Quantify Me, Baby

What's your name, what's your number, I would like to get to know you...

KPI

How do we know if we’re improving without measuring, quantifying, and tracking our progress? We have key performance indicators (KPIs) to hit! How many subscribers did I gain in the last month? How does that compare to the previous month?

Anxiety rising.

The numbers are green.

*exhale*

In 2021, Dutch business professor Berend van der Kolk published De Meetmaatschappij (The Quantified Society) which details how we live in a performance-tracking-obsessed society. We need to smash KPIs, kaboom engagement rates, or - dear smartwatch almighty - outwalk our number of steps¹. (Roughly a century before all this, a small Russian book called We already sketched a data fetish dystopia.)

Here's the issue: the cost of free-for-all performance measurement is often higher than the benefit. Tracking metrics, van der Kolk argues, should happen thoughtfully. Think about what you want to know, how to best measure that, adapt your tracking when necessary, and always remember that the numbers are a means, never an end. Contrast this with platforms that incorporate dashboards to measure everything they possibly can, regardless of whether or not it’s useful.

Yes, data matters and tracking it can be immensely useful, but data without interpretation is noise and pointless tracking is like nails screeching on a blackboard.

We might stress over metrics that don’t matter, and not everything that matters is quantifiable. For example, large-scale research on happiness usually asks people to rate their happiness between one and ten. Of course, scientists want data to work with and, admittedly, if the number of participants is large enough, you can smoothen many of the quirks to get a semi-decent ranking. But who says my happy six is equal to your six? Or that my jump from four to five is equal to yours, or even equal to my jump from six to seven? Do I even know what an eight feels like? I suspect my mood is a dynamical system that does not respond linearly to the conditions — unknown variables everywhere². So, if people would ask me to rate my happiness on a numerical scale, my answer might just be ‘butterfly’³.

You know what else we measure on a scale from one to ten? How hot people are.

Assortative mating

“She’s a ten; she’s way out of your league.”

Hold my Diet Coke.

If anyone would ask me to rate my attractiveness on a scale from one to ten, I’d say ‘error’. Not only am I my own harshest critic, but I also don’t quite understand the scale. Isn’t attractiveness supposed to be an eye-of-the-beholder thing? That’s what people say, isn’t it?

Ah, blessed be the dreamers.

Even if we don’t consciously want to, we are very good at ranking others according to physical desirability. In the early days of Subtle Sparks, I wrote about how traditionally beautiful people can benefit from the halo effect. Pretty people unwittingly hack the subconscious of others to appear more likable, successful, intelligent, and so on, which also improves the attractive person’s subjective well-being. The introduction of this paper on the beauty premium in politics (pretty people get more votes⁴), summarizes a bunch of halo effect research as follows:

Cute babies are better cared for, teachers pay more attention to attractive school children, and attractive adults are more likely to obtain good jobs, to be promoted, to earn high incomes, to obtain loans, to be elected to public office, to be acquitted as defendants, to be given lighter sentences when convicted, to be treated favorably in all kinds of social intercourse, and to enjoy physically attractive and cultivated life companions.

That final part about life companions is interesting. On average (which is an important caveat for everything we’re talking about here), people end up in relationships with people like them. Pretty people have pretty partners, smart people have smart partners, etc. Humans engage in assortative mating, as many animal species do. Like likes like. In humans, there is evidence for this in a variety of traits: height, facial appearance, overall attractiveness, intelligence (or level of education), social background, personality… In all these traits, a couple will (remember, on average) be more like each other than we’d expect by chance. This is rarely a fully conscious choice and it’s partially because we spend more time with people like us. Hollywood stars often date Hollywood stars and there are plenty of athlete power couples — they spend a lot of time in the same environment and can relate to each other’s struggles and life choices.

Call me a dreamer⁵, but I’m not quite ready to abandon the eye of the beholder even though it often leaves me bleeding from a thousand little cuts.

Imagine you’re dating a gorgeous person. Captain America, Wonder Woman, whatever your preference. They’re smart, beautiful, successful, and… it’s just not working. While it’s a mistake to chase the elusive spark at the exclusion of everything else, after a few dates you can tell it doesn’t click even if they are the perfect partner on paper.

Imagine again that you’re dating someone. Not Captain America or Wonder Woman. Not a perfect picture. No major red flags, but also not a full checklist. Yet, after a bit of initial awkwardness and a fumbling first date, their eyes sparkle with playful mischief and whatever page you’re on, they’re right there with you, co-writing the sequel of the story. And you. Just. Levitate. Not (just?) a spark, but a slow-burning fire that warms you from the inside out until you float and frisson dapples your skin.

We can measure physically desirable characteristics, study thousands of couples, and assemble perfect partner checklists, but we have not yet cracked the mystery of lovely levitation. Butterfly wings, perhaps⁶.

If I ever find the love of my life⁷ and she asks me to rate her from one to ten, my honest answer will be ‘infinity’. The scale will have lost its meaning.

Love track(ed)

Welcome to LoveTrack™!

With our proprietary LoveTrack™ lens, you can measure your date’s interest. Pupil dilation, body language, increased capillary blood flow in the face… Your LoveTrack™ lens measures, tracks, and quantifies it all for you and projects the results straight onto your field of vision. Our integrated AI will provide topics of conversation based on physiological measurements in response to guiding questions (included in the ‘Rizz’ extension pack)!

It gets even better! Your LoveTrack™ lens measures your responses too (pupils, gaze tracking, blink rate, etc.), so you’ll never again doubt how you feel about someone. LoveTrack™ will tell you. And the benefits keep coming. If your date also has a LoveTrack™ lens, your AIs will connect and, based on our database of thousands of daters and couples, give you a couple score. The ‘Rizz’ extension pack comes with AI-powered suggestions for personal appearance and conversational changes to improve your desirability score and become a guaranteed ‘high coupler’!

Take the guesswork out of love and make it a sure thing!

At LoveTrack™ we want to keep the love alive beyond the dating stage. That’s why we recently launched TrackRing™. Coming in various sizes and customizable designs, TrackRing™ rings always come in pairs. They measure blood pressure, heart rate, sleep quality, skin conductance, and more. For the best results, link them with your LoveTrack™ lens — do not miss the package deal! Do you want to know if he’s really listening? Do you want to know if she’s really fine? TrackRing™ has the answer!

Use the code THIS-IS-SATIRE for a 10% discount!

Or - shocking revelation incoming! - you could try to communicate with your date or partner. If they care, they’ll listen. If they don’t listen, the message is loud and clear.

I hope this post provided a little bump in your happiness score. You know that happiness is best when shared, right? 😁

(If you’re a fellow newsletter writer and think your readers might appreciate my writing, you can recommend Subtle Sparks, if you are so inclined…)

1. If you’re thinking 10,000, I’ve got a fun fact for you: that number is based on a 1960s marketing campaign for a pedometer. Science says: more is better, but 8,000 is already very good. It also differs per age group and the pace (probably) matters too. (In all fairness, 10,000 is an admirable benchmark.)

2. Chaos theory is a better bet.

3. I am not a good test subject. (Also, if it was obvious to you why ‘butterfly’ here, you have unlocked the third layer of this post, and - fair warning - I might fall hopelessly in love with you.)

4. It’s a bit more nuanced than that. More politically savvy voters are less likely to be swayed by a square jaw or fluttering eyelashes, and the extent of the beauty premium also depends on the voting system.

5. I almost choked on my Diet Coke.

6. More likely a combination of concentration changes in testosterone, dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, cortisol, and nerve growth factor. However, despite the obvious interest in the topic, there are fewer high-quality studies than I expected. This 2023 review finds,

…a limited ability to compare studies’ samples or make an assessment of the generalizability of findings. Existing studies are not representative of the general population in a particular country or globally.

Who said romance was dead?

7. All this Diet Coke choking is getting dangerous.