Measuring

"The world is driven by forces that cannot be measured," the market analyst Morgan Housel once wrote.

This applies to so many things.

Imagine a world where every decision is made on a spreadsheet, where we simply add up the numbers and get the answer. That's never going to happen, simply because that’s not how the world works.

Ask the British physiologist Archibald Hill, and he will tell you this is indeed not the case. Hill, who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1922 for his work in understanding body mechanics, ran every morning at 7:15. He was a keen runner. Hill believed that maximum running performance is a function of an athlete's muscles –  overwhelmingly their heart. A stronger heart pump more blood to transport oxygen to running muscle. That seems logical and straightforward. 

In the real world, Hill's calculations had almost zero ability to predict Olympic sprints or marathon race winners. 

With time, Hill realised there is more in athletics than sheer chemistry. He discovered that human bodies aren't machines. Human have feelings, emotions, and fears, all of which are very hard to measure. 

In other words, the world is not one big spreadsheet whose outputs can be computed. We'd never get anywhere if everyone view the world as a clean set of numbers to be computed.

Always been the case, always will be.