the.com/quantification
the act of turning a feeling into a number so people stop arguing about the feeling.
means expressing a quality or phenomenon as a measurable numerical value.
from from latin quantus, how much, plus facere, to make — literally to make into a how-much; the modern sense hardened in 19th-century science when things like heat and intelligence got forced into units.
kelvin's dictumlord kelvin said unmeasured knowledge is meagre and unsatisfactory.
iq backfirequantifying intelligence spawned a century of biased tests.
goodhart's lawonce a measure becomes a target, it stops measuring well.
gdp blind spota number that ignores unpaid work, still runs economies.
for instance
gdp — reduces an entire nation's wellbeing to one dollar figure since the 1930s
iq score — binet's 1905 test still shapes school placements worldwide
richter scale — turns earthquake devastation into a single logarithmic digit
credit score — a three-digit number that decides your mortgage rate