Curse of Quantification: How Numbers Dominate Thinking in a Society Driven by Metrics The curse of quantification occurs almost everywhere

in the world, but the scope of this topic would exceed this papers length. Therefore, we will view how the curse of quantification combined with various decision making heuristics affects the United States population. However, a bit of background is first needed. Geert Hofstede, a Dutch researcher in the field of organizational studies, is widely respected for developing the first empirical model of dimensions of national culture, thus establishing a new paradigm for taking account of cultural elements in economics, organizational cooperation, and decisionmaking. There are five dimensions of power distance, individualism, masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation, but we will concern ourselves with the United States score on the last two dimensions. The United States scores a 46 on uncertainty avoidance and a 29 on long-term orientation. This suggests that Americans are generally accepting of uncertainty but their orientation is pragmatically short-term. Therefore, in the business world, businesses measure their performance on a short-term basis, with profit and loss metrics issued on a quarterly basis. This pressure for performance around numbers drives individuals to strive for quick, not necessarily proper, results within the work place. The combination of uncertainty avoidance but shot-term vision causes Americans to believe that there is also a need to have the absolute truth in all matters. As Americans are driven around short quick results around metrics such as grades in school and money in work, we hope to expose how we are subjecting ourselves to subservience to numbers, thus causing a whole host of irrationality and biases. By the end, we hope to show a refreshing perspective on how to view numbers and probabilities when it comes to making and judging upon decisions. The goal isnt to submit a policy proposal,

but rather a New Years resolution for people to realize that viewing numbers in a new framework will reduce negativity such as regret. An American college student approached a professor asking for an extension on the group term paper. The professor responded by referencing Dan Arielys paper on deadlines by stating that they are arbitrary and thus should be subject to a grade deduction. Not getting the extension the student had hoped for, he was faced with a decision. The decision was either to reduce stress socially, mentally, and physically with the cost of a grade deduction or costing social, mental, and physical health for avoidance of a grade deduction. As college is mainly metric-driven by the GPA, it would seem proper for a student to forgo his personal stresses for the avoidance of a grade penalty. Reframing the decision that is to be made using quantification, the student is asked to -y for some y his personal stresses to gain some probabilistic x in the form of a subjectively placed grade. However, this grade is subtracted from the ideal 4.0 GPA a paper can get, so a subtractive notion also occurs during the grading of the paper. Option two asks the student if he is willing to +z for some z by improving upon his personal stress while taking a -g for some grade letterg which is then placed under another probability as it is subjectively graded. A stressful student cant produce a well-written paper, and a distressed student will be stressed that the paper was subjected to a deadline penalty. Using Geerts cultural dimensions for the United States, the short-term expectation of the grade is what dominates the decision. Since the decisions main outcome is viewed as a grade letter that is then converted to a three-digit GPA, it is hard to really understand how probabilities and taking care of personal stresses can benefit an essay when it is already

subjected to a late penalty. The main anchor from start to finish of this decision is the papers grade, thus making it hard to justify any decision that would harm this grade. And this is the curse of quantification. The average probabilities and expected outcomes we place on opportunity costs attempt to represent the whole probabilities and expectation outcome of opportunity costs opportunity costs. These expected outcomes are only seen as a metric because America is fairly concerned with short-term metric performance in terms of grades and money. In terms of the group paper example, a student would blame his stress for doing not as he would have liked if he handed it on time. However, he would blame himself for forgoing the grade deduction if he turned the paper after the deadline. Therefore, this causes a situation where regret is almost unavoidable because the short-term grade is what the student is basing upon in his private reflection. As numbers are this dominating on our thought process, it is quite easy to see in almost every decision making bias. In philosophy, the principle of rational belief states that if a persons total evidence supports some statement p, then the rational epistemic attitude towards p is one of belief. However if a persons total evidence goes against some statement, it produces disbelief and a neutral standing of evidence causes epistemic indifferencetherefore causing a judgment to be made. However, there are three main factors that cause a persons total evidence to not be total. These are misidentification, misevaluation, and motivational errors. If a person makes a mistake in about what their total evidence is, they are misidentifying what they believe is their total evidence to the proper total evidence. Misevaluation of total evidence occurs when a person can correctly identify the total evidence regarding p but may improperly weight its support for or against p. An example of

this would be the gamblers fallacy to be discussed later when covering the application of the curse of quantification to the many other fallacies. Lastly, motivational errors occur when a persons epistemic state is sensitive to pragmatism. For example, one may have practical reasons to hope that an earthquake wont occur again, but this pragmatic thought should not be confused with evidence to believe that it will not earthquake anymore. Apart of misidentification and misevaluation, motivational errors arise from personal influences such as hope, fear, and desire. These three types of irrationality create all the decisionmaking pitfalls people face when making decisions. The inclusion of a metric-driven society does not make these irrational traps any easier to avoid but instead makes them worse because evidence and outcomes (input/output) are seen as metrics. The first fallacy we see is nave diversification. This is a choice heuristic that states that when people are asked to make a simultaneous choice, they tend to seek more variety than when asked to make a sequential choice. For example, in the case of investing, people spread their savings evenly across several derivatives and services without consideration of the risk trade off of the alternatives, or their suitability in the 401(k) portfolio. Shlomo Benartzi and Richard Thaler (2001) thus concluded that investing is consistent with the nave notion of diversification because the proportion invested in stocks depends on the proportion of stock funds in the plan. Relating this to a mathematical notion, this nave diversification is subject to the 1/n rule, which simply allocates equally across all n funds under consideration. Although money is an important metric when investing, many people are not expert investors. Thus, when faced with stock fund plans, the 1/n rule makes it easy for an investor to feel like they are investing their money properly for future gains.

This rule gives investors an easy mental shortcut when it comes to investing even if the decisions may contradict investor rationality. The next fallacy is the gamblers fallacy. This fallacy simply occurs when investors inappropriately extrapolate future events from previous mutually exclusive events and placing judgments by that. For example, a gambler playing a game of roulette that has seen countless black outcomes in a row may surely believe that a red result is next. This clearly an illusion because fair roulette is based on mutually independent events as each roll isnt dependent on the last one. However, to a drunken gambler, if 7 out of the last ten rolls were black, then the roulette table produces black 70% of the time. This is way too high to be called fair roulette so the next roll must be red to have the law of large numbers finally do justice to the gambler. Again, the curse of quantification strikes by giving the simple identification of fractional probability to the ordinary person whereas a game like roulette requires more advanced statistical techniques. The curse of numbers mixed with motivational errors causes humans to try to find meaning in numbers, frequencies, and patterns. This can lead to overconfidence by identifying a pattern of repeated numbers. For example, overconfidence leads many investors to believe that they can always make the best choice when it comes to investing in stocks, services, and projects. Especially, entrepreneurs who are frequently around these choices and thus are exposed to more patterned frequencies, are prone to this. One concrete example is that people tend to beat the market by timing their trades according. An investor may have seen a stocks P/E ratio, quarterly earning, 6-month performance, and other metric-features to predict what will happen in the future. As this type of thinking is quite irrational to begin with because stocks dont necessarily move according to their

past history, this patterned frequency creates overconfidence in the investor. The investor may attempt to buy or sell shares in advance of the anticipated share trajectory. Again, the input is money in and therefore the output is money out. By placing a lot of confidence on the ability to beat the market, people tend to excessively trade thus leading to increased trade costs. If the stock choice did not happen as subjectively expected, the person will not have gained his expected outcome while also incurring extra costs. The curse of quantification strikes yet again by having the investor invest x but only gaining a probability of his expected outcome-trade costs. The most frequent of fallacies that occurs among college students would be mental accounting. Mental accounting is a term given to the propensity of individuals to organize their world into separate mental accounts. This can lead to inefficient decision making because students tend to create separate mental accounts for each of the classes and extracurricular in which they are participating. However, all of these accounts converge in the end of the semester when the professors assigns grades for the classes which then can be used to create a semester GPA. The extracurricular dont get a grade, but instead they just offer personal enjoyment and experiences. However, a semester is only a finite amount of timepossibly 13 weeks. Those 13 weeks of school have to be invested efficiently in the different mental accounts that a student has to be able to reap maximize benefita great GPA with a great experience of the semester. However, parents, jobs, and a students ego would love to see a high value associated to the students GPA. Thus, inefficiently investing time into the different accounts may lead to results that are undesirable. At first, this may seem like a great idea because mental accounting can be viewed as a self-control device. For example, in the world of investing, investors may separate their

financial resources into capital, which is a quantified metric, and disposable income pools, thus associating each capital pool to a certain portfolio. Investors tend to treat each portfolio separating, thus not reaping the benefits of diversification. However, one could argue diversification is risky because of the 1/n heuristic mentioned above. To diversify or to separate is the question. If 1/n heuristic is viewed on one pole of a spectrum and mental accounting is viewed on the other pole, one can view these poles can anchors. Using an anchoring principle, humans tend to cling strongly on anchors by continually justifying their decision they make on intutionas explained by Haidt. This constant justification creates a sort of quantified precision to the anchor upon which the person made a decision. No one paper comes to mind, but the Eddy, Englich, Kahneman studies on the anchoring principle show that the more precise the anchor is, the harder it is to move away from the anchor. In the case of these two heuristics, it is hard to see that the area in between the spectrum carries a lot of benefits when it comes to dividing time into classes and activities and financial capital into various portfolios. A proper rational thought could consider both poles of thinking but would assign proper weights to diversification and separation to make the best investment of time or financial capital. After seeing many of the heuristics, albeit being such a small list of all the available decision making pitfalls, it is clear that the curse of quantification is apparent. Numbers are ruling and over influencing our decisions because we tend to view all of our decisions making processes with an associated expected outcome. The previous sentence contains a lot of mathematical terms such as expected outcomes that require a solid understanding of probability. Viewing this in a decision making framework and citing The Paradox of Choice, one must realize that there are opportunity costs of opportunity costs of opportunity costs,

and the costs can keep expanding as new dimensions enter your decision-making framework. For a college student, that could be choices such as partying, sleeping, fornicating, and eating as opposed to studying. Mapping each activity to a new dimension, we can apply the curse of dimensionality to decision making. The curse of dimensionality is a core concept that keeps many mathematics and scientists up at night because it makes higher dimensional computation almost difficult. The concept of clustering techniques such as k-means clustering and other clustering techniques like density-based and hierarchal-based do its best to minimize the curse of dimensionalitys effects. Simply stated, this curse is the various phenomena that arise when analyzing and organizing data in high-dimensional spaces. The essence of this theme is that when dimensionality increases, the volume of the space increases rapidly, making available data sparse and almost useless. This sparse allocation of information is problematic for any statistically signification method such as decision-making. Decisionmaking requires a lot of evidence to properly be able to discern which would be the best activity to do with the amount of time and financial capital given. What makes this harder with decision-making is that organizing and searching data often relies on detecting areas where objects form groups with similar properties. From heuristics, we already know that organizing data mentally falls trap into mental accounts and searching data is subject to misidentification, misevaluation, and motivational errors. In high dimensional data such as choosing between n different activities, all things appear to be dissimilar in many ways because the notion of distance between objects in high dimension is very tough to define. This prevents common data organization strategies from being efficient, thus proving that heuristics dont work in virtually any and every decision making process.

The reason these common shortcuts dont work is because moving away from the anchored heuristics require more advanced mathematical understanding of linear algebra and multidimensional calculus and its applications to game theory. These heuristics provide simple shortcuts that derive from elementary school math of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Not having a proper understanding of how to manipulate numbers to properly allocate resources is yet another curse of quantification which was properly exhibited through the curse of dimensionality. This misevaluation of evidence propagates the curse of quantification to immeasurable horrors that is readily seen in scarcity and overindulgence in things from power, money, sex, chocolate, and drugs. This paper has shown that literally every decision is falls trap to some form of a decision making pitfall because one can never know all information regarding a decision that is to be made. The problem is made worse because we associate all of this high dimensional data and information (social, emotional, physical, etc.) to a n-1 mapping. All of this information is squeezed into the expected outcome of a simple quantified metric such as a GPA or paycheck. Gamification expert Gabe Zichermann has stated that humans are very interested in status, access, power, and stuffotherwise known as the SAPS model. Relating Geerts cultural dimensions to SAPS, we see that stuff, access, power, and stuff are equated to credential, entrance to exclusive societies, rise to power, and material goods. In the credential based society that American is founded upon, credentials, societies, power, and goods can easily be bought with a lot of money or a high GPA. One quick glance shows that Americans really arent that happy because the wealth distribution is far from equal and even then, money doesnt buy happiness. From the Paradox of Choice, it is argued that low expectations are the key to happiness. However, low

expectations are quantified in an equality to saying that a human doesnt care about making a lot of money or getting a high GPAa sure taboo in the entrepreneurial nature of the United States. It almost therefore seems that the curse of quantification will forever exist because humans will never be able to make a statistically significant decision to have a desirable outcome nor will attaining the maximum expected outcome bring happiness because of the greedy nature of wanting more maximal outcomes. Therefore, there is no policy that can be proposed, but rather a shift in paradigm. There is a need to embrace unpredictability for not long short-term projections but also long-term projections because we can never know anything for certain when making a decision and its associated outcome. The need to embrace unpredictability is yet another topic that goes beyond the scope of this paper, but it stems from the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle. It is a theory that explains the uncertainties that occur when trying to measure the position and momentum of a position and momentum of a particle were not solely from the error of the experiments, but rather the inherent in quantum mechanics. The inherent principle in quantum mechanics is that simple observation of trying to ascertain position and momentum adds a dimension that is not properly understood even by theoretical physicists. Because of that, the close you know information about one dimension, the less you will know about other dimensions. This goes to say that the more you calculate the trade off decisions for choosing one activity or thing over another, you become uncertain about various other opportunity costs cost and benefits. The uncertainty principle can be seen in economics as well. Even if the field of economics is deterministic there is still unpredictability through chaos, which makes the deterministic system fluctuate wildly with unlimited potential endings. These are some of the

many parallels between the Heisenberg principles in the natural sciences to the field of economics, but economics also has its own version of an uncertainty principle. In an August 2010 speech Republican Senator John Boehner described the problem with uncertain government intervention during the ongoing recession which was later summarized as the Boehner uncertainty principle, stating that government efforts to increase regulation lead small business to delay investment and hiring until the new regulations impact is well understood (Shane 2011). This principle describes the intersection of uncertainty and human behavior, and complicates governments responses and the reliability of economic forecasts during difficult economic times. This paper has properly showed that unpredictability needs to be understood and embraced. Otherwise, short-term expectations will lead to depression and regret. Going back to the story of the student, we see how the curse of quantification affects him and provide an answer to help alleviate the negative emotions that could be derived from quantification. As a high school senior, the student saw college as a very expensive education that his parents were footing. He associated his entire college experience with the end outcome, namely getting a job that justifies the price paid for education. Because of this, the student goes crazy for four years stressing over how to properly divide time and financial capital to obtain a high enough GPA to get that justifiable job. This creates a jaded aura of the student because he realizes that he is not really soaking in the entire college experience. He is only living for the quantified metric. He is equating four years of a personal journey roller coaster to a GPA in the form of a.bc where a, b, c are integers. When it comes time to graduation and the job market is finding it tough to employ him, he becomes very sad and regrets his college experience irrationally.

Thus, the paradigm shift needs to come from eastern philosophy. Citing the BhagavadGita, No man can attain freedom from activity by refraining from action; nor can he reach perfection by merely refusing to act. Do thy duty as prescribed, for action for dutys sake is superior to inaction. But since those still in the body cannot entirely avoid action, in their case abandonment of the fruit of action is considered as complete renunciation. Although the Gita is a heavy philosophical and spiritual piece of text, one could subjectively say that it is eastern psychology. The above quote states that one should make decisions not based on the expected outcome but rather just for the sake of the experience of decision making itself. Although it would be hard in the modern day to follow a path that the Gita states, its modern day translation simply states that we as humans need to share wealth and not worry about the short-term fruit of the decision that we make whether or not it is desirable nor undesirable. If an expected outcome is desirable such as making successful investment choices, dont keep all the money to yourself. Keep what you absolutely need. Share the rest of the money. Although America is a highly individualistic society, scoring a 91 on the cultural dimensions, the notion of sharing would redistribute wealth in a way that would make way for positive changes for everyone. To end this paper and fully show what the curse of quantification is, we end with quotes from book Useless Arithmetic : Why Environmental Scientists Can't Predict the Future, The late Stephen J. Gould, Harvard paleontologist extraordinaire, author, and baseball fanatic, argued in his book Full House that reification is the big danger that arises from averaging. According to Gould, the term was coined by philosophers and social scientists in the mid-nineteenth century and refers to the mental conversion of a person or abstract concept into a thing. . . . We abstract the variation within a system into some measure of central tendency like the mean

value and then make the mistake of reifying this abstraction and interpreting the mean as a concrete thing. (Pilkey pg. 200) and, Among the early model skeptics, J. H. Chessire and A. J. Surrey in 1971 noted that because of the mathematical power of the computer, the predictions of computer models tended to become imbued with a spurious accuracy transcending the assumptions on which they are based. Even if the modeler is aware of the limitations of the model and does not have a messianic faith in its predictions, the layman and the policymakers are usually incapable of challenging the computer predictions. . . . A dangerous situation may arise in which computation becomes a substitute for understanding a complex system. (Pilkey pt. 203) This book is a goldmine of quotes, but shows clearly that mathematics is truly useless when it comes to evaluating highly chaotic dynamical systems such as life. Lastly, to quote Barry Schwartz, The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. It is true. The curse of quantification exists and will never go away any time soon. Rather than trying to compute the best possible decision made, there should be a paradigm shift from hierarchical, greedy, and individualistic patterns to equality, sharing, and collective patterns. With this, we hope that this will help redistribute the wealth and create an economic system that alleviates job market trouble and other worries. As for a college student, dont worry so much about the GPA. Enjoy the things you learn, experience college life because it will never be something you can experience again. This doesnt just apply to college students, but even people in the professional world who only care

about the metrics.There is a curse to quantifying things. We can only hope to handle the outcomes properly.

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Contribution Saving Plans," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 91(1), pages 79-98, March. "Speakers Barry Schwartz: Psychologist." Barry Schwartz. TED, Web. 01 Dec. 2012. The Bhagavad-Gita, Translated by Sir Edwin Arnold. Vol. XLV, Part 4. The Harvard Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 190914; Bartleby.com, 2001.