Started work on “wiser metrics”: an effort to tracks (more of) what matters in this moment of metacrisis and second renaissance - and to provoke dialogue about the whole value vs what you can measure question
At present, it is a basic dashboard (just 2 metrics with more to follow soon):
Welcome suggestions for metrics to include (and pointers to similar existing efforts). Would like the positive stuff (if we feel it exists) as well as the clear polycrisis/metacrisis pointers
love help from others - writing, coding design etc all helpful. Source repo here GitHub - life-itself/wiser-metrics: Because we are what we measure.
Background
This is another of those projects that we’ve thought about for a long time eg a decade plus ago started collecting datasets with others at datahub.io project and we even wrote an (unsuccessful) pitch to One Project 4y ago (need to dig that out).
WhatsApp thread
NB: originally posted on the whatsapp on 22 Feb 2025
Some response on whatsapp:
Response to SamiK re cultural values:
Oh boy do we think alike
— tracking values change in a systematic change would be great. Could you post this in the forum thread too
Aside: here’s an old repo (from 8y ago now) on Schwarz GitHub - life-itself/cultural-values: MOVED. See https://lifeitself.org/notes/schwartz-cultural-values. Research on cultural values with heavy emphasis on Schwartz — we also started collecting some data but didn’t get very far.
BTW another idea we had was using the political manifesto project https://manifesto-project.wzb.eu/ and doing textual analysis to track changes in values at that level — this has got a whole lot easier with recent AI / machine learning stuff).
In general, collecting datasets on values and their evolution over time would be pretty interesting, especially if you could get fine-grained data and identify innovative “pockets” …