> _“What important truth do very few people agree with you on?”_

(living thread)

**_Everything_ is quantifiable, and should be quantified.**

Everything is a #measure or can be measured.

#Science can study anything, and #mathematics is the language of science.

The fact that some aspects of life seem hard to estimate doesn't mean we are better off not even trying and coming up with our best approximation.

More #information rarely hurts, and even rough approximations (accompanied by their respective confidence intervals) are useful information.

One can measure, weigh and analyse… and still be sensitive, funny, romantic, impressionable, intuitive, creative — if one so chooses after all the (numeric) information is available.

@tripu
Go tell this to anti realists.

Surely measuring things often improves information and knowledge, but that doesn't mean everything is quantifiable.

@rastinza What isn't?

@tripu
Whose life is better, what is the meaning of life, position and momentum of an electron

Science can study some things, to some others it can offer no response; for example it cannot answer the question "is science a good way to explain the world?"

@rastinza

> Whose life is better

There are entire fields of research devoted to improving (and so, necessarily, also _measuring_) quality of life, aka well-being: within medicine, psychiatry, sociology, philosophy.

There are metrics (longevity, physical health, mental health, suffering, pain, stress, purchase power, crime rate, democratic quality, self-reported happiness), units to measure it all (years, QALYs, BMI, USD, % of disability), and ways to combine it all into a single measure.

I'm not saying there is one single perfect metric or that we have found the ultimate way to measure well-being. But it's definitely measurable, and we're getting better at it.

Whoever measures higher has “a better life”.

@tripu
No, it depends on several assumptions that you make before making those measurements.
You can measure some values, but these measurements in no way can tell you who has a better life.

Let's take a simple example: measure the amount of friends one has to determine if he has a better life than someone else.
For someone who likes meeting people and staying with them, a higher number will indicate a better life; while for someone with a more ascetic view of life a lower number will indicate a better life.
The results of your evaluation will change according to the assumptions you make, in one case you'll consider one persons life better and in the other the opposite.
Science cannot provide any way to determine these things.

@rastinza @tripu simply measuring the amount of friends would not tell you who has a better life, as you say, because each person prefers different amounts of friends. What we can measure is the effect of each amount of friends in the brains of those people, and that might tells us who feels more content with the number of friends they have. That is measurable.

@ImperfectIdea
Sure, but you're still just measuring the effects in the brain of a person.
You still have no way to determine which person has a better life, you did not measure that.

You could say that you assume that one response in the brain is associated to a better life *in your opinion* and thus measure that.
But that is still your opinion.
Because first of all you have to decide what it means to have a better life, and that is not something that you can design experiments or falsify.
If someone tells you he has a better life than billionaires because he has fun throwing rocks at trees, you cannot say that's not true. A billionaire might disagree and prefer its own life. Now, deciding who has a better life is possible: you can have an opinion about it. But that is not scientific and that is not something that can be measured.
@tripu

@rastinza what I'm trying to say is that any feelings that we might associate with "a good life" are ultimately brain states - which are measurable, at least, in principle. If you say that the definition of "a good life" changes with time, culture and each person, that's true, but the brain states that give all those different definitions are also measurable. Define "good life" well enough and you'll end up with atoms and electric charges.
@tripu

@rastinza @tripu And I'm not saying we can determine which is "better" - there might be brain states that can't be felt by everyone, so they're not comparable; there might be many different ways to get to the same brain states. Context is needed. But for each life there's definitely better and wrong choices, depending on the brain states they produce. Religion simply tries to answer questions that we haven't been able to define well enough mathematically yet.

@ImperfectIdea
> But for each life there's definitely better and wrong choices

That is opinable. Are you able to tell a person whether he should suicide or not? Is it an objective analysis that can be done simply through science? If that's possible, then one day we will have a computer telling people the exact day in which they should suicide.
If you can say that living is a better choice than dieing for that person then he should not suicide, if you can tell the opposite then he should.

> Religion simply tries to answer questions that we haven't been able to define well enough mathematically yet

You are assuming that it is possible to do so.
I believe it is not possible.

> Define "good life" well enough

This is what I think is impossible to do in a scientific way.
It's possible to define good life, but not through science.
You can do a lot of calculations and stuff, but none of those will result in "this is good life, while that is not"
You must first define what is good life and then you can use science to identify which people have a good life and which ones do not.
@tripu