
Life and society are increasingly governed by numbers - jkuria
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2019/02/23/life-and-society-are-increasingly-governed-by-numbers
======
toofy
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.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Some things shouldn't be measured, or be about any external validation. I'm
sure that old lady wasn't doing it for recognition or reward, but just because
she felt it the right thing to do. A sense of personal or civic pride if you
like, or wanting to make her little bit of the world that bit nicer, for
everyone.

It's something we mostly forgot. Parks and gardens are maintained at lowest,
most efficient cost; businesses build the cheapest box building planning laws
let them; people couldn't care less about much of anything beyond them and
theirs. Everywhere you look things are that much more dull and uninteresting,
or messy and rubbish strewn than they once were. I suspect it was an
_intended_ consequence of the Thatcher/Reagan years. It's certainly removed a
lot of the humanity.

I can give no better example of striving to make the world a tiny bit better
for no recognition or reward than this story from yesterday:
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/man-who-
tend...](https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/22/man-who-tended-mi-
amigo-memorial-for-75-years-watches-flypast-wwii-us-pilots)

If you click through to the twitter threads that initiated this, you may end
up with grit in your eyes. :)

~~~
jonbesga
Could you explain further what do you mean with one consequence being the
Thatcher/Reagan years? Genuinely curious.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Erk, big question! The Reagan/US experience was different in the details, but
broadly followed the same road and rationale. I'll cover the UK case as I live
here. It's a huge topic, so I've probably summarised this poorly...

Thatcherism ushered in a widespread, total belief in materialistic
individualism. Until the recession, anyway.

Not just the cliched Harry Enfield loadsamoney, or for US readers Gordon Gekko
"greed is good" in Wall Street, and the rise of the yuppie, but the abolition
of the majority of the post-war consensus. Thatcher herself seemed to have a
genuine, but strange, belief that this would turn us all out like the little
old lady mentioned in the GP. We'd have massive amounts of civic and social
pride, whilst inhabiting a society where everything has been shaped around the
individual alone, with competition for everything. Others in government were
far more straightforward about the intended result.

Anything collective was bad. The welfare state, public housing, public
ownership, public amenities were bad, as a matter of dogma. Even when they
were good. That included tiny things like the council employing park keepers
and gardeners, or big like providing enough public housing. You could buy your
public housing, but the local council _was not allowed_ to build a replacement
or spend the proceeds on buying a replacement. Post-war, through the
seventies, _both_ political parties agreed, and even competed, to provide
adequate public housing, public facilities, adequate regulation, an adequate
safety net etc.

There was plenty wrong with the UK in the 70s, and _some_ of the Thatcher
changes were necessary. Just some. Unions were certainly overly powerful.
Others, from the long term perspective have been remarkably damaging. It
didn't have to be so brutal. It didn't have to go from safety net to now where
we have a punitive, vindictive welfare system intended to punish and
stigmatise. After 40 years of neoliberal policies to end state control and
direction, local government is more centrally funded and controlled than it's
ever been.

We ended up with individual insurance and pension schemes. Invest in the wrong
scheme? Tough shit. The employer was divested of any responsibility to provide
for their workers with a collective scheme. Not just pensions, but connections
to the community, fair wages, wage differentials, job security. Billions in
proceeds from oil or privatisations? Piss them away in tax cuts. Norway built
a national investment scheme that's worth hundreds of thousands for each
citizen. Collectivism is always bad.

As so often is the case, the right answer was somewhere between the two
extremes.

~~~
Ntrails
Defined Benefit pension schemes were a terrible idea that only made sense when
you assume the risk free rate will always be 10%.

Something more like the Australian model would be good, there are improvements
that should be made, but in the end DC is the correct path forwards

------
Alex3917
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.

~~~
heymijo
For the uninitiated, what might Epistemology of Measurement and Statistics 101
look like?

~~~
dr_dshiv
Everyone should know three things: 1\. You can measure anything 2\.
Measurements always have error 3\. Measures aren't always aligned to what they
are trying to measure, so even validated measures need critical thinking based
on qualitative experience.

------
DanielBMarkham
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...](http://tiny-giant-
books.com/Entry2.html?EntryId=recEUbufzhAvph8K1)

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.

------
austincheney
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.

------
ausbah
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
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
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

------
openfuture
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.

------
AtlasBarfed
... 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
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'

------
vbuwivbiu
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.

------
known
Numbers drive
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect)

------
PavlovsCat
> _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._

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

~~~
BurningFrog
If true, this makes power rather pointless.

~~~
xenihn
Why?

~~~
BurningFrog
Imagine a form of money that can only be used to buy more of that money, not
any goods or services.

------
l0b0
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
>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.

------
KasianFranks
In other words, datasets.

------
minikites
>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
> _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.

~~~
minikites
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
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.

