in the EU. The list goes on. Small government has no resources to spy and terrorize its citizens. Large does. The Economist on the whole favors technocrats and "effective" government, and are part the problem.

openfuture 8y ago

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.

DanielBMarkham 8y ago

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=recEUbufzhAvph8K1 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.

ausbah 8y ago

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?

alehul 8y ago
Good question! Goodhart’s Law fits this quite well. :) From Wikipedia: “Goodhart's law is an adage named after economist Charles Goodhart, which has been phrased by Marilyn Strathern as "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." [0] [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
- dr_dshiv 8y ago
  Yeah, but read his actual papers. Goodhart doesn't actually advocate against using measures. He just shows how measures can be corrupted and presents suggestions on avoiding this
bschne 8y ago
Goodhart‘s Law - „When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure“ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law
NeedMoreTea 8y ago
As well as Goodhart, there's also "People with targets and jobs dependent upon meeting them will probably meet the targets - even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it." W. Edwards Deming As seen everywhere including in hospital care outcomes, waiting lists and school standards.

vbuwivbiu 8y ago

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.

PavlovsCat 8y ago

> 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 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.

known 8y ago

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

AtlasBarfed 8y ago

... 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.

tCfD 8y ago

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'