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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

I suspect we are a fairly long way from measuring that. And even when we do manage to measure that positive ripple effect, do you want to?

The reality is, numbers are used for accounting. If we start keeping an accounting of small actions such as that, what freedom will we have?

People being mean, nice, depressed, etc. they are what make is human. By accounting for the little things we’d incentivize uniform behavior and lose all diversity of any kind.

I too think on those little things a lot. I recently had a family member move away, and since then every family get together is just flat in comparison. I think in a small way, those flowers did the same to the neighborhood.

Sometimes I think it’s enough to say, we lost something when they left. Or gained something when they were here. Maybe that’s enough of a quantified “number”.

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> And even when we do manage to measure that positive ripple effect, do you want to?

> The reality is, numbers are used for accounting. If we start keeping an accounting of small actions such as that...

This is a really good point. I think your point fits well with a sibling comment to yours, Gibbon1 pointed out something called The McNamara Fallacy which says we often trick ourselves into believing that the most important things are those which we can measure quantitatively, that they must be more important if only because they are measurable.

I do still wish we were better - on a level above The Individual - at recognizing the ways we add value to one another's lives. I do feel like, on a societal and systems level we're missing out on a lot of the little ways we make each other's lives more colorful, the ripples or 2nd and 3rd order effects. Taken as a whole, all of these little value-adds, everything from the artist, a neighbor's little garden, to the guy on my team who writes hilariously snarky code comments, I think these things probably add-up and affect us more than we realize.

Maybe we need to be better at teaching from a young age to notice those little ripples? Anyway, thanks for your comment, it helped me see it differently.

It is a catch 22. think all I want as a technologist, indirectly the reason to measure to see that I am going in the right direction, hoping the products I build help people create more of above type of interactions between us. Years ago when I was reading about this, I have come to conclusion that these places are what Hakim Bey called "temporary autonomous zones" and I accept them as just experiences to be lived rather than quantified.

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