After the last speaker I began to wonder about measuring sensitivity. Many of the problems we discuss here are about objective and material problems. Easy enough to fix. How much do we use? How many years will it take. How many tons of whatever are we wasting. Simple stuff.
How do we classify the other things? Hard science only deals with the material and objective issues. What about the objective yet immaterial? Does it even exist?
Yes immaterial and yet objective things exist. When we sit in class and we engage in discussion with each other, that is a social connection. Immaterial, yet it is still a thing. How would one go about measuring that?
Decidable levels from chatter? Proximity of the seating clusters? Perhaps a quiz?
“How would you rate your class’s social connection with one another”
1 – 2 – 3 – 4 – 5
What happens when we rate the subjective is another fascinating experience.A rating for the level of attractiveness of other people is one we are all familiar with.
“She’s a soft 7.”
This brings me to a question related to sustainability. How important is it to you ? How do we measure this? As we saw in the TED talk, a grandfather would probably do anything to save the world for his grandchildren.
I’m not proposing to measure love. I am questioning the importance of judging what is worth saving. A way of life, or a place to live?
I think the difference here is things can be seemingly intangible for various reasons.
Things like physical attractiveness are tough to quantify for various reasons, although there are ways of doing it (e.g. facial symmetry, waist-hip-ratio, and vocal pitch.) Penn State Anthropology did a lot of neat studies on these topics.
Things related to sustainability are sometimes seemingly intangible because they are so dynamic with many different confounders and interactions that are difficult to isolate. Some things (like the following example) require assumptions as to how to quantify qualitative data or objectify it with associated quantitative data.
Measuring things like the No Can Do recycling programs’ effect on individual motivation to properly dispose of waste is also rather challenging. Sure it is a more convent system that makes proper disposal of waste clear for all audiences, you can’t exactly directly measure individual motivation or how the program played a role. You can only collect select self report data from surveys, focus groups, and interviews, or measure fluctuations in waste disposed. These more displaced measurements require assumptions, and in the case of self-report data, may not be representative of the given population.
I think that measuring intangibles is something that humans instinctually already do, but maybe without officially quantifying it. In every decision we make as humans, we measure in our heads the importance of the situation to us. With that, we go about making thousands of decisions in a day. I feel that if people started to quantify a rating for everything, it could potentially make for a dangerous culture by holistically valuing somebody or something based on numbers alone. For instance, I don’t think colleges should be accepting students based on a bunch of numbers that they have in front of them, but by a rating of the overall value of said person.
This is a very interesting and meaningful topic that should be explore more. I like that you are being creative in the blog post. However, you did not offer a solution on how to really measure intangibles and you did not include any math. Great thoughts though!
Measuring intangibles is a serious dilemma, especially in the field of education. For example, college admissions committees want to measure each applicant’s potential for success. Another example: college professors are tasked with gauging each student’s knowledge of the content covered in the course. In each case, those who are trying to measure something intangible approach the problem by listing observable byproducts. From the first example, one observable might be the history of work from an applicant. From the second example, one observable might be a score on an exam. By defining a set of observables, this helps measurers avoid making decisions based on impressions or whims. Defining which observables you should use, however, is highly nontrivial. The SATs might be one observable that has nothing to do with a person’s potential, yet it is still used by admissions committees.
I think this is a very important topic to ponder and discuss. However, I think you need to elaborate on what you mean by the “sustainability” component of this problem. Do you mean the difficulty in measuring intangibles in the field of ecological sustainability? Or do you mean the sustainability of living with such ambiguities? In addition to clarifying what you mean, I think you should provide a concrete example of what you mean and how some components of the measurement are subjective and perhaps even arbitrary. Show how those subjective/arbitrary parts can lead to very different conclusions.