Just measure

From Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker.

Seeing how journalistic habits and cognitive biases bring out the worst in each other, how can we soundly appraise the state of the world? The answer is to count. How many people are victims of violence as a proportion of the number of people alive? How many are sick, how many starving, how many poor, how many oppressed, how many illiterate, how many unhappy? And are those numbers going up or down? A quantitative mindset, despite its nerdy aura, is in fact the morally enlightened one, because it treats every human life as having equal value rather than privileging the people who are closest to us or most photogenic. And it holds out the hope that we might identify the causes of suffering and thereby know which measures are most likely to reduce it.

The combination of people rejecting Enlightenment Principles with the aversion of people to measuring things in order to weight priorities is one of the banes of our modern times. Teach history, inculcate Enlightenment values, cultivate numeracy, teach statistics, foster habits of good conversation, teach logic - our public conversations would improve markedly.

Much of my consulting career has been based on being able to translate appealing concepts into measurements of reality. Shifting from the appealing abstract to the measured reality is quite a useful transition. You make different and better decisions.