Thoughts on Quantification

I asked a question yesterday: “Is it possible to improve our performance without quantification?”

And the answers were educational. The rough definition is: “the expression or measurement of the quantity of something.”

If one takes that narrowly enough, only objective measures count, and there are definitely arenas where it is difficult to find objective measures. This would make it very important to agree upon definitions, and I respect the notion that this makes art, relationships, and some other things difficult.

But in the sense of “determining whether you are getting further away from or closer to your goal” as the point of quantification, I don’t see an arena in which we cannot apply the notion.

First, if your actions are truly random, like arrows shot at a target you cannot see, how do you improve? Don’t you need SOME feedback saying “hotter” and “colder” at the least?

Let’s take a look at one of these three arenas. All I’m really doing here is saying “when I say quantification, this is what I mean and why I use that term.” We’re not arguing.

It was mentioned several times that “art” cannot be quantified. Well, first of all, we’d have to define the term, and give specific real-world examples. For the sake of simplicity, let’s say we’re talking about things like dance, writing, painting. Lemme focus on writing, something I understand. Spelling, grammar, and punctuation have pretty clear objective standards: most of the time there…