C. Thi Nguyen

I mean, here's one way to put it, that the thing that I'm worried about is that we have substituted for our sense of reality that which can be quantified, metrified, and datified, and that we have put in front of us, instead of a sense of well-being or happiness, like some legible external tracker, and we become convinced that that's the real thing.

Now, one thing I want to say, I'm not like, let me just

I'm not saying data is bad.

I'm not like anti-science.

I take my antibiotics.

I believe in science.

One of the things I think that's really important is that the large scale institutional methodologies I'm talking about, this kind of portability concept is very good at measuring some kinds of things.

What they're very good at measuring is anything that's context invariant and easy for everyone to pick up on.

So, for example, I mean, one of the reasons that I mean, this is vastly oversimplified, but one of the reasons that large scale database methods are good for basic medicine is because being alive or dying, that's very easy.

That's stable across contexts.

Similarly, bacteria leaving your system, right?

That's stable across contexts.

That's exactly the kind of thing that large-scale database methods and quantitative methods are incredibly good at capturing.

They're capturing a real thing and they're doing it perfectly.

The problem is if there's something that's valuable, that's highly variable between contexts, that needs a lot of sensitivity to pick up on,

That's going to be the kind of thing that large scale data collection methods that demand portable, easily recognizable categories and recognition systems.

That's going to be the kind of thing they're really bad at picking up on.

This is why I like when I think about the kinds of things that we're not going to get good data on.

I think about things like well-being, happiness, art, beauty, because not because these things are like ineffable, but because they're highly contextually variable.

Elizabeth Barnes is a philosopher of metaphysician who does a lot of stuff on philosophy of health and disability.