There's a certain violence in reducing human experience to numbers. We do it anyway—we must—but the choice of what to count reveals more about our values than the counts themselves.
When I started working with data, I believed in its objectivity. Numbers don't lie, we say. But numbers don't speak truth either. They speak whatever language we teach them, answer whatever questions we ask.
The problem isn't data. It's the questions we forget to ask.
Consider engagement metrics. We measure time spent, clicks, scrolls. We optimize for attention. But attention is not the same as value. A person doom-scrolling for three hours is "engaged." A person who reads one article that changes how they think about the world spent five minutes.
Which one received more value?
The metrics we choose create the world we get. When we measure clicks, we get clickbait. When we measure time spent, we get infinite scroll. When we measure shares, we get outrage.
What if we measured differently? What if we asked: Did this help someone make a better decision? Did this change how someone sees the world? Did this bring people closer to truth?
These things are harder to measure. Maybe impossible. But that's the point—the most important things often are.
I don't have answers here. Only questions, and a growing suspicion that the things we can easily count matter far less than the things we can't.