You can’t fix what you can’t measure

You can’t fix what you can’t measure is common battle cry of today’s business community. Systems of efficiency and technology are invoked for creating new operating paradigms or to justify the expense of a new system for meeting a business need. The Carson article regarding intelligence testing speaks of this phenomenon as well, from a human capital perspective. If you want to improve the intelligence of a population or allocate resources for a diversely intelligent population, you need a yard stick to measure them. The use of technology to measure intangible aspects of nature or complex systems has been shown to be fraught with uncertainty. The questions must be asked, is the tool measuring what you intend it to measure, are other realities affecting the results of your surveys?

The desire to improve the status quo results in a situation where co-production becomes the driving force, especially as new technologies emerge, such as the ability to treat mental disorders in France due to an emerging technology such as psychoanalysis in the early 1900’s. The intelligence tests that came out of France were originally designed as a diagnostic tool for mental disorders, not as a way to categorize people for military service as occurred in the US much later. The artifact of the test however can survive its original context as a diagnostic, and be applied to other uses as social forces push on it and try to use it to meet their own needs.

Co-production demands that society continue to adapt technologies to the emerging needs of the community, but this does not always mean that the correct tool will be adapted to the correct task. Social scientists must constantly be aware of what the biases in existing tools can create and if we are measuring the correct signal. The difficulty of the military to create to effective mechanisms for research into human ability so they could establish an effective force for WWI is an example of co-production stressing the speed of the implementation of new science. Governance of these new systems can often lag the creation of the technology, and in most cases cannot predict the outcomes in any meaningful manner.

Social scientists need to be aware of these potential conflicts and facilitate the iterations of the co-production. As society pushes the technology forward and technology defines what can be possible in the future, care must be exercised in the application of historical artifacts.