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Comment by max76 | Hacker News Reader

I think the goal of quantifying the amount of adversity a person experiences in their life is a fools errand. This is like asking "On a scale of 1-100 how beautiful is The Mona Lisa." Somethings can only be poorly approximated in numbers.

Once we have a number it tends to become An Important Thing, regardless of how much the number reflects reality. It is ironic that SAT is making a new number that has little reflection of reality to provide more context with their SAT test scores, which is another number that has only a poor approximate measurement of reality.

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I think this idea of quantifying adversity is worse than that. I'd say "on a scale of magenta to 100 how west is jello?"

There's so many variables, there's no real encompassing way to calculate this metric holistically.

Otherwise, every college application would need an addendum of "List every hardship or limitation you have ever experienced". It's not practical.

Lot's of measures are imperfect.

That doesn't mean they aren't useful.

What statistics will the Adversity Score be based on? How close to reality are those numbers? What statistics will colleges create using the Adversity Score? Those will surely be even further away from reality.

The primary use of a number like Adversity Score is to create a pretty spreed sheet that generates pretty graphs that look good in board meetings, grant applications and pamphlets. While the data backing up the graph is impeccable it also is built on layer after layer of imperfect abstractions until the graph has very little to do with reality.

There are great high schools, decent high schools, mediocre high schools and bad high schools and we can tell the difference.

There are neighborhoods full of rich people, middle class professionals, working class people, and slums and we can tell the difference.

I don't know why you think that's so hard. It seems quite easy to me. Certainly worth trying instead of (as you seem to advocate) just giving up at the slightest difficulty.

This isn't a slightly difficult problem, this is a fundamentally impossible problem. A qualitative thing cannot be quantified.

If we could quantify adversity we could calculate the percentage out of all human suffering that occurred during the Trail of Tears or determine the single most resilient living person.

I'm not saying we should consider adversity in college admissions. I'm saying we shouldn't quantify human emotions and experiences.

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