We need a name for this disease, and it may already have one, because it’s been rampant for decades. It is the need to attach a specific number to a phenomenon that is not a single parameter, that encompasses a diversity of causes and consequences, and then treat the phenomenon as something that can be ranked, or min-maxed, or just generally be reduced to one number. And then it gets treated competitively! The most familiar example is IQ, taking a complex multivariate property like intelligence, and reducing it to this one single number, and then regarding the highest score as the best, without even considering the best…what? The best mathematician, the best musician, the best conversationalist, the best humanitarian, the best poet? It’s a sickness. We spend way too much time obsessing over the quantification of our existence.
Another example is sports and athletic performance. How much do you bench? How fast do you run 100 meters? What’s your freethrow percentage, your RBI, your golf handicap? These are all valid contributions to your performance at a game, but they don’t capture the totality of that performance, despite being easy to print on the back of a collectible sports card. In particular, they don’t come close to representing the value of that human being’s life.
It’s disturbing when someone focuses so much on the statistics of their existence that they miss the broader view of what that life is about. Case in point: Bryan Johnson, the weird millionaire who is obsessed with fine tuning every aspect of his physiology to maximize his longevity. His life is a constant whirl of pill-popping, exercise regimes, blood testing, and pointless measurement, all to a goal that he won’t get any closer to with his endless tweaking. Watching Johnson on his ridiculous hamster wheel of a life is entertaining, in a sad kind of way.
The latest news is that Johnson has a girlfriend, and he has immediately started scoring her.
Bryan Johnson, the world’s most dedicated oversharer, is in love. The 48-year-old got famous for documenting his strict diet and elaborate regimen of supplements—many of which he also sells—as well as exotic therapies including an injection of “young Swedish” stem cells, all in the pursuit of not dying, ever. And after he got a girlfriend, he told his public more than they’d ever want to know. “Just gave Kate oral sex. Goodnight everyone,” he tweeted this spring. Alas, there was more: “This is her vaginal microbiome report. 100/100 score. Top 1% of all vaginas.”
What followed was a report from a vaginal microbiome test, confirming the elite status of Kate Tolo’s. This, Johnson claimed, was a critical marker of Tolo’s overall health. (He soon began referring to his girlfriend’s genitals as “Kate’s 1%.”) Tolo then leapt into the comments, reassuring followers that she was totally fine with the world knowing that the bugs in her vagina are the very best bugs.
Wait. My first thought was about how you score a microbiome. Is this a thing? It turns out that it is.
In the simplest terms, a microbiome score is a metric designed to summarize the state of the microbial ecosystem living in your gut. It is a data-reduction tool. Instead of listing the relative proportions of hundreds of different bacterial species, a testing company uses a single number or a small set of numbers to represent the overall health and balance of your gut flora. This is analogous to a Body Mass Index (BMI) score: it condenses complex data into a single, comparable figure.
These scores are not universally standardized across the industry. Each testing company uses its own proprietary algorithm to calculate them. A “score” is meant to be a starting point, a way for you to quickly gauge whether your gut ecosystem appears healthy (often called “high diversity” or “good balance”) or potentially imbalanced (sometimes termed “dysbiosis”). However, you must distinguish between a summary score and the raw data. The raw data—the specific bacteria found and their levels—provides the most detailed and actionable information for a healthcare professional.
So it’s a scheme for reducing hundreds of numbers to one number, and different companies (that’s telling — it’s a profit-making tool) have different schemes, and it’s just as valid as BMI…which we already know is seriously flawed.
How was the sex, Bryan? What do you love about your girlfriend? He replies with a simplistic calculation of the distribution of bacteria on her body. I think you’re missing the point, Bryan.
I hope for Kate’s sake that she can keep her bacteria in tip-top shape. Would Bryan shame her if she were only in the top 5%? A yeast infection would be a devastating crisis in their relationship.
Narcissistic creeps have to creepify, since it is their only actual skill. No doubt he also ranks himself as “a” or even “the” top human. Just like the other narcissistic creeps; the Orange Führer, Musk, Zuckerberg, etc. He is surely the best possible human, despite totally missing on all sane comparisons. They elevate their importance by pulling their own shoelaces upwards, despite contributing absolutely nothing to humanity, excepting their mere presence.
Yeah I’d rate this post a 7 out of 10.
Speaking of scoring, my interest level in Bryan Johnson is 14% out of 100%.
He is a strange guy but strange in a way that isn’t all that interesting.
My avoid at all costs scoring is 95% though.
He probably isn’t a danger to other people but why take any chances?
@1
“…excepting their mere presence.” Which is a huge negative.
Will taking all these obsessive, careful measuring & charting steps make this werid TMI exemplified millionaire live longer?
Probly not, but they may well make it feel like longer & probly less fun.
To rephrase a very old joke.
Maybe you should investigate Boris Johnson instead of Bryan Johnson?
Boris can brag of a real achievement: letting an extra 20,000-50,000 die of COVID by totally mismanaging the pandemic response in the same style as Brexit.
.
If Bryan is syphilis Boris is HIV.
One aspect of the urge to reduce characteristics to a single, scalar description — emphasizing that it’s only one aspect — arises from everyone’s favorite social construct: Racism, and the continuing struggle for and against it. At one level, by reducing things like “worker performance” and “employment qualification” (and “intelligence”… and, perhaps most to the point, “academic potential”) to a single number, it simultaneously creates a barrier against and excuse for discrimination.
The barrier, so to speak, is that it’s now harder to rationalize favoring the lower-scoring member of the favored group for an advantage (job, pay, promotion… right to vote…) over the higher-scoring member of the disfavored group; it at minimum requires verbal gymnastics or outright arbitrariness, both of which expose the decisionmakers to criticism. It’s a way to claim that “I’m not the bigot here, the system made me do it!” without taking any responsibility for the system — not even when it’s a closed system, not even when the ability to obtain the score in the first place preselects for a characteristic not being tested. Example: SAT scores aren’t about “verbal aptitude” — they’re about “verbal aptitude in contemporary American English as favored by the managerial class of the American Northeast,” which rather ignores the “verbal aptitude” of, say, a teenager who has just arrived in the US as a refugee and started learning American English (in a rural community) about nine months ago. It’s one thing to say that right now, a particular task requires a particular minimum facility that’s measured Like This; it’s another entirely to presumptively rank those above the minimum competence level on the same instrument.
The excuse comes from the presumption that both whatever is being scored is meaningful and the method of scoring is accurate (and reasonably precise). The concept of the so-called “five-star recruit” in men’s college athletics (hack! phhhhhhhht!) is a great example; the number of excuses made for “five-star” candidates who never pan out even in college, let alone the pros later, versus the number of “two-and-three-star” candidates who both objectively and subjectively outperform them exceeds my ability to count. And the less said about numerical ratings in performance reports — whether talking about “grades” or “annual performance evaluations” — the better, because all such judgments are by definition limited to the evaluator’s values, experience, and judgment. Not to mention being snapshots that get extended to longer timeframes and other contexts.
It is a data-reduction tool.
In other words, a tool to minimize information and make people dumber. And the fact that different “data-reduction” (“reductionist?”) companies all have their own “proprietary algorithms” only reinforces the notion that none of this is based on any real-world need or circumstances.
Oh, and why “young Swedish” stem-cells? Is he Swedish and in need of compatible stem-cells? Or does he just think White Scandinavians have the best cells?