Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

GRAY MATTER ... Measurement and Its Discontents

LAST week, delegates from 55 nations assembled in a suburb of Paris to bring to fruition a dream, centuries old, to perfect the world’s measurement system. The historic event, the 24th General Conference on Weights and Measures, finalized state-of-the-art definitions for basic units of measurement like the second, the meter and (at long last) the kilogram. Gone are the days when the meter and the kilogram were defined by physical sticks and lumps of metal stored in a vault in France; now we rely on high-tech standards like the speed of light and other scientific constants.

With the measurement system all but finalized, why are controversies over measurement still surfacing? Why are we still stymied when trying to measure intelligence, schools, welfare and happiness?

The problem is not that we don’t yet have precise enough tools for measuring such things; it’s that there are two wholly different ways of measuring.

In one kind of measuring, we find how big or small a thing is using a scale, beginning point and unit. Something is x feet long, weighs y pounds or takes z seconds. We can call this “ontic” measuring, after the word philosophers apply to existing objects or properties.

But there’s another way of measuring that does not involve placing something alongside a stick or on a scale. This is the kind of measurement that Plato described as “fitting.” This involves less an act than an experience: we sense that things don’t “measure up” to what they could be. This is the kind of measuring that good examples invite. Aristotle, for instance, called the truly moral person a “measure,” because our encounters with such a person show us our shortcomings. We might call this “ontological” measuring, after the word philosophers use to describe how something exists.

The distinction between the two ways of measuring is often overlooked, sometimes with disastrous results. In his book “The Mismeasure of Man,” Stephen Jay Gould recounted the costs, both to society and to human knowledge, of the misguided attempt to measure human intelligence with a single quantity like I.Q. or brain size. Intelligence is fundamentally misapprehended when seen as an isolatable entity rather than a complex ideal. So too is teaching ability when measured solely by student test scores.

Confusing the two ways of measuring seems to be a characteristic of modern life. As the modern world has perfected its ontic measures, our ability to measure ourselves ontologically seems to have diminished. We look away from what we are measuring, and why we are measuring, and fixate on the measuring itself. We are tempted to seek all meaning in ontic measuring — and it’s no surprise that this ultimately leaves us disappointed and frustrated, drowned in carefully calibrated details.

Consider the popular Web site The Quantified Self, which, in the name of self-improvement, provides tools for collecting data on every aspect of your daily life: sleeping, eating, having sex, worrying, having coffee and so forth. “Behind the allure of the quantified self,” Gary Wolf, a founder of the site, explained in this newspaper’s magazine, “is a guess that many of our problems come from simply lacking the instruments to understand who we are.” Ontic measurement is seen as the key to self-knowledge.

But how are we supposed to measure how wise or prudent we are in choosing the instruments of measurement and interpreting the findings? Modern literature is full of references to the dehumanizing side of measurement, as exemplified by the character Thomas Gradgrind in Dickens’s “Hard Times,” a dry rational character who is “ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to,” yet loses track of his own life.

How can we keep an eye on the difference between ontic and ontological measurement, and prevent the one from interfering with the other?

One way is to ask ourselves what is missing from our measurements. Are the tests administered by schools making students smarter and more educated, or just making us think we know how to evaluate education? Is the ability to measure tiny levels of toxins making us safer, or leading us to spend enormous sums of money unnecessarily to eliminate toxins just to make us feel safer?

In our increasingly quantified world, we have to determine precisely where and how our measurements fail to deliver. Now that we have succeeded in defining the kilogram by an absolute universal standard, we still have to remind ourselves of the human purposes that led us to create the kilogram in the first place, and always to make sure that the kilogram is serving us, and not the other way around.

The delegates at the conference in France certainly deserve kudos. In seeking to perfect the global measurement system, they have respected science and acted without political agendas to further the collective good for future generations everywhere.

How do the rest of us measure up?

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page SR9 of the New York edition with the headline: Measurement And Its Discontents.