Can we Quantify Value? “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science.”– Lord Kelvin Lord Kelvin is making a value judgment. Has his value judgment advanced to the state of being a science? We do not have a physical standard for such a measurement so his judgment of this matter is unsatisfactory, at least in his valuation of judgment. We have developed standards for quantifying certain physical parameters. We have standards for distance, weight, and time. The physical sciences utilize these standards for measuring things that have length, gravity, and duration. We have not developed similar quantifying standards for many other things that are of value to us. This may mean that the measurement of these values is unsatisfactory but again this is a value judgment, which is, as Lord Kelvin says, unsatisfactory. However unsatisfactory it does not mean that we cannot develop a disciplined, empirical, and systematic study of our values, that is to say we can develop a science of any domain of knowledge. The quantification of qualities is useful especially in qualities that seldom change but, however unsatisfactory, it does not mean that we cannot develop a disciplined, empirical, and systematic study of our values. Many of my teachers in grade school gave us report cards with number rather than letter grades. Since this is a quantification of value is it better than a letter grade? The quantification of an assessment of value seems to be an arbitrary assignment of the degree of value in which a judgment is held. Can you quantify beauty, right, wrong, evil, good, sanity, aptness, inaptness, IQ (evidently we have developed a standard here), sophistication, democracy, freedom, etc?
Even back in the 1960s when I was in college, the letters were assigned standard numerical values. A+ = 4.3; A = 4.0; A- = 3.7; B+ = 3.3; etc. This was the only way a GPA (grade point average) could be computed, and GPA meant everything. Staying on the football team, keeping a scholarship, or simply not being expelled from school. Oddly enough, when I was in grade school and high school in Arizona in the 1950s, they used a numerical grading system, but it was upside down. 1=A, 2=B, etc. This caused a lot of confusion when we applied to big-city universities. It's not hard to devise your own rating scale for any of those things. I have all of my music titles in a database and I've auditioned each song and assigned it a "goodness" rating. (I suppose that's about 30,000 titles; no one ever accused me of not following through on a project.) I use the school grading system because of its familiarity, 0.0 to 4.3. A 4.0 is one of my all-time favorites; 3.3 is one I'll put on a compilation of a genre; 3.0 would go on a compilation of an individual band or artist; 2.7 is one I enjoy hearing occasionally; 2.3 would not make me change the radio station, etc. And I use all the decimal gradations in between, to come up with the aggregate rating of entire albums or CDs. We see numerial ratings used routinely in athletic competitions, and even in performance arts competitions like "Dancing with the Stars." People use the one-to-ten scale for practically everything these days, certainly beauty. >5 is good, <5 is bad. The problem of course is for a group of people to agree on a scale. Olympic judges and dancing judges come close enough that no one quibbles over the average score, and their scales are based on relatively objective criteria. Several organizations rate countries or governments on attributes like freedom and democracy, and they also use objective criteria such as the percentage of the population in prison. It boils down to whether you can get a consensus. I don't think you can do that with something like beauty that is totally subjective. Even Miss America is judged on several other merits besides her looks. Good and evil, right and wrong, you have to have a community of judges with a common sense of standards. In other words, you can't measure something until you define it. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
While that might be true to one person, others might not agree with them about how they came to their conclusions about those values.
Fraggle Does this mean that you agree with Lord Kelvin? When he says “When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of science.”– Lord Kelvin Most people seem to think that a science is about something that is quantifiable.
I used to be the manager of a software metrics program and I quoted that portion of Kelvin's statement in all my presentations. I'm a diligent enforcer of measurement. Obviously there are conditions and attributes that cannot be easily (or objectively) measured. But we've got a long way to go before we run out of the other kind.
