November 2, 2020November 2, 2020 Jeff

How to measure your life. Priorities, Parameters, and Rankings.

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Read: 8 mins.

The world we live in now kinda feels like a huge jumble of comparisons… a ranking fest of sorts. Sure, it may have been important back in the caveman days when we learned to compare ourselves with others as a method of gauging our position in the pack, and pushing ourselves for the sake of survival. But nowadays, it’s more of a problem with millions upon millions of people all over the internet, comparing themselves with one another. Where lives are dictated by the number of likes, shares, and followers we have. It’s an unfortunate game which I’m also slowly getting involved with myself, as a lowly bottom-dweller with only 17 people subscribed to my blog emails (and even worse 5 views on average…. 1 being myself). Though all isn’t lost as I enjoy ruminating and sharing interesting, thought-provoking ideas.

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Setting 1 – Survival Scenario Example

Let’s start by creating a setting: there are 100 people of all different types in a never-ending desert. You are an overseer looking at these poor people trying to survive, and through your authority, you are allowed to provide protective gear and survival equipment for 30 of the 100 people. What do you do?

There are many ways to approach a scenario game like this, but generally, players would utilize the process of elimination. Finding out what is important (Priorities), creating a system to weigh and organize the priorities against each individual (Parameters), and placing everyone’s outcome in some sort of ranking. However, with every scenario, our minds are subject to skews and biases, easily creating sub-optimal outcomes. (more on this later)

Let’s start with a pretty standard approach to our desert survival scenario:

Priorities and Parameters

With maximizing survival as the main goal in this specific scenario, we can identify what the key stats and skills are that provide the highest rate of success. Things such as:

• Fitness level
• Wisdom & Knowledge of survival in the wild:
  • Wild plant, edible vs toxic
  • Desert climates
• Survival skills:
  • Food gathering and hunting
  • Craftsmanship
    • Building living spaces
    • Equipment creation
    • Weapon creation
  • Dexterity
    • Equipment utilization/proficiency

Many of these are self-explanatory… based on survival-related stats, knowledge, and skills.

These will end up being the baseline within our parameters and thus weighs a lot more in the decision process.

Next comes the more difficult things to measure but also very important secondary attributes that fine-tune the previously determined core stats. Things such as:

• Leadership (Multiplier: 2x unless there is already another leader picked, then x1.5 overall)
• Teamwork (Multiplier: 0.5x – 1.5x)
• High adaptability (Multiplier: 0.5x – 1.5x)
• Quick witted / Learning speed (Multiplier: 0.5x – 1.5x)

These secondary traits are just as vital as the primary, with the difference being that they are very difficult to measure yet can cause a drastic difference in overall survivability. At a high level, they have great potential, thus need to be included in the decisions of who you distribute the 30 life-saving gear towards.

Lastly, there are also stats at the core of someone’s personality traits that may be detrimental to the group’s survival. Things like when an individual has a very high level of negative chaotic nature:

• Nature (Negative: 0.5x , Positive: 1.5x)

Or other attributes that may need consideration:

• Gender Diversity (importance rises as imbalance rises)
• Connection (+10 points)

Another thing that could be looked at is connections, someone who I have known for a long time, who may not be the best fit in the survival group, but because it is someone who has been close to me from my past, received a leg up in the survival gear selection process.

Ranking

After all the priorities are laid out, we can run every individual through the parameters (primary – secondary – lower level) and into a ranking system to determine the top 30 candidates. Now your parameters may be very different from mine based on a difference in priorities, but generally, no matter what the priorities are, every process of elimination would run through a similar set of steps and filters.

– End of scenario –

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Fortunately, the real world isn’t quite as severe as the scenario listed above, but there are many variations being played out throughout the world as of this very moment… As a matter of fact, you can find this pretty much wherever you look.

This falls under the real-world category called market design, where you play with real-life resource-allocation problems such as which kid goes into what school, who gets what job. The reason why this category is interesting is that it doesn’t play alongside the standard supply and demand structure: Price goes up with more demand/less supply, vice versa. Instead, resources allocated do not follow a specific price and demand manually allocated to reach an equilibrium. So to solve this, priorities/parameters need to be defined instead, as in our example above.

Downside of Parameters

There’s a problem though, with this approach.

Although the previous example may seem to be… a pretty good solution for our situation, every parameter that has ever been drafted for a difficult problem, has some sort of fault in it because there are too many variables to picking out good priorities, along with the parameters with it.

We can see it by using 2 simple circles: one circle for the values that represent everything that is needed for success for our priorities, and another circle that represents our parameters, our system for capturing as much of the values as possible.

A perfect system would look like this. Our parameters completely capture our values. A perfect system for 100% success.

But alas, in our imperfect world, when confronted with real-life resource-allocation problems with huge variance, we can only do what we think best, and end up with something more along the lines of this: 2 circles, with an overlap. things we unnecessarily considered in our parameters, things we captured accurately, and things we missed or were unable to capture at all.

In short: Every system with parameters that we currently employ in the world has its faults, where very important attributes aren’t measured and left out or are too difficult to measure like talent or personality traits. This may be fine for the little scenarios in life that don’t impact many people, but when it involves life-changing decisions, the severity can cause huge repercussions. Where there are always things unaccounted for, the true potential will never be fully grasped.

Example: the way we determine who goes to Harvard University and who goes to the neighborhood college is derived from a standardized test, commonly known as the SAT. With standardization, we can easily funnel large amounts of people through and get a ranking for that specific test, however, we lose the immense amount of potential for people who have other attributes that are not measured by the SAT. As a matter of fact, there’s almost no correlation at all between what makes a great student and high SAT scores. It more so measures people who are good…. at taking the SAT. What a surprise!

However, there unfortunately needs to be a system in place for the world to function properly and advance in a certain direction as a whole. We can’t just go around customizing every single application and complete in-depth profiling on every single person.

Blurred Lines

Most of the time, parameters are created with a specific goal in mind. Clear values and priorities that help dictate what you need to solve. But occasionally, there may be a time when things become blurry. Priorities and values, unclear. What would you do when you must decide who lives and who doesn’t not for a specific goal but simply as a decision? What would you take into consideration?

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Setting – COVID-19 Example

Recently, the world actually went through something similar: COVID-19. When people infected rose by the thousands, many hospitals in the epicenter were unable to keep up with the demand, due to the limited number of ventilators, especially because many ventilators were already in use for other medical needs. So when there are hundreds of people in need of this life-saving device, with only a limited number of supplies, how did the hospitals decide…

Where are you in their ranking system?

There are many ways you could approach this from things like the “First come first serve” ranking system, to systems that may completely overhaul and ignore the general population like the “Essential personnel receives priority” ranking system. But let’s take a step back and first consider different priorities…

Priority 1 example: Saving the most lives possible

If we take this approach, the parameters for this would be to give all the priorities to those most likely to die. This would mean allocating the emergency equipment to the older people who are at the highest risk. People who are experiencing the most severe symptoms.

• However, if we try to save the most lives, we ignore saving the most life-years (The equipment will be allocated to saving a smaller number of human life years as they are already nearing the end of life).

Priority 2 example: Saving the most life-years

Q.A.L.Y. for Quality Adjusted Life Year. A common acronym used by health economists, measuring the number of years you will live at full health. So if over 1 year, you are healthy for around 6 months and sick for the other 6, then your Q.A.L.Y. would be 1/2 a year. Using this measurement, we would prioritize saving young, healthy people who have more potential time to live.

• Leaves out many could be considerations:
  • People with wealth & power
  • People who have great contributions to society or have more things to contribute
  • Leaders in prominent positions
  • …etc

Priority 3 example: VIP patients

This would be where people who are perceived to have great value with high standings will get initial services from reserved ventilators to COVID-19 testing without signs of symptoms. Whereas many who do show symptoms are unable to get tested due to lack of testing supply. These can include world leaders, superstars, athletes, etc.

• This not only takes away from the supply when demand is already stressed but in some places also kicks those who are currently being treated off treatment to make way.

Priority 4 example: First come first serve

Pretty self explanatory..

At first glance, this may seem like the fairest way to do things, but in actuality, there are big flaws to this method. There are 2 main factors: proximity and depth of treatment are not being considered. People who live in better-situated areas have higher ease of access, thus discriminating against those who live in rural areas. And, people who come in have a varying degree of sickness. Some may need it more than others and some may require longer treatment than others, taking up vital slots for coming in first may be more counterproductive.

Priority 5 example: Highest Rate of Recovery with Ventilators

This one would take those with the highest rate of successful recovery using a ventilator to gain access to the equipment first, in an attempt to maximize the efficiency of ventilators. This comes into play because, in one study, roughly 67% of patients in a U.K. database still died even on ventilator systems, thus wasting precious resources with poor outcomes.

Priority 6 example: Instrumental valuation

Basically, people who are essential get priority. When a doctor gets sick, they should be given priority. This can also be expanded to giving priority to people who do essential work in any field that keeps society running properly.

In the end, all the different hospitals have their own priority system based on what they believe is right. However, in all the examples above, no matter which priority system you choose, or even with a mix of systems, there will always be certain people with an advantage over others. People will be left out and attributes unaccounted for.

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So… Where do you stand in the rankings? How much are you worth?

We all have different parameters in mind for every situation. Based on different priorities, the global ranking chart can be sorted into millions of different filters:

• Wealth
• Success / Achievements
• Followers / Influence
• Looks
• Prestige
• Love
• Good/Evil
• Productivity

The list of filters can go on and on, and each individual player views from their own perspective of ranking. Such as people I hold dear, over people I don’t know…

So there is no real answer.

In the end, we are all stuck comparing ourselves constantly based on our own values, and silently judging each other at a distance. Maybe it’s time to stop comparing and realize that we are simply all the same. (more on this another time)

We are our unique selves and should learn to own it, be proud of it, and see ourselves for who we are.

The controller is in your hands

Jeff