The Need to Quantify

Today, I have a couple of slightly disparate media recommendations that fit together in my head.

First, a Science Friday segment from last week. The guest was C. Thi Nguyen, a philosophy professor at the University of Utah. His book is called The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game, and he and host Flora Lichtman were discussing how metrics — I would call this quantification – are, essentially, bad. 

At one point early in the conversation, he said, 

One of the core experiences I had in my life was this kind of drift in my values, where I started doing things, like starting to diet, trying to get better at rock climbing, trying to get better at philosophy. And at first, there was a scoring system nearby, and I could mostly ignore it and be like, what I cared about is the interesting questions, is feeling better in my body. And over time, there’s this drift.

What happens with the drift is that I started caring deeply and immediately about the metric. So I’ve been calling this value capture. And value capture is what happens when your values are rich and subtle and then you get put in a setting, typically an institutional setting, that presents you with some simplified and quantified version of your values. And then that starts to take over. You start caring immediately about getting more likes or ... getting higher in those rankings.

The whole discussion has more nuance than my brief description, and Nguyen (being a philosopher) wouldn't say something as simple as "metrics are bad," of course. 

This conversation confirmed a lot of my priors — since I am a person who has resisted the whole "quantified life" trend since it began. I admit that. 

Second is a recent edition of the education podcast "Have You Heard," called The Curious Case of Kindergarten. It's about an upcoming book whose author visited American kindergarten classrooms across the country. Part of the discussion is about how metrics and the supposed acceleration of K–12 curriculum have damaged kindergarten and, therefore, children.