We often think quantification is a good thing. We are taught that there is scientific virtue in being precise, being rigorous, and putting things down in numbers. We argue that it helps you get things into perspective, and point out what exactly a problem is. For example, Physics, Chemistry, and Economics are some subjects where measurement has proven to be extremely important.

Today, I wish to make a case that this sense of measurement or quantification is not necessarily a good thing, at least in some domains. I have had personal experiences that this tendency to measure attributes in terms of numbers has harmed people rather than improved their general expectations of well-being. This is not to say philosophy is devoid of such quantification. Utilitarianism, one of the most popular theories of ethics, proudly presents the utility calculus, where an action can have positive utility or negative utility overall, leading to an action being right or wrong. Phillipa Foot’s trolley problem example forces us to grapple with a problem that ultimately comes down to numbers: would you pull the lever if a train en route to killing five people would, upon your action, turn to the track which would kill one person instead?

However, we do not have to search through abstract philosophy books to notice this phenomenon. One recent, most acute example of this quantification I have seen us all indulge in on campus is the quantification in terms of daily protein intake. The argument is not that it is bad to quantify daily protein intake at an individual level. At a broader level, the problem is with a quantification culture that treats measuring everything as normal.

Firstly, such a norm risks us losing the power of our qualitative judgements and using quantity as a crutch for them. With extreme dependence on numbers, we lose very valuable intuitions. What is it to have a good paper, without being given a rating (these days, by ChatGPT)? What is it to have a balanced diet, without being given a caloric distribution? What is it to have a good picture, without being assigned to the number of likes it has gotten (or is likely to receive) in some social media? The argument here is that such intuitions are valuable. They allow us to assess our environment in qualitative, more holistic terms, rather than numbers. Numbers force us to unfairly bring spontaneous, often inarticulate experiences down into some particular fixed point. For example, you would think something wrong is happening if someone uses a tool to measure how great a friendship is everyday instead of analyzing it themself, through how well the interactions with the other person have been.

Additionally, externalizing your life choices to numbers risks expanding such externalization to other parts of our lives like self-worth, and self-confidence, or social relationships. This culture creates a cognitive habit, encouraging us to see more of our lives, including our relationships, through a quantifiable lens. It risks making our relationships transactional.

A final jarring flaw of this cognitive habit, is that it opens up new avenues for the corporate world to capitalize on it. Some could even argue that the quantification is a culture encouraged by the corporate world itself so that they can benefit off of it. Friend dot com (an AI companion friend that you wear around your neck) is an example where people’s loneliness has been capitalized by the market to sell you what it wants. Another hilarious example is Cuddlr, where you could get hugs from people online as soon as you wanted it. It is amusing that basic social relations like hugging and saying “hello” have been parasitized by companies to make money. With quantification, it gets more prevalent.

Corporations target normal everyday people to prove to them what is deficient in them, and how they can buy some product to get rid of said deficiency. The defining rule is “This is a problem you did not know you had, and we will solve it for you.” Numbering makes it easier to show how that deficiency exists in the person and can turn even normal fluctuations from the average into another way someone can be convinced to consume yet another product.

This feeling of unease with constant measurement is common, but it can be hard to articulate exactly why it isa problem. The philosopher J. David Velleman offers a powerful framework for understanding this, arguing that sometimes, being given an option can make us worse off .By giving them an option to quantify, you are taking away how they could be most well off: by not having to quantify by default, while still being content with what they have.

Velleman argues that in some cases, giving an option puts people in a worse position than they were without the option in place, even if they make the most rational decision after the choice is given. This is directly in contrast to the general idea that it is usually better for us to have more options. In common reason, having options means that we can better practice our faculty of reason, and therefore feel the agency. Velleman disagrees.

He gives the following example. Say your supervisor at work invites you to a dinner that you do not really want to attend. Then, you have two options: 1) deny the invitation, or 2) accept the invitation. But, you might not want to decline her kind invitation, so option one is too bad. The most rational option in this case is then to accept the invitation, even though deep down you do not want to attend the dinner. By being given an option through an invitation, the option of being absent from the dinner is by default taken away. This example is especially relevant in the quantification epidemic I talked about at the start of this article. The culture of reducing elements of your life in numbers, including what you eat, or how your body is functioning, is analogous to the example Velleman presents. Giving you the option of tracing everything in number, these technologies and corporations strip away your option of living your life by default. Either you deny these tools that track every bit of your life from sleep, to heart beat, to your screen time in numbers, and feel like you are missing out, or remain in this constant state of self-surveillance.

When the culture presents these tools as the most reasonable things to have in life, denying them in life makes you either feel unreasonable, or be seen as “unreasonable”. When my friends track their heart rate everyday, and I do not, I have this nagging feeling that perhaps, I am not taking good care of myself or am being negligent. Or, you accept these tools, and be more prone to be extremely dependent on them for most part of your life: you lose the qualitative intuitions, you run into the risk of making everything transactional, and fall prey into more and more of corporate advertising based on the quantification. The culture of number takes away one’s option of not having a quantified life by default, when it could have been clearly better for you without it.

Therefore, the superior default state is "living your life according to intuition and qualitative judgment without feeling like you are being negligent or missing out." The option to quantify everything via apps and trackers removes this default state. Now you must either actively track (and become dependent) or actively resist (and feel Luddite-ish or irresponsible).

Of course, there are cases when numbers are rightfully necessary. What if you have some disorder, or you are dealing with some health condition?. In such cases, not quantifying is not clearly a better answer. Since quantifying is, overall, beneficial in that context, then the option cannot be said to be ‘bad’. But that is not what happens in most of the cases of quantification, so this argument still holds true. For most of us, we buy the health wearables even if we do not need it, we track protein intake even if we are not usually protein-deficient, and so on.

Quantification is everywhere. It is in wearable fitness trackers, it is in the back of the food you got from the Convenience Store, it is in the bottle you use for drinking water. It would be foolish to say that we have to stop quantifying everything, measuring anything and go back to being cave people. However, we need to have important conversations on what the limit of this quantification should be. Right now, it seems it is seen as d something we ought to do as reasonable people. I disagree. Just like Velleman said that we can be worse off even when being reasonable, we could instead be better off by resisting the permeation of quantification in many parts of our lives today.