The Tyranny of Numbers - By Thomas J Bevan - The Commonplace

I believe the “ tyranny of numbers ” has atrophied people’s abilities to listen to their body. Numbers can be helpful, but often cause me to lose the plot. I’ve found that I feel better when I let my body tell me what I really want, instead of the non-actionable anxiety associated with metrics.

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ocial media's quantifying metrics aggravate the problem, making expression into a series of discrete items to be counted, ranked. It serves as the infrastructure for a feedback loop that orients expression toward the anxiety of what the numbers will be and accelerates it, as we try to better those numbers, and thereby demonstrate that the self-

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Generally speaking, quantification and the logic of optimization which it encourages tend to transform our field of experience into points of aggression, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has aptly put it. Data-driven optimization is, in this sense, a way of perceiving the world. And what may matter most about this is not necessarily what it allows u... See more

We are . . . living at an age when life is completely overwhelmed by numbers and calculation, and we are all increasingly controlled by “targets.” . . .The frightening thing is that, just because computers can count and measure nearly everything, then we do. There was a time when we could trust our own judgment, common sense, and intuition to know

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Some seek to measure how they are growing creatively or in the subjective realm of “excellence.” When we make these our benchmarks, we start doing stupider and stupider things, as anyone who’s seen the promotional videos from the church that hosted a fart-themed sermon series can attest. One pastor sleeps on the roof of his church with his wife to

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“When we gear our society around efficiency, we produce more and more of the measurable, while the immeasurable, the qualitative, and the things we don’t think to measure drain away. Bedazzled by quantitative abundance, we might not be able to see what is lost, but we can definitely feel its absence.”

We are living in a world in which nothing is made to man’s measure; there exists a monstrous discrepancy between man’s body, man’s mind and the things which at present time constitute the elements of human existence; everything is in disequilibrium […] This disequilibrium is essentially a matter of quantity. Quantity is changed into quality, as Heg... See more