The United States of Metrics

What are we trying to prove, exactly? Or maybe inexactly. We have become besotted with metrics, lathering ourselves with numbers, drowning in measurements.

Is there a purpose to all this or are we, collectively, like a kid with a new toy: unable to stop playing because we are just so delighted with our latest distraction?

This is, to a great degree, an extension of our fascination with technology generally and the power of smart phones specifically. We have access to features of whose wondrous capabilities we are justifiably in awe. The potential inherent in taking that mishmash ofinformation, reducing it to data and then attempting to apply it is impossible to resist. And bravo to us for trying.

But the question remains: are we giving sufficient (some might say any...) thought to either the meaning or to the  implications of all this.

Meaning requires interpretation. Interpretation requires context and context requires knowledge, experience and at its apogee, wisdom. All of which extend outwards to sources and uses. The debate about what we are giving up - socially, intellectually, morally - to acquire the raw material for our new constructs has only just begun. The implications are that we are, as yet, either incapable or unwilling to manage the data and the process by which it is obtained. Until we do so the usefulness of the exercise is questionable because thebroader applications and the results they generate, if any, will be similarly uncertain.

Measures generated during times of great change tend not to have long term impacts. And the perfect - or  our search for it - tends to be the enemy of the good. This suggests that we should continue to experiment - and nurture our sense of wonder - but not lose sight of the fact that we may not yet have the answers we seek. JL
 
Bruce Feiler comments in the New York Times:

As the greatest numbers person of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, warned, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

The map of the United States that appeared on Nerve.com this year was in many ways similar to the maps that pop up on the Internet during election seasons. States were divided into red or blue, then shaded from light to dark. Only in this case, the color did not indicate political preference; it indicated duration of sexual encounter.

With data provided by Spreadsheets, an app that uses body sensors, accelerometers and smartphone microphones to monitor “how long you go for, and exactly how loud it gets,” the website calculated the average length of sexual experience in all 50 states. New Mexico came in the longest at 7 minutes 1 second, followed by West Virginia and Idaho. Alaska was the shortest at 1:21, preceded by South Dakota and Vermont.

The app, which also tracks the number of days in a row you have sex, the frequency of assignations during a 24-hour period and your decibel peak, does not record or play back audio, its website says, noting, “That would be creepy.”

In the last few years, there has been a revolution so profound that it’s sometimes hard to miss its significance. We are awash in numbers. Data is everywhere. Old-fashioned things like words are in retreat; numbers are on the rise. Unquantifiable arenas like history, literature, religion and the arts are receding from public life, replaced by technology, statistics, science and math. Even the most elemental form of communication, the story, is being pushed aside by the list.

The results are in: The nerds have won. Time to replace those arrows in the talons of the American eagle with pencils and slide rules. We’ve become the United States of Metrics.

Given our new obsessions with numbers, you’re probably eager for some statistics to back up this argument. (Actually, by this point, you’ve probably already stopped reading. A study by the Internet data company Chartbeat looked at “deep user behavior” across two billion web visits and found that 55 percent of readers spent fewer than 15 seconds on a page.)

In any event, here goes:

HEALTH Sixty-nine percent of Americans track their weight, diet or exercise, while a third track their blood pressure, sleep patterns and headaches. The market for digital fitness devices brought in $330 million last year and is expected to double this year. Samsung just added a heart-rate monitor to its popular Galaxy line of phones. The No. 1 paid app on iTunes this spring is the Sleep Cycle Alarm Clock, which monitors the amount and quality of winks you get and wakes you during a light phase of your cycle. The app is the top seller in every G-8 country.

SOCIAL MEDIA Facebook is the king of metrics. The site counts the number of friends (average 338), the number of likes on each status report, the number of comments on each report and the number of likes on each comment. Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Foursquare and Tumblr all tally your followers and connections, along with the number of pass-alongs, favorites and responses. Want to know how influential you are on social media? Klout and Kred use analytics to rank your impact. Five hundred million users have calculated their Klout score on a scale from 1 to 100.

SOCIAL SCIENCE That God-shaped hole in the universe? It’s been filled with social science. Whereas once we quoted politicians or preachers, now we quote Gallup or Pew. (Actually, few neologisms better capture the change in the United States in the last 50 years than the move from pew to Pew.) There’s a study, poll or survey for everything these days. TED Talks, the headquarters of this movement, have been viewed more than a billion times, and talks are ranked by views. The hottest nonfiction book this spring is “Capital in the 21st Century,” a 696-page economic tome by Thomas Piketty.

Every generation gets the gurus it craves. Ours include Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Kahneman, Brené Brown, Jim Collins, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, Dan Gilbert, Dan Pink, Dan Ariely and Nate Silver. What do they all have in common? They use research to tackle issues that were once the provenance of poets, theologians and philosophers. (Also, there’s a 40 percent chance they’re named Dan.)

SPORTS While sports fans have always loved statistics, the explosion of fantasy sports in recent years means that the statistics, in essence, now play one another. Fans assemble their own rosters of players from various teams, then those teams “compete” based on metrics. Thirty-two million people play fantasy sports each year. Offerings include baseball, football, rugby, professional wrestling, surfing, auto racing, hockey and golf. (There’s even a Fantasy Congress.) The economic impact is $4 billion a year.

LIFESTYLE The Quantified Self movement utilizes life-logging, wearable computing and other techniques to assemble what it calls “self-knowledge through numbers.” New York University just announced that it has teamed with Hudson Yards to create the nation’s first “quantified community.” Electronic monitors will collect data on such things as pedestrian traffic, air quality, energy consumption, composting compliance, even the physical activity of residents in order to build a “smart community.” The app Reporter pings you several times a day and asks you questions like “Where are you?,” “Who are you with?” and “What did you learn today?” The service then creates a graph of your life.

There’s even smart cutlery. HapiFork tracks how fast you eat. If you don’t pause 10 seconds between each bite, the utensil turns bright red and vibrates to slow you down.

Big Brother isn’t our big enemy anymore. It’s Big Self. That hovering eye in the sky watching every move you make: It’s you.

So what are the consequences of this new numerized world?

Duncan Watts, a social scientist at Microsoft Research and the author of “Everything Is Obvious,” welcomes the trend. He said all this new information enables better decisions.

“If you had to choose between a world in which you do everything based on instinct, tradition or some vague, received wisdom, or you do something based on evidence, I would say the latter is the way to go,” he said.

The challenge is coming up with the proper interpretation of the data, he said. Did you not get a full night’s sleep because you were mindlessly flipping channels or watching Internet porn, or because you were comforting a sick child or having a night of great sex the way they do in New Mexico?

“Coming up with the correct meaning is what’s hard,” Mr. Watts said.

Tony Haile, the chief executive of Chartbeat, which provides real-time analytics for ESPN, CNN and The New York Times Company, agrees. (In addition to studying readers’ habits, nearly every major news organization has invested in “data journalism,” the use of computerized tools to scan digital records, cull big data and visualize complex stories through three-dimensional charts and revolving infographics.) He said the benefits of metrics far outweigh the risks. Data provides what he calls a “sixth sense,” giving instant feedback that’s objective. A former tour guide to the North Pole, Mr. Haile measures his sleep, his exercise, his fat percentage and how many steps he takes each day.

“I do it because it’s fun,” he said. “I get a buzz when I see I’ve hit my 10,000 steps.”

Still, in the same way we never use one sense in isolation, Mr. Haile said, the same should apply to data.

“Just as looks can be deceiving, data can also be deceiving because they’re not the whole picture,” he said. “But it’s an important part of the picture and one we didn’t have before. I’m much less concerned about the data taking over as long as we remember that it’s an additional layer.”

Others, though, are concerned. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the statistician and former options trader who wrote the best-selling book “The Black Swan,” about unexpected events, said he believes the current obsession with metrics is a seductive trap.

“The evil here is not having metrics,” he said. “The problem is that you start trying to maximize every metric you have and reduce everything else.”

Mr. Taleb said he likes knowing how many kilograms of meat he’s buying, but if his meal is measured only by kilograms of meat and calories consumed, then dozens of other uncountable qualities, like the pleasure of the food or the quality of the conversation, go ignored.

“As a scientist, I can say that very little is measurable,” he said, “and even those things that are measurable, you cannot trust the measurement beyond a certain point.”

Many nonscientists are even more frustrated. Anne Lamott, the novelist and nonfiction writer whose best-selling books include “Bird by Bird” and “Traveling Mercies,” is concerned that the headlong rush into data is overshadowing “everything great and exciting that someone like me would dare to call grace.”

“What this stuff steals is our aliveness,” she said. “Grids, spreadsheets and algorithms take away the sensory connection to our lives, where our feet are, what we’re seeing, all the raw materials of life, which by their very nature are disorganized.” Metrics, she said, rob individuals of the sense that they can choose their own path, “because if you’re going by the data and the formula, there’s only one way.”

Ms. Lamott said the current obsession with quantification also represents a male point of view, because it favors order.

“Women have always been handmaidens of birth and death, and that means mess and instinct,” she said. Data, by contrast, gives the appearance of control. “Everything that is truly human is the opposite of that,” she said. “It’s about surrendering control. The surface and numbers aren’t going to hold if your child gets sick or your wife gets cancer.”

Given that everyone faces messiness sooner or later but that everyone also seems to enjoy a bit of data gazing, maybe what’s needed is a fresh way of putting all these numbers in perspective. Curiously, one seems to be at hand, and it’s even got backing from the social scientists: It’s called the law of diminishing returns. Numbers can help, but after a while they become overkill. What we need is a simpler model, something more akin to pass-fail.

“The analogy I would make is diet,” Mr. Watts, of Microsoft Research, said. “If you do a rigorous, exhaustive study of dietary science, I guarantee all you’re going to get is confused. There are thousands of studies out there, and they’re all contradictory. It’s just hopeless. Instead, eat reasonable food, exercise, get a good night’s sleep. After all, you might get hit by a bus tomorrow.”

Mr. Taleb concurs. There are two schools of thought about metrics, he said. You can optimize everything, or you can do what the ancients did and say, “Good enough.”

“Good enough is vastly more rigorous than any metric,” he said, “and it’s more humane, too. Once you reduce a human to a metric, you kill them.”

Or, as the greatest numbers person of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, warned, “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”