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This is very silly; the worst case of a fetish for creating metrics to try to make something "objective" when the determination really needs to be made on the t

This is very silly; the worst case of a fetish for creating metrics to try to make something "objective" when the determination really needs to be made on the totality of human experience and moral reasoning. The "ship pollution to poor countries" is a great example of this -- hey, we have this metric, and according to this metric, it's a net win. This is one path to doing monstrous things in the name of minimizing a metric, rather than actually making progress. To convince yourself that the task of "value of human life" is futile, the following thought experiment suffices -- there are different penalties for deliberately causing the death of another (and distinction based on the quality and recency of those motives) vs. negligently causing a death vs. recklessly causing a death, in all justice systems invented by humans. The article says that attempts to do this have "shown puzzlingly great variation across individuals and contexts", but then attempts to reduce it to new and interesting metrics instead. Uncertainty is the fact of life; this pursuit is meaningless except as a post-mortem examination of the impact of an action taken in ignorance of the metric. If the metric is involved in the decision making in any form it immediately becomes useless and counterproductive.

cryptonector 6y ago
> To convince yourself that the task of "value of human life" is futile, the following thought experiment suffices -- there are different penalties for deliberately causing the death of another (and distinction based on the quality and recency of those motives) vs. negligently causing a death vs. recklessly causing a death, in all justice systems invented by humans. How does that prove the futility of the exercise? It only proves that there must be more than one way to do it, and that the right method depends on context. There are metrics for use in criminal cases, civil cases, insurance, etc. It's not like we can fail to make these determinations -- failing to put a value on human life in each relevant context is akin to saying there is no value to human life at all.
- andrewla 6y ago
  > failing to put a value on human life in each relevant context is akin to saying there is no value to human life at all. This is the crux of the problem with metric-based examination of nearly everything except physics. It is not nearly akin to that. If anything, saying that you can have a metric that measures the value of human life is much more akin to saying there is no value to human life at all -- all of life is "haggling over the price" as it were. Saying that it cannot be measured is just making an epistemological declaration of lack of knowledge. Not of the general form of "well, we just have to find the right variable and plug them in to the right formula" but of the form of "this is not well-suited to being reduced to a metric, as any such reduction will mask aspects of its value that are obvious but not easily measured". To be clear on the dangers (as if the McKinsey-fication of "dump the pollution in pooristan" wasn't enough) the problem is that given an imperfect approximation to some theoretical perfect metric, we have absolutely no way of determining how imperfect it is. There's nothing to measure it against except other potential metrics. There's absolutely no concept of ground truth -- the universe will not correct you (as it will if you measure mass incorrectly when doing physics).

cryptonector 6y ago

> To convince yourself that the task of "value of human life" is futile, the following thought experiment suffices -- there are different penalties for deliberately causing the death of another (and distinction based on the quality and recency of those motives) vs. negligently causing a death vs. recklessly causing a death, in all justice systems invented by humans. How does that prove the futility of the exercise? It only proves that there must be more than one way to do it, and that the right method depends on context. There are metrics for use in criminal cases, civil cases, insurance, etc. It's not like we can fail to make these determinations -- failing to put a value on human life in each relevant context is akin to saying there is no value to human life at all.

andrewla 6y ago
> failing to put a value on human life in each relevant context is akin to saying there is no value to human life at all. This is the crux of the problem with metric-based examination of nearly everything except physics. It is not nearly akin to that. If anything, saying that you can have a metric that measures the value of human life is much more akin to saying there is no value to human life at all -- all of life is "haggling over the price" as it were. Saying that it cannot be measured is just making an epistemological declaration of lack of knowledge. Not of the general form of "well, we just have to find the right variable and plug them in to the right formula" but of the form of "this is not well-suited to being reduced to a metric, as any such reduction will mask aspects of its value that are obvious but not easily measured". To be clear on the dangers (as if the McKinsey-fication of "dump the pollution in pooristan" wasn't enough) the problem is that given an imperfect approximation to some theoretical perfect metric, we have absolutely no way of determining how imperfect it is. There's nothing to measure it against except other potential metrics. There's absolutely no concept of ground truth -- the universe will not correct you (as it will if you measure mass incorrectly when doing physics).