Much of our scientific knowledge is based on measurement. In order to claim there’s a difference between two things, for example a control and a test, it helps to be able to standardize how we examine it. Without that standard, we might argue endlessly about how, in my opinion, there’s nothing worth noting. But if we weigh it to the gram, measure it to the milligram, parse its chemical composition, mark down the decibels, calculate the friction, it’s easier to state differences. After all, information according to Gregory Bateson is simply a difference that makes a difference.
Measurement is a powerful tool, and it allows us to share in the external world. It’s easy to overlook, but when we only deal with opinions, we set up competing worlds, and common ground is achieved through persuasion, arm-twisting, or some other leverage applied by the strongest to the weakest.
When we measure things with standard tools and increments, though, we can often come to an agreement even when we don’t want to. Fine, I guess your calves are bigger than mine. In no small sense, we occupy a shared space.
Imagine a world in which we had no way or desire to measure distance, for example. The size of your plot of land (if you could have one in such a world) is incomparable to your neighbor’s except by boasts and legends. A place we’ve never visited constantly shifts farther or closer depending on the traveler’s tale. Sure, we could hold up a pencil next to another and figure out which is larger by comparison, but we couldn’t say whether candy bars are getting smaller or larger, historically. Nor could we come up with a replacement part for a tool unless we had that exact tool in hand, and made one while testing it for fit.
Much of our wisdom, though, is beyond measure. If knowledge refers to facts (which are standardized ideas), lengths, and electromagnetic frequencies, wisdom might be those things we feel sure of without being able to set forth in neat units. We can’t measure how many units of love we have for a person, or how to behave in a social setting. There are things that can conceivably be measured, but in practice, never are. A baseball player doesn’t run through calculations at the plate before he swings. And while we could run complex evaluations of people based on medical examinations, personality quizzes, infrared signatures, water displacement, and genetic makeup, typically, we don’t decide who we will relate to or how based on such analyses.
The ability to measure things has given us many great technologies and practical theories. I am pro-measurement, just as I enjoy many machines. What worries me is when we apply useful tools beyond a reasonable scope.
When we measure some aspect of something, we imply that this is one of the important things about that item. It’s important how tall you are, how much you weigh, your total cholesterol number, and your shoe size. What can’t be easily measured can’t be compared. We perceive that as “lacking rigor,” or drifting into the subjective realm. And that’s true. But why does everything require rigor?
Our world is difficult to understand. By setting standards and gathering data, we’ve learned a lot of useful things about it, and benefited from the knowledge. In the process, we came to believe that all was simply a product of measurements interacting. Anything could be taken apart and measured down to the atom, and its future modeled with enough data. Measurement gave us the illusion of understanding.
It’s an illusion, because we understand only those things we measured. We know the acceleration of gravity on Earth is 9.8m/s, but what the hell is gravity?
There are many aspects of life that defy honest attempts at quantification. You could measure your heartrate, temperature, and brain activity while you scratched a dog’s head, but is that what’s going on? Some people would argue that all will be measurable one day, or declared irrelevant. This is an article of faith, and a statement of value, and it lacks the rigor the metrologists would claim to have.
As our policymakers become more data-driven, decisions affecting great numbers of people, as well as their environments and non-human inhabitants, are based only on those few aspects that we can place against a ruler. Sometimes, that’s helpful, when inept leaders are reined in by certain facts. Other times, it steers our actions to move a certain average number by a few points one way or the other, regardless of what happens to a given person on the ground.
I think, like the good child in school, we simply want to have the right answer when called upon. When we can’t grasp something, we prefer to hone in on a handful of aspects, slap a quantity on them, and pretend that the length of one part is the summation of the whole. Most people, physical environments, and situations are more complex than that. Is it fair—or even accurate—to take something we can’t understand and reduce it to what we can, then call it solved? I don’t know, but neither do you. Sometimes, it’s better to admit what we can know, and what we can’t.
When we only consider those aspects that can be measured, casting off the rest as unimportant, we also reduce the measurer. Our ways of knowing are many and complex. To only consider the measurable forfeits the profound capacities of the observer, reducing him to a few mechanical parts, staring at something else reduced in the same manner.
The challenge for those of us who want to avoid overly-mechanical thinking is to step outside of ourselves to measure what we need, then bring it back within, so that our other forms of knowing can wrestle with the complexities. That does mean subjecting it to feelings, intuitions, memory, social relationships, prayer, personal values, big ideas, and more. All of those, on their own, are just as insufficient. They would lead us adrift in a world where any two people would struggle to share their fancies.
We might take into account someone’s height and weight when choosing to go on a date, but trust our gut feelings when we meet them; consider the income of a job, but also the quality of life and value-alignment; look at the very small carbon impact of our actions, but ask ourselves if it makes our home a better place to live, and how it contributes to the whole of all our activities, and our neighbors; purchase one product based on reviews and careful research, and another because it struck us as beautiful; choose a health intervention due to positive data, but trust our personal experience when it contradicts other patients’.
This dance between the measurable and the immeasurable, like two overlapping lines, gives us coordinates in our world, a stable center from which to explore. Or, if you prefer, it allows us to glimpse and share some small aspect of the awesome, confounding whole.