Reflections on James Vincent's 'Beyond Measure'

‘Beyond Measure’ (https://a.co/d/07lKROP) by James Vincent (https://x.com/jjvincent) is a truly magnificent read, highly recommended.

The subhead ‘the hidden history of measurement’ doesn’t come close to what the book is really about, at least for me. I’ll admit my nerdism and love of arcane facts (and a recommendation from my good friend Andy Ruben) drew my attention to the book. What I discovered - alongside a huge amount of incredibly surprising facts about the origins, melodramas and struggles that have brought us to today’s massive and ubiquitous capacity for measurement - was a fascinating opportunity to reflect on what constitutes civilization and organization. The ability to quantify and measure defines our terms of engagement with our world today. It is a construct of our creation to organize our perception of reality. When I started to examine how it works and how it has come about, I found myself in awe of the layers and layers of mental innovation that have gone into building this capacity to organize over the millennia. It made me think about what actually constitutes civilization - these conventions of perception that allow us to communicate and collaborate. We live such a quantified existence today, how might we perceive our world and our reality if didn’t define it in size, shape, depth, wavelength or temperature? Quantification of life and nature is massively empowering, and at the same time perhaps constraining of the bandwidth of our opportunity for perception.