The Measure of a Man
The Measure of a Man. When the thing we use to measure value becomes more important than the thing being measured
There is a man standing in an arena.
Around him sit the spectators.
Everything is black and white.
The walls.
The crowd.
The dust.
The fallen helmet.
The man himself.
And in front of him stands a ruler.
A ridiculously large ruler.
It is the only thing left in colour.
Gold.
Of course it is gold.
Because apparently, once humans invent a way of measuring something, it doesn’t take us very long to start worshipping the measuring stick.
I didn’t originally create this image for a challenge.
The arena already existed.
The man already stood there.
The enormous ruler was already confronting him.
Then came a simple challenge:
Everything in the image must be black and white. One thing is not.
The coloured thing had to earn its colour.
So I looked at the image and thought:
The ruler.
Make the ruler gold.
And suddenly the picture said something it hadn’t quite said before.
What Gets to Keep Its Colour?
That is a surprisingly philosophical question.
If everything in your world lost its colour and you were allowed to preserve only one thing, what would you choose?
A person?
A flower?
The door leading home?
A memory?
Or…
the thing measuring you?
That possibility bothered me enough to like it.
Because we measure almost everything now.
Money, obviously.
But also followers.
Likes.
Views.
Rank.
Points.
Steps.
Sleep.
Productivity.
Engagement.
Conversions.
Performance.
Popularity.
We even measure ourselves against ourselves.
Better than yesterday?
Growing fast enough?
Falling behind?
Measurement can be extremely useful. Without it, we often have no idea whether something is improving at all.
The problem begins when the measuring stick quietly changes jobs.
It stops being a tool for understanding value…
and starts becoming value.
The Arena
That’s when I began looking differently at the spectators in my picture.
They’re sitting there watching.
The man stands alone below them.
And towering over him is the golden ruler.
Who is judging whom?
Perhaps the crowd is judging the man.
Perhaps the ruler is judging him.
Perhaps he is judging himself.
Or perhaps everybody has simply agreed that whatever the ruler says must be important because…
well…
look at it. It’s gold.
😂
That’s not very different from what happens when a little number appears beside something we do.
Write an article and nobody measures it?
Interesting article.
Write the same article and attach:
237 views
14 likes
3 comments
Suddenly another story exists beside the first one.
Was it successful?
Apparently we now have evidence.
But evidence of what?
That is where things become slippery.
A Ruler Can Only Measure What It Was Built to Measure
A ruler is excellent at telling me how long my desk is.
It is absolutely terrible at telling me whether I love my desk.
This seems obvious when we’re talking about furniture.
It becomes less obvious when the ruler is digital.
A follower count can measure how many accounts followed you.
It cannot tell you how many people remember something you wrote.
A comment count can tell you how many comments appeared.
It cannot tell you which sentence continued living in somebody’s head three days later.
A leaderboard can tell you where something sits according to a particular system.
It cannot contain every possible definition of quality.
An earnings counter can tell you something about monetary reward.
It cannot tell you whether the activity that produced the reward was worth your time.
The measurement may be perfectly accurate.
The mistake is asking it a question it was never designed to answer.
And Then We Paint It Gold
This may be the part that interests me most.
The ruler in my image isn’t merely present.
It is the only thing allowed to have colour.
Everything else has become secondary.
And perhaps we do this psychologically all the time.
The measurable thing becomes vivid because it is easy to see.
The unmeasurable things fade into the background.
A thoughtful conversation doesn’t come with a progress bar.
Curiosity doesn’t send a weekly analytics report.
Helping somebody understand something may produce no visible reward whatsoever.
Neither does changing your mind.
Neither does making something strange simply because you wanted to know whether it could exist.
Those things are difficult to measure.
So they risk becoming black and white while the metric glows gold.
The Dangerous Question
Perhaps the most useful question isn’t:
“What is my score?”
It is:
“What exactly is this score measuring?”
And immediately after that:
“What isn’t it measuring?”
That second question may be the more important one.
Because once we know the limits of the ruler, we can put it back where it belongs.
In the toolbox.
Not in the temple.
The Man Is Still Standing There
I keep returning to the man in the image.
He hasn’t disappeared.
He’s still standing in the arena.
The ruler towers over him.
The spectators are watching.
And yet there is something wonderfully stubborn about him.
Because however enormous we make the measuring stick, the man remains larger than the measurement.
There will always be things about him the ruler cannot reach.
Perhaps that’s why the image needed only one colour.
Not because the golden ruler is the most valuable thing in the picture.
But because it is the thing demanding our attention.
And those are not necessarily the same thing.
😌
Maybe that’s the real challenge:
Notice what we’ve painted gold.
Then ask whether it deserved the colour.
And the image?
There is something much bigger hiding inside that ruler.
Not really about colour.
Not even really about AI.
About measurement.
Thank you for reading and sharing! 😀🎉
Text and image with help of openAI and MIB
