> _“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.
@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, let me try to reset the conversation, with a couple hypothetical scenarios:
👉 We are discussing some wealth transfer program or social intervention. I present you with a number of specific individuals, in order to decide who should pay, or start paying more, or be asked to help the community somehow — and who should benefit from subsidies, grants or other kind of social assistance. How do you proceed?
👉 You're pondering whether to have kids at all, or have another kid, or have kids now or ten years from now. Your friends advise you in one direction, your religion tends to recommend something else (but your own pastor seems to disagree), your parents have their own piece of advice, social norms push you in one direction, and your gut seems to disagree with them all. How do you make up your mind?
👉 You could invest what little spare time you have in studying a new degree, working extra time at a side gig, tackling the pile of books you've been meaning to read for years, or starting to work out. What tools do you use to move forward?
/cc @ImperfectIdea
@tripu
I already agreed with you that science is an useful tool, I don't see why you want to discuss that further.
I never said the opposite.
1. Science is surely a useful tool that can aid you in taking this decision.
You cannot however use science alone to take it: you must first of all decide whether wealth transfer or social intervention are things that should be done, that is, if you think it is a moral and acceptable thing.
2. You will decide to do what you'll decide to do, you will ponder all things that come at you. Certainly you will consider whether it's a good economical decision, but that won't be the decisive thing.
All in all, it won't be the scientific method telling you "you should have a child"
3. Science will not motivate you in doing things, that is something you must do yourself.
All in all, this discussion is getting quite useless. I feel I am learning nothing and you're not willing to consider the fact that antimaterialistic philosophies do exist and you cannot prove them wrong, thus you should consider their existence even if you disagree.
If the world is not completely material, you cannot measure immaterial things using material ones, thus science will fail in explaining everything that is not material.
Even if you're a materialist, science cannot provide clear answers to certain questions, such as "should I have a child?"
I propose we finish this discussion, unless you have something different to say than "science is useful".
@ImperfectIdea