Is it time to throw a hundreth post party?! Nah; let's instead talk about how counting and numerical measures in general are used as (artificial) markers.

What is the significance of a 100th post? That a blog has been going on for a while? Why not celebrate a 98th post? Especially considering that I don't write new posts here on a regular schedule (e.g. daily), what does "100" even signify?

Here is where we start to talk about meaning. Different numbers do mean different things to people.

If Bitcoin goes above $50k soon, that will be a psychological significant marker. It is "halfway to $100k".

Numbers are words we use to describe reality just like other words. For many people, just adding numbers to stuff makes it sound "smart". Spouting a bunch of numbers is sufficient to confound many people and make them accept you as an expert. ¹

The Cult of Data-Driven Decision Making

People these days are obsessed with counting stuff and then turning knobs and flipping switches to optimize things. While certainly there is a time and a place to optimize stuff, the efficacy of optimizations can only help as far as the underlying assumptions about how some system works.

So for example, an educator might optimize some cirriculum such that students score as high as possible on some kind of standardized test.

Has LEARNING therefore been optimized?

Well, the students may improve at taking some specific type of test, but this doesn't imply that education got "better" in a more holistic sense.

Similarly, people might apply this sort of thinking to topics like diet. Someone might try to go for a maximum "low-fat" or "low-carb" diet. Sure, there are correlations between certain metrics, but does optimizing for one of these things miss other important "big-picture" questions like what is my relationship to food (to begin with). Furthermore, only looking at metrics like those found on nutrition fact labels may not distinguish between important considerations about what we're eating—is "grass fed" the same as "normal" meat?

Putting on the blinders of numbers can be helpful for focusing and improving certain systems. However, as illustrated by the thought experiment of the "Artificial Intelligence" system that decides to exterminate all humans in order to optimize paper-clip production, narrowly specified goals (often which rely on some numeric accounting thing) can lead us to engineer our own destruction.