C. Thi Nguyen

So when I was trying to understand metrics, the thing that helped me the most was this book from Theodore Porter called Trust in Numbers.

So Theodore Porter is a historian who works in quantification culture.

And he was trying to understand why people kind of like knee-jerkly reach for, he was particularly interested in bureaucrats and politicians and why they always reached for quantitative justification, even when they knew that quantitative justification wasn't that great.

And his answer was to understand what the particular nature of institutional quantification was.

So he ends up saying there are two different ways of knowing things in the world.

qualitative ways of knowing and quantitative ways of knowing and he thinks they're both great at different things and the problem comes when we don't like find the appropriate one or balance them against each other but go all in for quantitative in every case so he says qualitative ways of knowing are context rich sensitive and open-ended responsive dynamic but they don't travel well between contexts because they require a lot of shared background information to understand

So my example for here is, you know, a professor is written comments I write on my philosophy majors papers, right?

They're long, they're complicated, they're particular, their response of the students, what they're doing.

They use a lot of complex, like in philosophy language.

They use a lot of particular concepts from the class.

Someone else from elsewhere in the university or elsewhere in hiring won't understand them.

Quantitative ways of knowing in institutions work by identifying a context invariant kernel

And then holding that kernel stable across different contexts and making sure that everyone collects into the same kernel the same way.

So the example here is like letter grades in the university system, right?

So an A means about the same thing, a B means about the same thing, a C means about the same thing in every different context.

And once we fix that, that information can travel easily.

Like my really long, complicated...

qualitative discussion of a student is not going to be understandable by the business dean or by someone hiring at Silicon Valley, but A, B, and C are immediately comprehensible.

And the reason they're comprehensible is precisely that we've stripped high context, high nuance information out of them.

Does that make sense?