I am sure many readers have two kinds of friends. The first kind is militant about every transaction, almost down to the penny. If you both get a bagel with cream cheese, but only you get coffee, this friend will want to pay exactly the price of coffee less than you.
The second kind of friend doesn’t sweat the small stuff. They take the attitude that it’ll all come out in the wash. Sometimes they pick up the bill—sometimes you do—but it’s clear they aren’t keeping score.
Of course, it would be more accurate to say that everyone falls somewhere on this spectrum:
Scrupulous ←–––––––––→ Laissez-faire
Since the beginning of this Substack, Rob has argued that emotions measure and motivate. He is writing a book that extends this framework across the emotional landscape. The question I want to ask here is: What kind of measurer are our evolved systems? Are they more like the penny-splitting friend, or the relaxed one?
Complications That Don’t Matter
Anyone who tries to answer this question will quickly notice some complications. First, there is the matter of focus. You might not pay much attention to the sounds of the forest until a twig snaps nearby. Then, all of a sudden, you’re all ears. People can drastically alter how much and what kind of attention they are paying based on the circumstance, flitting between carefree and careful as the situation demands.
Another factor is that some of our systems measure concrete inputs—like CO₂ in the blood—while others track much fuzzier signals: how valuable we are to a group, say, or how unconditionally we are loved. It’s hard to say how closely we monitor something that has no known unit of measurement.1
There are other complications, too…but as it turns out, none of them matter. That’s because the question I posed above—What kind of measurer are our evolved systems?—has an easy answer. By and large, they are as precise as they need to be. Evolution has had ample time to make them so.
The problem isn’t with the systems themselves, but with the modern world, which is overflowing with “measurement opportunities” that never used to exist. For example, the modern world has converted abstract signals—like social value—into the concrete metrics of salary, follower count, or likes.
In this article, I will focus on when and how that is bad. I’ll try to convince you that, sometimes, fudged or fuzzy numbers are best.
Attention
A number of phrases have entered the lexicon—mindshare, attention fracking—that reflect our growing understanding of attention as a currency. Those rich in attention can exchange it for money, power, and so on.
Our increasingly sophisticated ability to track and quantify attention is unfortunate for some fairly obvious reasons. Chief among them is that it leads to better methods of capturing and holding it. That might sound great—are you not entertained?—but how do we explain the fact that more and more people wish they spent less time on their devices? When attention is being deliberately mined by very smart, well-funded people, it’s no longer fair to say that users are simply “voting with their feet.”
Meanwhile, the whole point of capturing attention is to sell something. Whether the person whose attention has been captured “wants” or “needs” whatever is being sold becomes more difficult to answer as selling methods become more robust. (Not to mention that solutions create more problems.)
But I want to focus on a less obvious cost of quantifying attention: it deepens the pain of social losses.
Let’s say you’re hanging out in a group and say something you think is funny. Your joke garners a few smiles, maybe a chuckle. Then your buddy Bill chimes in with a one-liner and the room erupts. What a slap in the face, no?
Well, not really. A few features of normal social interaction make this palatable. One, there’s no concrete measurement. Sure, one of your friends might be hiding a decibel meter, but probably not. Two, the moment passes. Bill won that round, but the game continues. Three, the event remains local and largely unsharable. The pith of it, we could say, is lost as soon as it transpires.
Compare this to a digital version. You post something on Instagram and get 20 likes. Bill posts something and gets 100. His win is measurable, time-stamped, semi-permanent, and public. Now it’s pretty clear: you are a loser. By 80. For eternity.
Prospect theory helps explain why making this “competition” digital is a net loss. People feel worse about losing a dollar than they feel good about gaining one. Similarly, Bill won’t feel as good about beating you by 80 likes as you will feel bad about losing. The lesson here is that if you have to lose, do it analog.
Money
How many people do you know, gentle reader, who have reduced everything of significance in life to the pursuit of money? The percentage seems to rise as I get older.
Like attention metrics, money reduces a fuzzy, complex evaluation into a single, concrete number. All too often, this number becomes the lowest common denominator of someone’s worth. “Guy makes bank” or “She does well for herself,” never mind what they dream about. I think a major, undiscussed opportunity cost of money is all the other ways we might conceive of a person’s merit.2
By melding many forms of value together, money also allows for extreme sacrifices. Without money, you couldn’t ask someone how much they’d need to go a round with Mike Tyson. You could still play the game—“How many yams?” “How many days as tribe leader?”—but it wouldn’t pack the same punch. Money can buy yams, influence, and everything in between. Thus, another opportunity cost of money is all the other ways we might spend our time, all the other things we might chase or pursue.
I’ve noted elsewhere that hunter-gatherers generally worked less than modern people—certainly less than the farmers who replaced them. In fact, by modern standards, aboriginal peoples were lazy. European colonial accounts are full of condescension on this point: the natives didn’t know how to hustle.3
Lest you think I share their condescension, consider one of my favorite passages from Walden:
As for the Pyramids, there is nothing to wonder at in them so much as the fact that so many men could be found degraded enough to spend their lives constructing a tomb for some ambitious booby, whom it would have been wiser and manlier to have drowned in the Nile, and then given his body to the dogs.
Why the difference in work ethic? Maybe, in part, because of money. Money is one of the main reasons people commit to ridiculous undertakings in the first place. It was, after all, the promise of riches that lured Europeans across oceans, where they encountered “indolent and idle” natives.4 But those natives had little reason to work once their immediate needs—food, safety, mateship, belonging—were met. This is why Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers “the original affluent society.” He wasn’t claiming they had the latest technology or were bursting with wealth—only that they were getting what they needed and wanted with relative ease.
While nothing can prevent a person from acquiring too much money, something will prevent them from acquiring too many coconuts. It’s called rot. But money, as a store of value, doesn’t go bad, which allows people to pursue it interminably. For example, I recently listened to a podcast with Kevin Hart in which he said he wasn’t going to stop working because he was in a position to create generational wealth. Nobody would say that of coconuts. They’d gather enough to satisfy themselves and their family, and then they’d move on—sometimes to better things.
Money has its positives, don’t get me wrong. If a person raised cattle, it would be excruciating for them to buy a stamp without a medium of exchange. But a subtle downside is that it’s an everlasting carrot—a bottomless well of unquenching water from which we drink and drink and drink. We are told money that doesn’t buy happiness, and that’s false: research shows that people do continue to get happier with more money. The caveat is that there are significant diminishing returns. Yet many people chase money their whole lives, well past the point of it being experientially worth it, because there is no cutoff, no point of satisfaction, no natural limit.
Without money, far fewer people would fritter their lives away chasing it. To be sure, other pernicious motivations could take its place. “Hate’s as good a thing as any to keep a person going,” says Sandor Clegane from Game of Thrones. But few motivations or rewards match money in its versatility, potency, and durability.
The drawback to money as a concrete and concentrated form of value is that it crowds out other valuations. At many a cocktail party, wealth is the lowest common denominator of worth. Another downside is that many people are tempted to pursue money well beyond what would represent the best use of their time. Golden handcuffs have imprisoned many in the most productive years of their lives.
Also, going back to the opening story, the existence of money is what allows people to sweat exchanges in the first place. Without such precise measurement, a bagel and a coffee is close enough to a bagel.
Male Height
Apparently male height is a problem in modern dating. Many women want a tall guy—at least taller than them—and there never seem to be enough (at least not since covid disrupted supply chains).
But has the ratio of tall to short men changed? Not at all. It’s just that now, people can specify the height they think they want on dating apps. Women use height filters to screen out shorter men, and height is one of the best predictors of who they will contact, even controlling for other important variables such as income or education.
In the past, of course, height was visible but rarely quantified. This allowed it to remain one factor of partner attractiveness among many, all of which would have been assessed holistically—in the breathing embodiment of a person.
When people do try to assess height (or weight), they aren’t particularly good at it. Funny enough, their errors tend to be kind. As the above authors note: “We find strong evidence of contraction bias toward a reference value, such that the…height of short people are overestimated…whereas the weight of heavy people… are underestimated.”
It also turns out that men, not surprisingly, exaggerate their height a little. (The same might apply to other body parts.) Yet this is all well and good in the case of a shorter male and tall-seeking female. First, as we just saw, the height of short people is overestimated. Second, people “are better at estimating people similar to themselves,” meaning a woman who is shorter enough than a man might be a poor judge of his height.5 Thus, without even knowing it, men and women might collude to establish the height difference they want, with all the other wonderful qualities about the other only reinforcing their fit.
Then again, I don’t need to speculate: Rob has done some research on this. Rob and Jason Weeden looked at the issue of height, using data from speed dating. They found, in line with prior work, that women report a preference for men taller than themselves, about six inches or so. They also found assortment on height—taller women matched with taller men in the speed dating setting—but noted that in data from couples, the most important way that partners assort is on invisible features such as values and personality. Rob dug into this a bit deeper using a much larger dataset and found that women preferred men who were about 10 inches taller, while men preferred women only about 2-3 inches shorter. However, matches were most likely to form at an intermediate height difference of 7.5 inches—a compromise between each sex’s stated preference.
Much ground for (inaccurately-based) compromise has been eliminated by height filters that specify to the inch. These filters give dating app users the ability to say, in effect: “There is no combination of your other attributes that could possibly overcome your stature.” Very few people would actually say this, of course, but that is the impact of their actions.
Shorter men are put in an unhappy bind: lie or get culled.
From an economic perspective, dating apps function a bit like regulation that distorts an otherwise free market. Their filters constrain who gets through the gate, limiting the system’s ability to match based on unquantifiable traits—like sense of humor. By offering so many parameters, the apps implicitly suggest that romance is a formula and that all variables are present and filterable. Not only is this false, but that level of specificity and control prevents the free flow of capital—the organic growth of romance—that might emerge in a more natural, less constrained environment.6
In short (lol), dating apps overdetermine what is often the most mysterious element of life. Romance becomes a recipe: combine the right ingredients and out pops love. Fortunately or unfortunately, that’s not how it works. The recipe is better read without your glasses on.
Now here’s the thing: even after reading this, you’ll be tempted to filter by height. Why? Because height is a preference, after all, and when accurate information is available, why not use it? The problem is that when something is easy to measure, it tends to crowd out better—but fuzzier—metrics. For example, is weight the best proxy for health? Absolutely not. But it’s easier to capture than VO₂ max. Similarly, is bench press the best determinant of overall strength? No, but it’s more concrete than core strength. So we run with it.
Numbers Themselves
Now let’s go very far back and get very conspiratorial. One reason modern people can shoot themselves in the foot with dating filters is that apps exist. But height can be quantified in the first place because numbers exist.
Numbers were invented millennia ago, and they’ve obviously been useful. But as Heying and Weinstein have pointed out, the long-term hazards of a new technology can be hard to spot—even thousands of years later.
One overlooked consequence of numbers is that they enable the quantification of things that were never meant to be that precise. Without numbers, you can’t specify height. You can’t reduce a person’s value to how much money they make. You can’t compare thoughts, jokes, or creative projects by how much attention they receive. Essentially, much of the harm this essay talks about loses its razor-sharp edge.
Many small-scale societies developed additional ways to blunt the edge of social competition. In Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, James Suzman describes how the Ju/’hoansi assign credit not to the person who shoots the animal, but to the maker of the arrow that brings it down. The purpose of this and related practices is to “cool young men’s hearts”—to temper pride and prevent vanity.
Other examples include the many games of chance that foraging peoples play—often for hours on end. As Sahlins said of the Hazda: “[The] men seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” By minimizing the role of skill, these games ensure that every dog has its day. I find something very wise in these old and various ways of softening a loser’s pain, given that most of the time, most people are losing.
Modern metrics give unnatural precision to inherently fuzzy social dynamics. When social life remains loose and informal, and advantages remain imprecise, emotions soften. But the more we quantify, the sharper the comparisons become—and the more those comparisons hurt.
The Microplastics of our Experience
Recently, we’ve all been learning just how much havoc microplastics are wreaking on human and planetary health. In fact, microplastics are one of the leading theories for male infertility worldwide.
Through my writing, I hope to show that evolutionary mismatch is the microplastic of human experience—small, ubiquitous, and quietly corrosive. A true death by a thousand cuts.
Evolutionary mismatch in its more obvious forms has been understood for some time. Screens, chairs, processed food—these are like the six-pack rings that have been found around seagulls’ necks.
My goal is to go smaller. To get more subtle. To track the mismatches that don’t seem harmful until they are added up. One of these is the quantification of previously fuzzy and fudgeable metrics.
By the way, why do this? Why enumerate small mismatches that won’t be fixed? Mostly because it’s interesting and true. But also because, once in a while, better information is better. Other times it’s not.
Rob and I suspect that future psychologists will be able to measure "value to a group" as precisely as we now measure CO₂ levels in the blood. The reasoning is simple: our minds are already doing it.
A national take on this idea is the effort to measure Gross Happiness Product in addition to Gross National Product.
As it happens, Rob is currently reading A Savage War of Peace, by Alistair Horne, about the Algerian war, in which the author makes exactly this observation about the Europeans’ view of the locals. Horne points out that many Algerians suffered from malnutrition and artificially low wages, explaining where this uncharitable view might have come from: “Malnutrition induces lethargy at work, which doubtless could to a large extent explain the commonly held pied noir notion that the Algerian worker was, by nature, indolent and idle.” (99)
It should be noted that the major exception to all this is mates—people sailed across oceans for Helen of Troy, too.
I suspect this is part of what drives the “average” standard of six feet. Many women think that’s typical, but it’s actually taller than they think—two inches above average.