The Tyranny of Relative Measure

Once upon a time in a world now long past, a good life was comprised no more than of fulfilling the societal expectation to start a family alongside serving your immediate community whilst living earnestly in full communion towards a higher power. However, the world we find ourselves in today couldn’t be any more anathema to the aforementioned above.

Beginning at the onset of your teenage years, one quickly discovers the culmination of your high school experience gets rendered into the primitives of test scores, class grades, and extracurriculars in service of concocting a pristine college application in an attempt of securing your socioeconomic future. Even after acquiring your undergraduate credential, this same process gets rendered again in preparation for graduate school or for careers with SAT-equivalents like software engineering that mandate proficiency in answering leetcode-styled interview questions as a prerequisite for beginning your professional life.

Relative measure is predicated on measuring difference normalized across an arbitrary unit of time seen practiced in not just standardized testing (SAT, ACT, LSAT, GRE, etc.), but also in math olympiads, hackathons, and most especially IQ tests. Given the ubiquity of these measures within our civilizational context, the imperative of these tests have become an unassailable dogma at this point.

Before we go further, we must stop and consider how exactly have we arrived at this point? What assumptions does said civilization have to make to arrive at the conclusion towards optimizing for people with the theoretical potential to create rather than the created object itself?

Beginning with IQ, while it may measure a phenomenon rooted in objective reality, like all other relative measures, it cannot tell you in absolute terms what can or cannot be done with one’s own two hands. There is no doubt that there is utility in measuring differences across populations and between generations; however, when the status of one’s cognitive caste relative to the peers in their generational cohort becomes a surrogate for actual accomplishment, then the measure becomes entirely self-defeating.

Taking a step back, we should really ask ourselves what is it that we’re actually trying to approximate with this measure? Given the impetus of normalizing outcomes across some unit of time, the closest analog is likely economic productivity. The primary assumption of economics is that we live in a world of finite resources; thus, optimizing for the best use of those resources becomes the imperative, and by necessity, that mandates selecting people that can do the most in the least amount of time.

There is a predicament here, though, the seminal moments of the human story that pierced beyond the ether and truly stood the test of time are remembered precisely because all prior analog had been superseded.

Whether that was Mendeleev seeding the taxonomical structure of the modern Periodic Table of Elements, Kekule manifesting the shape of the Benzene molecule within an epiphany during dream state, or Einstein establishing the theoretical foundations for Special Relativity whilst imagining himself riding on a ray of light, these moments that truly pushed the human story forward cast their own shadow without need for relational comparison.

Relative measures generally fare considerably in approximating one’s daily average output, but given the aforementioned above creative tasks are fundamentally asymmetric and non-linear by nature, thus the convergent value of your daily average starts to become much less useful of an approximation.

If you’re willing to accept this premise, then you might consider questioning other assumptions pertaining to the IQ test and the primacy of relative measure at large. What this could mean is that while IQ speaks to the average cognitive ability determined over said duration of the test, it then also assumes the total variance of one’s thoughts remains equivalent between IQ ranges, which may not be valid. For example, a 125 IQ person could have a larger dynamic range in the total variance of thoughts when compared to another person of 145 IQ, even if the average quality of thought is lower. However, the “far-end” range of this long tail might only ever manifest in long-duration tasks like research spanning across many years, a property of the mind that categorically cannot be captured in a short-duration test. You can think of this dynamic range in the total variance of one’s possible thoughts as “top-speed” and the traditional measure of IQ as “acceleration” functioning as two distinct attributes of the mind.

The key differentiator here is that you’re looking for the attributes of a person whom could tangibly move the needle forward, thus it matters not what their output of productivity or quality of thought that they converge to on average, but rather if they have a fighting chance at approaching the apotheosis of all human potential in a single instance. Though to make this leap, you must be willing to orient yourself upon longer time horizons by foregoing your expectations of the here-and-now for any chance at communing with the eternal.

With all this being said, there is still yet an even bigger theme on hand. To operate under the assumption where relative measure becomes your default intuition, you must presume that the fundamental property of the world is that all measurable phenomena, including human behavior, emerge as the product of some stochastic probability distribution — in short, materialism. Simply put, the distribution of human intelligence follows a normal distribution or Gaussian curve, a pattern observed in many other physical systems, such as Brownian motion, thermodynamics, or quantum mechanics. Abstracting outwards from this premise leads one to conclusions such that all human cognitive potential is bounded to this phenomenon, and before you realize it, the maximal optimization of this measure becomes your governing premise for operating in the world.

Imagine if a genie came out of a bottle and presented two choices: either increase the average IQ of every person on the planet by one standard deviation, or be constructed a perfect solution to any unresolved problem in mathematics or physics, like the Goldbach conjecture. Most people would probably pick increasing the average IQ under the presumption of how many more other problems would be solved. This captures the sentiment of what relative measure really is. You are picking to optimize for an increased probability distribution of outcomes rather than a single absolute measure. It would be like asking a person whether they would rather be guaranteed to accomplish one single great feat in one’s life or be given a 50% increase in accomplishing any feat that one might choose to undergo.

This results in a paradigm where one is more inclined to ask questions such as, “What is the process that creates a great artist?” rather than beginning with the question of “What is great art?” Defaulting to the question pertaining to the process rather than the object insinuates that you yourself are incapable of creating said art, but more importantly that it is not the artist responsible for the creation of said art, but rather is a product of their genetic lottery and circumstantial externalities thus resulting in a focus more on the environment and cultural context rather than the individual artist. If the artist alone is not responsible for the fruits of their own becoming, then by necessity you must deny the will, personhood, belief in belief itself, and any premonitions of an absolute claim.

Relative measure taken to the limit would render someone like Alexander the Great whom was born the son of a king, as bound to live a life of great accomplishment; thus, rewarding him with greatness would be a disservice to all of those whom never had said opportunities. Even the life of an Olympic gold medalist could be concluded as unsatisfactory, for that single moment of glory could be flattened into mediocrity, considering the decades of pain, suffering, and agony that would nullify or even overshadow the perceived pleasure derived from the glory of that becoming.

To genuinely strip away glory from the Olympic gold medalist, you must see their feat not as a demonstration of their willpower, but as an input towards some thermodynamic exchange of energy, because fundamentally, you believe the irreducible primitive of the world is a cluster network of attractor basins, not persons embodied by a will and soul that remain unperturbed by the external world. Therefore, the assumptions undergirding the primacy of relative measure taken to its logical conclusion must blur any distinction between mediocrity and greatness, mandating that human behavior is solely the product of circumstance and instinct, thus in effect rendering mediocrity out of greatness and greatness out of mediocrity.

Operating under this same assumption, one would then have to conclude that any of the great basilicas of Europe that took centuries to build, relatively speaking, must have been failures because the people whom originally commissioned the work were unable to consume the final product of their labor and for stripping away resources from housing the general populace at large of that specific generational cohort. Thus, in terms of intergenerational utility, the project was a failure because it rewarded pleasure to future generations at the expense of pain experienced from the preceding generations whom were actually the ones that hammered the nails and chiseled the stones into the final output we see today.

This same sentiment presents itself in the famous excerpt¹ from A Pale Blue Dot where Carl Sagan analogizes the entirety of the human species, specifically the stories we’ve told ourselves and all the conflict, strife, and tumult seminal to the human condition as being no more than murmurs of vapid nothingness as mankind relative to the proportion of the earth and the rest of the cosmos at large is nothing more than just a “pale blue dot” floating into the ether of space.

While not contextualizing humans towards a relative measure pointed inwards amongst ourselves like the IQ test, the excerpt presents mankind relative to the entire universe as ultimately diminutive in physical proportion, thus in effect accepting the presupposition that all meaning is downstream of a stochastic probability distribution, therefore the larger the object, the more complex of a system, and ultimately the greater in meaning. One must then conclude that man can exist only in conflict with the universe and the forces of entropy, rather than operating in communion with the cosmos at large, resultant of being made in the image and likeness of its creator.

Rather than seeing the pale blue dot as a trickling ember ready to ignite into an inferno, instead, that same pale blue dot becomes a prison of condemnation from the forces of the cosmos that shall behold us for all of eternity.

It should then be no surprise to us that we live in a world where our software engineers are more skilled at solving leetcode-styled interview questions rather than architecting resilient software systems, or where doctors are more apt in their administrative diligence than in their ability to cure disease and heal the sick.

As a result, we prefer asking questions like, “Which economic system is more efficient relative to others” (i.e, communism vs capitalism) rather than asking the more fundamental question of what these economies are producing and the state of the actual people in these nations, less so the economic heuristics. Thenceforth, we then assume nation-states exist for GDP to grow at all costs rather than for the economy existing to serve the needs of the nation-state.

Our political discourses get framed in the rhetoric of small and large government, nested around fulcrum points of economic inequality rather than beginning with the premise of what the nation should look like and what it should eventually become. We then ask not what our institutions produce, but rather if they’re fulfilling our preferred proportions of demographic quotas.

These same principles reverberate into our architecture, for we’re more concerned about energy efficiency ratings and the units of energy consumed in constructing said buildings rather than erecting a structure that garners awe in absolute beauty for the aeons to come.

When a civilization is devoid of an objective to culminate itself around, an absolute painted in light of what is good, true, and beautiful, logically it must then point inwards and start eating itself from within, seen most evident with the imperative placed on relative measures.

Why does any of this matter? Our civilization has now demonstrated for over three generations in succession that it has failed to reproduce itself, the single prerequisite necessary for a civilization to define itself as such. It matters not how highly we rank in any other relative indices, such as freedom, happiness, or civil rights, when compared to that of our ancestors, if all we are doing now is simply just free-falling into the ether of space and collectively dying in slow motion.

Consider something as trivial as choosing what meal to consume. Relative measure concludes that overconsumption of red meat renders heart disease, high-sugar intake yields diabetes, and surplus food of any kind results in excess weight gain. If you seek muscle mass, stuff yourself with red meat; if longevity, minimize caloric intake to the minimum, but if you want momentary happiness, then stuff your face with all the delights that this world has to offer. What do people do instead? They optimize for the average between all three options and end up accomplishing neither longevity, muscle mass gain, nor the happiness of gluttony, thus in effect having done nothing at all. By choosing relative measure, you forego any possibility of communing with an absolute in exchange for the comfort derived from mediocrity.

We measure quality of life relative to the conclusions of what happiness-survey meta-analyses point to, rather than asking the more foundational question of what is the good life. When people try making amends with their lack of happiness, they think not of introspection but of a new activity to pass the time with, what new travel destination to visit, or relocating to a new city or district that ranks higher in quality-of-life than their current location.

Take, for example, a common heuristic given to students preparing for the SAT test, they’re told that if they’ve spent over one minute on a single problem without yielding a solution that they should just move on instead, and given the context of the restrained time, it’s perfectly rational and sensible advice to give. However, now imagine giving this same advice to Leonardo Da Vinci when he was painting the Mona Lisa which required 14 years for completion, or to Auguste Rodin while he was sculpting The Gates of Hell, which required over 37 years to complete.

How would science have been possible if the very same scientists whom spent decades working on a single problem (i.e, Peter Higgs devoting forty-eight years of his life to the Higgs Boson) would’ve stopped themselves midway asking themselves, “relative to other scientists in my field I haven’t made much progress in my research,” thus upending their research upon said realization.

Obviously, there’s an explicit asymmetry in the comparison above, such that the advice given for maximizing SAT scores is not commensurate with the advice you’d give to an artist or scientist working on their magnum opus, but that being said, it does speak to the ephemeral time horizons that relative measure encroaches onto the mind.

For a more practical example, imagine instituting this same advice to an engineering student struggling to pass one of the mandatory courses necessary for completing their undergraduate program. The advice above would be modified to then tell the student to honestly ask themselves whether or not they have the cognitive aptitude to actually become an engineer, otherwise the most sensible outcome is to then accept defeat and move on.

However, this premise of whether or not you’re of the intellectual muster to complete said engineering program is where things fundamentally go wrong. Why is it that one truly chooses to become an engineer?

For most, that intuition was probably seeded from your childhood as you were fascinated with objects, be it cars, trucks, airplanes, or anything else involving motion, and you flowed into a trance when building things, whether that was with legos via physical bricks or in Minecraft using digital ones. You were probably eager to read car magazines and had a poster of your favorite supercar hung on your bedroom wall. What you should be asking yourself instead what is this deep-seated curiosity that led you down this path?

What is the “thing”, the actual objective that you want to fulfill and arrive at?

If all you ever wanted was just the shiny supercar plastered over the bedroom wall rather than some curiosity to know how and why said physical systems work, then walking away from said engineering program at that fork in the road becomes a simple decision. If what animated you to become an engineer was so that you can upgrade your car and design custom parts for it using CAD, you can just teach yourself CAD and forego the need for acquiring said credentials.

At this juncture in civilization, we do not have a first principles explanation of where we should go next, what to build, and why we should do exactly that. In a world with a clearly defined collective vision of the future, you’d probably feel less existential angst for not living up to your full socioeconomic potential because subconsciously, you’re still being carried upwards by the forward spiritual motion of this larger narrative. It could also be that the urbanized digital-first world of today has made people forget that the physical world is something they can directly interface with, and that they don’t actually need to be beholden to urban socioeconomic status games to feel that they can propagate forward into the world.

Following this vein, the acquisition of new skills should be decided under the prerogative of unlocking new personal capabilities, rather than being used as a signaling factor for gaining an advantage over your job market competitors. You ought to be like Issac Newton, where he coincidentally invented Calculus to better describe the natural physical world as a footnote towards his larger goal of practicing theology and understanding the Lord Almighty.

If what you’re doing is truly worth doing, then do it. Think not of your contemporaries, think not of your status, think not of anything else other than eternity itself. If your litmus is all of time itself, then it won’t matter if you spent a lifetime doing it, even upon imminent failure. If the “now” is the only thing you can conceive of, then you will stop and pause, asking yourself “Is this the most efficient use of my time, and will this bring me happiness?” In those moments, you might tell yourself, “Maybe I ought inhale my ego and temper myself to more reasonable goals so that I become less suffocated of my own belief.” However, by doing so, you will have castrated the first inklings of an ember sparked within before it could have ever ignited into a flame.

You don’t go out and become an Olympian because, on average, relative to the rest of the population, you’re better at that singular task; you do so because glory has called your name and it has become your duty to commune with this becoming.

The people who changed the world and truly moved the needle forward did not enter a field because it was projected to have more growth relative to the others nor from an artificial scarcity imposed onto them by having to accomplish x within y amount of time (i.e, hackathons), but from a manic obsession that gripped them of all their faculties forcing them to commit all the way.

If we are to push the human story forward, why do we not animate ourselves in the conviction of an absolute becoming? Why is our first instinct to bind our own outcomes to those of the peers immediately before us?

This can only be made possible if one truly believes there are things in the world that are indubitably true, beautiful, and thus worth living and dying for beyond all reprise. Without this presupposition, one can only see oneself as a passenger towards bigger forces that one can only choose to act in accordance with. It is for this reason why relative measure then becomes the default, and why it is you can only optimize for the process of doing things and never the actual doing.

Without these beliefs guiding the way, one can arrive at a world with much stranger conclusions. One such example is the Multiple Worlds hypothesis, which is an alternative interpretation of quantum physics that rectifies the measurement problem by abstracting all possible outcomes of a quantum superposition their own branched parallel timelines. What this stipulates is that for every choice you’ve ever made, there exists an alternative universe for every other decision one could’ve ever decided upon. This takes the premise of the stochastic probability distribution to its absolute limit by thus blurring the lines of there being a singular substrate of reality, and if this interpretation of quantum physics is to be taken literally, none of your choices truly amount to anything definitive because there is no single timeline anyone is part of, just a conglomerate of infinite universes.

Another alternative world governed by this same assumption would result in separating children from their parents at birth by randomly distributing the newborn to a different set of parents birthing children on the same day under the premise of making the world more equal by removing the intergenerational socioeconomic network effects that disproportionally favor people born to families of higher economic strata. In theory, this would resolve into a more meritocratic world, but at the expense of the most foundational human impulse of them all, to raise one’s own kin and blood, thus invoking the question of what we are actually trying to accomplish.

Returning to the original premise, it seems unequivocal that something has fundamentally gone wrong at the civilizational level. The tyranny of relative measure is that it robs people of believing the willpower gripped between their own two hands is sufficient enough to enact change onto the world and instead gives people a false sense of accomplishment contingent on the rank of their socioeconomic cognitive caste.

As such we’ve made ourselves slaves to the probability distribution, and thus by doing so, we’ve divorced ourselves from anything real and absolute. Consequently, what has resulted is that our best and brightest are stuck vying amongst themselves in these zero-sum games rather than generating things that substantively matter.

Intelligence, the theoretical potential for knowledge and ultimately wisdom, is a very strange particular for any civilization to orient itself around, thus demonstrating an immaturity in believing more resolves into better, which couldn’t be further away from the truth. When all is said and done, no one is going to care that you had an IQ four standard deviations above the mean; instead, they will ask a simple question: what did you contribute and what did you leave behind for posterity?

If we’re going to reorient our civilizational frame such that we will return to building grandiose Pantheons that have stood for two millennia once more, we’re going to have to redirect from the ephemeral and back towards the eternal. This means we must genuinely believe one single great moment can make amends for all prior mediocrity from the preceding moments of before. If we can commune with belief once more and act earnestly in alignment with virtue, we can make anything happen. The time to generate is now.

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Notes and Extra Reading

If you’re convinced relative measure is indeed tyrannical, then you might enjoy the piece below, speaking to the belief required for one to commit all the way.

Mystery of The Origin Node — Take the Leap — Generative Forms

Great does the mind incant upon pontification, prognosticating manifolds of possibilities upon the illusion of plurality, paralyzing intent against the clamor of antecedent, spinning the mind upon the ambiguity of choice.

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Footnotes

Footnotes

1. “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994 https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot ↩