Imagine if we have an accurate and precise measure for; empathy, mood, consciousness, self-control. How much better would the world be?

Empathy

Empathising is hard. If we could measure it we could start to test and design strategies to improve it.

  • Schools implement a new standard requiring all students to score at least 50% on their Emapthy Ingelligence (EI) test.
  • At secondary school you failed your 3rd year empathy test, so dad helps you practice.
  • Doctors and nurses require 95th% percentile empathy scores.
  • For any position of power (senators, CEOs, professors, …), you must pass a special ‘leaders’ test of empathy.

Mood

We are really bad at introspection. What mood are you in right now? What mood were you in yesterday? It isn’t something we think about often, yet it influences the way we see the world and how we act in it.

Imagine if we had a measure of our mood that could (accurately) describe we are feeling;

  • sad and like a victim. And that is likely to have influenced our interpretation of why your partner(s) didn’t do the dishes (heh).
  • After spending 3 months trying various activities and exploring different topics you receive a mood chart, tracking your happiness and how it related  to what you were doing. (hmm. That seems hard – to assign credit to the topic, and account for other external confounders.)

Consciousness

A measure of consciousness would bring science to the often controversial debates about animal welfare, abortion and euthanasia.

  • If a coma patient is no longer conscious, then the person we knew is dead, and you can shutdown the remaining body.
  • If a fetus is conscious then we should not abort it.
  • If an animal is conscious then we should not eat it.

Addictiveness

The delusion of self-control is persuasive. But, to me, it is extremely clear that we are not in control most of the time (if at all, but that is another story).

  • If we could measure how addictive various products are then we could fairly regulate them.
  • We could help people understand their own choices by assigning some credit to addictive substances or experiences present in their environment.

What else could we measure? Depression, anxiety, creativity, curiosity, …?