> _“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?"
> 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.
I think you only need a few axioms, eg “suffering is bad”. There doesn't need be a big apparatus of ideology.
Your example is simple: losing friends is trivially easy; making and maintaining friendship is costly and for some people may be difficult. Your hermit who has “too many friends” can “solve” the situation in a day or two, alienating or ignoring people as needed. The opposite is not true.
Also: necessarily, when we approximate the ingredients of well-being, there'll be outliers and exceptions. That's to be expected, and doesn't mean numbers don't work.
You can always refine the model, and measure instead no. of friends _in relation to desired no. of friends_: 1 means perfect; anything above or below is worse.
Ultimately, everything is quantifiable.
