Here at Asterisk, we like to tell ourselves we’re publishing a magazine about the most important problems in the world. We do a reasonably good job of keeping ourselves on topic, but sometimes we can’t help getting distracted. Let’s face it: even we have a limited appetite for reading about nuclear diplomacy or the semiconductor supply chain. Sometimes we want to have fun. Indulge. Commission some essays about the things we can’t stop thinking about.
That’s why this issue is all about measurement.
Why are we so obsessed with measuring things? Because how it’s done — and how hard it is to do it right — is essential for understanding absolutely everything else. We like to tell ourselves that our decisions are based on evidence, from monetary policy to what makes up part of a balanced breakfast. Usually, that evidence means numbers, and as a society, we are certainly good at collecting them. We have numbers for our health and wealth and degree of democracy, and even numbers that purport to measure which countries are happier than others. We plot them on graphs, and when the graphs go up, we say we’ve made progress.
Unfortunately, turning reams of raw data into a line on a graph is fiddly work, and sometimes we get it wrong. Over the past few decades, statisticians have come up with more and more sophisticated means to test which numbers really represent the pure essence of what they’re supposed to be measuring. But as our measurements rest on an increasingly technical superstructure, they become even more divorced from the sort of simple observations that make intuitive sense.
In these pages, we’ve done our best to shed some light on the messy, subjective methods we use to quantify the world around us. You’ll learn about the struggles of economists and government officials trying to count the poor and the statistical instruments used to measure crime. Our contributors have investigated the ways we measure mystical experiences caused by psychedelic drugs and the religious affiliation of 18th century Puritans. They’ve studied how to make faster clinical trials for new vaccines, invented new benchmarks for evaluating AI, and designed the world’s most enticing sexual fetish survey. Have you ever wondered how advertisers learned to measure human attention, or whether colonoscopies even work?
If so, this issue is for you. If not, we hope you’ll enjoy it anyway.
