You should not have sex with your slave girl: she will chew you up

Values bind us at scale, where the bond of embodied shared experiences isn't present. Another thing that joins us at scale is measurement: by agreeing on standardized measurements, we can coordinate with people we don't know.

However, measuring yourself too much doesn't work. The thing being measured changes in response to the observer.

In our time, the most frequent instance is when you measure yourself.

Imagine criticizing yourself in a competitive match. Or trying to take a car apart during a race. It doesn't work!

And there are events beyond our control which change everything.

The flood.

A measurement for one environmental context will not work for a completely different context.