Core Question:
What happens when what you're measuring is as complex as you are?
The human sciences try to measure things like poverty, intelligence, wellbeing, and disadvantage. But these concepts are multidimensional, value-laden, and context-dependent. How you define them determines how you measure them — and your measurement shapes what you find.
Philosopher Jonathan Wolff tried to solve this problem for "disadvantage." He identified 13 categories of human functioning — from bodily health to political control — and scored real communities across all of them. Then he asked: does the ranking change depending on which categories you weight most?
That's what you're about to test. Nine real-world communities. Thirteen categories. You control the weights.
Your task:
The key question: No matter how you weight the categories, do the same groups stay at the bottom? What does that tell you?