Economists and scientists have a love affair with measures. They think most, if not all things, could be measured (or gauged, approximated) and if not, it is just because they have not figured out a way to measure them. I constantly and consciously dig into their efforts, past or present or even in the planned future, how they go about doing this and gett amazed and amused at the lengths they go to and the things they set about measuring.
Just last week, there were 36 questions being flung around cyberspace that supposedly promised to be a likely filter for true love. The “36 questions” was sort of a measured inducer for personal closeness and this was based on the initial findings of a study on whether you can “force” interpersonal closeness from strangers using a set of self-revelatory questions about the pair’s personality and views on intimate behavior. The study initially found that this actually fosters closeness between strangers. I read the whole study and unless I am as dense as a blackhole, I did not see anything there that referred to “true love.” At best, it was “close friendship.” But still, people did not hesitate to associate it with “true love.” .
And then more recently, there was a study on married couples that asked two questions to married couples. One, they asked them how happy they were in their marriage compared to if they were not in it and two asked them how they think their spouse answered that question. Then, they checked the divorce rates of the couples six years later. The results were pretty much what we would guess: those who rated themselves happier if they were not in the marriage and those who overestimated their spouse’s happiness, were more likely to divorce. But still the researchers, using a measuring tool called “bargaining theory” suggested that the divorce rate should be higher.
“Bargaining theory” suggests that when a spouse (Fidel) thinks that her partner (Rose) is happier than she really is, then Fidel would push her further to the edge thinking that he has more bargaining chips (i.e., “happy chips” based on what he thinks Rose feels about their marriage). But because the divorce rates that resulted was lower than what the researchers predicted (they referred to this as an “inefficiency”), they said could be attributed to “love”. “Love” is I think the commonly recruited social equivalent of the cosmological constant that Einstein threw in when things did not add up in his equation of why the universe is the way it was.
I am currently reading a beautifully informative book called Anatomies by Hugh Aldersey Williams. Among the many fascinating things in it about the history of making sense of human anatomy, I was particularly taken by how natural it was for people to be drawn to measures.
For instance, the pioneer of “mean” and ‘average” and statistics as a measure to make sense of many things (including people) was Adolphe Quetelet. He also played around with heights and weights of different people coming up with a way to make sense of both. This was the foundation of what we know now to be the body-mass index.
There was also Alphonse Bertillon who came up with scientific identity cards – it is like the results of your full executive check-up but in cards but included detailed measurements of your visible body parts in different angles. Before fingerprints, these measurements were used NOT to identify suspects but to eliminate them.
But the one who really took the cake for me in terms of obsession with measurement was Francis Galton, who noticed how fingerprints could be used in a methodical and reliable way to identify suspects. He drew up questionnaires, counters of all sorts, the 1800’s equivalent of the big efforts now to make sense of big data. He even wanted to measure boredom in scientific conferences by coming up with a “quantitative index of human boredom from the rate of fidgeting among members of the audience.”
In his indefatigable measuring spirit, this was how Galton reacted to a woman whose appearance struck him: he used his sextant and recorded her stance in every direction, not just her east, west, north and south but even diagonally, even using a measuring tape to figure out the base and angles of his views using trigonometry and logarithms. So there you go gentlemen, a perfectly reasonable way to deal with a woman if you run out of proven pick-up lines. Just don’t refer to me as your coach. Galton is your man.
But we miss the point entirely if we think that scientists and economists are the only ones valiantly taking the risk of looking like fools measuring love, beauty and other fuzzy things in life. We all do this – this is why everyone went way ahead of what the 36 questions originally meant to elicit. We think that if we know certain numbers and we consider them, we improve our chances and lessen the risk. We like measures because we think it somehow softens the blows of the all too many impromptu appearances of real-life situations like love, attractions and separations.
So how do you think your life has been measuring up so far? – Rappler.com
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