Chasing Likes And Page Views: Why Is Modern Life So Exhausting?

CTN: Value Capture is when you have kind of rich, open values and then you get put in an institution and that institution feeds you simplified versions of those values. Then, the simplified versions take over. This is something that's just happened, like any number of times. It's happened on Twitter. It's happened with weight loss.

And what is The Gap?

CTN: The Gap is the gap between what's easy to measure and what's actually important. And I just want to say one thing for all the scientists [reading]. When I'm worried, in [The Score], I spend a lot of time worrying about what we can quantify. And there's a little bit about what the essential barrier to quantification [is] at its root, but most of this is about what's easy to quantify at scale. 

The thing that's really interesting to me is that in large-scale institutions, what we see over and over again is people's attention gets captured not by rich qualitative descriptions, not by complex, careful, multi-dimensional quantitative analyses. 

They tend to be captured by extremely simplistic metrics. And I think they're the kinds that we all are familiar with: page views, Twitter likes, BMI, citation counts, grant numbers, like huge, obvious, simple numbers.

Why are we drawn to metrics?

CTN: I think what our attention is captured by is the qualities that are easy to count in unison. 

There are some things like happiness, joy, well-being, or even good mental health that are extremely hard to count at an institutional level. There are other things – graduation speed for students, screen time for our children, number of publications, number of years lived – that are incredibly easy to count in unison. 

I think the thing that I'm most worried about is the clarity and simplicity and usability of what's easily countable is swamping our attention and dragging our attention from what really matters, especially when what really matters is highly variable.

How does this tie into social media?

CTN: [Social media] is one of the first places I started thinking about this. It's such a clear case where you can see The Gap between what you might have originally valued and the easily countable. 

Because there are many rich values to communication and the values are plural. You can communicate to urge political action. You can communicate to learn. You can communicate to connect to people. You can communicate to feel intimacy with a small group of people. 

These are all important reasons, but social media likes – because of the way they're structured – flatten the landscape of value because likes are binary. One person might have laughed for a quick second, clicked like, and forgot about it. Another person was moved to tears and had their life changed, but it’s just another point.

What influence can these systems have on society?

CTN: Power goes to the people that are willing to game the system. Paul Smaldino and Richard McElreath's paper, “The natural selection of bad science”, is a wild scientific paper about the problems of science. 

It's a computer modeling paper and it says: “Let's build [the] following model. Here are the assumptions of the model. 1) More rigorous science takes more time, and less rigorous science takes less time. 2) Our rewards go to publication volume – scientists get better jobs and get more grants for publishing more. Therefore, the scientists that will get the better jobs are the ones that are willing to do the minimally rigorous thing that will get to publication rather than the maximally rigorous thing.” 

Add the premise that young scientists in training will tend to imitate high-status scientists with high-status jobs and lots of grants and big labs, and what you get – if this model's assumptions hold true – is a feedback loop where science will really quickly devolve into crap as everyone races to the minimum bottom in order to meet the standard of measurability. 

As long as there's any gap between what's important and what's easy to measure, and as long as our institutions reward people with power and prestige and resources for hitting the thin metric, then we should expect systems to promote people that are willing to give up on everything that's important and wholly game and optimize for the metric.

And what influence can they have on us?

CTN: The large-scale systems we're in were not built to make us feel joyful or refreshed or rejuvenated. They were built to get us to maximally optimize for the greatest numbers of outcomes. 

I do find that modern life exhausts me. 

I have found a lot of relief in games, and I think it is precisely because you can tune games how you wish. I used to read a lot more philosophy and literature in my spare time, and now I just don't. I think it's my job now. 

But also, my job is 80 percent in front of a computer or reading a book. So, in all my spare time I now just seek ecstatic physical activity. It's all rock climbing and fly fishing and yo-yo and weird animal movement.

I'm choosing the things that I think I need as responses, but also a lot of those activities have been tuned to produce a feeling of satisfaction and openness in your life, body, and mind. Most of the activities we're doing in ordinary life are not. They're tuned for some completely other reason. 

The reason metrics feel so inhumane is they're not tuned to produce an experience of a good life, and a lot of games actually are.

This We Have Questions first appeared in Issue 47 (June 26) of our digital magazine CURIOUS. To access exclusive CURIOUS content first and receive the quarterly digital magazine, become an All Access Member.

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