Metric philosophy and how this Applies to Measuring, Analyzing, and Comparing Suffering

Quantifying suffering is necessary to understand suffering and react appropriately to people suffering. There are likely many ways to quantify units of suffering, the way I am proposing is done a by reflecting upon the standard distribution. 

If a person suffers a trauma, this will likely be reflected in their life. A control group, one without trauma, would set the standard for performance in a task. The degree to which the abused group deviates from the performance of the normal group would quantify the degree or severity of abuse. It can be difficult to measure some elements of life such as happiness or pain, but many statistical metrics already exist to quantify these things, and there have been many studies about how people who survive abuse or trauma perform in regards to economics or other easily quantified metrics when compared to untraumatized and unabused people.

E.g. An example using domestic violence: If on average people earn X, the per capita GDP, the mean, and on average the annual earnings of people who are victims of domestic violence are 1.5 standard deviations from the mean, this would suggest that unspecified domestic violence has a traumatic caliber of 1.5 in regards to earning income. This measurement of deviation can be taken across a number of statistics, and the deviations within each of these statistics can be averaged to form a more general traumatic impact induced by domestic violence. The more statistics measured the better, as many can be measured in regards to economic success, reported happiness, criminality, hospitalization, health, social statistics, romantic statistics, athletic statistics, anything. Though self-reported measurements are not ideal when compared to impartial measurements, anything can function so long as it is standardized. This would measure a broad range of categories to analyze the degree to which experiencing domestic violence negatively influences the lives of these people.

On a lighter note, this can also be done in regards to how people may benefit from something, e.g. number of books in the home as a child in relation to average income as an adult, producing a benefit caliber if this creates a positive influence on the person.

 The degree to which, when tested, these people deviate from the standard distribution, the number of deviations is the general magnitude of abuse. This is a very general standard, and it can be further refined by quantifying the degree of trauma the person has experienced. An example of measuring the severity of abuse could be a civilian who has been within 100 yards from a standard grenade explosion, 75 yards, 50 years, 25 yards, 20 yards, 15 yards, 10 yards, 5 yards, and so on.

The longevity of the trauma can also be established by repeating the quantification tests over a period of time to analyze the rate at which people do or do not recover from trauma. A person who has been punched in the face within an hour will likely perform more poorly on a wide range tests than they would if they had been punched in the face a day ago, a week ago, or a month ago. This would demonstrate the degree to which trauma persists within the person.

The constancy of suffering would also be measured. E.g. does something cause suffering around the clock, or only in certain times? A fear of public speaking may hinder somebody’s ability to succeed at work, but it is not a relevant cause of stress or discomfort during many parts of that person’s life.

Granted there are often a number of different traumatic influences in a person’s life, so isolating these forces would be difficult. When they cannot be isolated, they would just be analyzed as a combined number of traumas that are inseparable and function as one type of trauma.

To quantify the types of suffering for adequate comparison to one another, they would be weighted as to the amount of influence that the task has on the person’s life. E.g. the ability to work influences nearly every aspect of a person’s life due to their life being substantiated by money, whereas the ability to dance is at most only influential during free time and is an entirely optional activity. This would mean sorting things out into escapable and inescapable suffering, as a person cannot escape the need to work, but a person can escape any need to dance. 

The degree to which a trauma damages a person would be proportional to the rate at which it interferes with their ability to perform a task. The more basic tasks would carry much higher weight than more advanced tasks, for example, the more basic the action is according to a standard such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the more influential and significant the debilitation induced by the trauma is.

 E.g. if a person cannot provide food for themselves, this is substantially far more significant than the person’s ability to find respect and self-esteem. (Why the reproduction is at the list of basic needs is beyond me, reproduction is not a physical necessity of an individual. Easily this is a necessity for the human race, but not for an individual to survive. The needs of the human race are profoundly different from the basic needs of the individual to survive; a person doesn’t die if they fail to have children.)

The point being…

One cannot truly measure pain beyond self-reporting, but the influence of pain on a person can be measured by analyzing their performance on tasks and using self-reporting if necessary. This is the key point, measuring the decrease in quality of life that occurs from trauma, or anything for that matter.

 Without being able to quantify suffering, to quantify the degree to which something hurts another person, people fail to understand the very significant degrees to of suffering, people forget that suffering is a rational and comparable concept. People can suffer more or less than others, but too often people see this only as a light switch, “either the person is suffering or they are not suffering”, which is a completely irrational stance to take given that like all things that exist within the scientific world, suffering is just as rational, measurable, and comparable as something like beakers full of water, some of them are more full and others are less full. They all have water in them, but to end any sort of analysis at that point is completely impractical, especially in a world so defined and advance by scientific analysis.

With scientific metrics that analyze how traumatic something is compare to something else, this would give people adequate perspective. The issue is that without a scientific metric of suffering, people act as if suffering is black and white, they become comparably indignant about “trigger warnings” as they do about domestic violence or sexual abuse. This is an irrational reaction when domestic violence is easily millions of times more damaging to the human psyche than being triggered by a sensitive topic. 

 Seeing how domestic violence and sexual abuse induce millions of times more measurable suffering in the lives of people, logically people should care about these issues as defined by their severity. Though people cannot physically feel millions of times more upset than they have been about trigger warnings, it would give them a rational perspective to understand the degree of trauma that people experience, and the degrees to which these problems present themselves in people’s lives.