Where Measurement Ends, Need Begins

This post was originally published in Kronika: Filozofski magazin as “Gdje prestaje mjerenje, počinje potreba.” It has been translated by the author and reproduced here with the permission of Kronika.

I’m certain you’ve come across the phrases “penny for your thoughts” and “food for thought” at some point in your life. Perhaps you’ve even used them. If so, with the first you politely asked someone what was on their mind. With the second, you signaled the value of an idea (or of some content that prompted you to think more deeply, or think at all) whether you received it or, better yet, produced it yourself, perhaps giving others a reason to do the same.

I love those phrases. They serve well as a frame for something that preoccupies many people in academia, perhaps without their even realizing it; and that is the phenomenon of obsolescence. Not the legal kind—the statute of limitations, the expired claim, the debt that can no longer be collected—but the kind that describes a particular human wear-and-tear within a system. The academic system, specifically.

I think this phenomenon surfaces at the moment one desires to advance in rank. It is that moment when an individual takes stock of everything they have done or failed to do: how sought-after they are as a collaborator, how easily avoided. It is the moment of being left alone with their own work, or lack of it, and a set of regulations: institutional or, as is common in most European academic systems, national. A kind of a twilight zone in which a person, willingly or not, finds themselves subject to a rulebook not unlike the “Please return your tray” sign in an IKEA cafeteria—a polite instruction to clean up after yourself and leave no trace. Or, in the academic version: When you’re done producing thoughts, leave a clean record behind you. Add it up, gather all the materials, read the relevant passages, and factor in depreciation.

Is there a specific form of psychological discrepancy between the younger version of oneself—the person who had no particularly worked-out career plan, but somehow assumed that the future would involve intellectual glamor, the occasional guest lecture, walking important hallways with an important folder, and generally being cited—and oneself now, in that strange in-between of neither youth nor old age, dutifully reading through evaluation criteria? Is it normal that precisely at this moment the ontological residue of that ambitious younger self becomes active, along with all its unrealized scenarios, as a kind of side effect of academic administration? If nothing else, it seems that criteria serve not only to evaluate work but also to unexpectedly summon alternative versions of one’s own life.

For some reason I can’t fully explain, when I think about all this, what comes to mind are the two phrases from the beginning of this article. I’m not sure whether it’s because the evaluation criteria—with their grids, matrices, and ranked categories—make me think of food arranged on a plate in precise geometric patterns, specifically the kind of food that arrives at the table in smears, lines, and architectural arrangements, as if drawing the food were meant to disguise the shortage of it. Perhaps it’s because that kind of food costs a lot and doesn’t satisfy. Perhaps the problem is simply that I am currently hungry. After all, some things shouldn’t be done on an empty stomach.

And perhaps it is also slightly arrogant to write about the phenomenon of obsolescence from a kind of view from nowhere, as though it were a cool object of analysis rather than something that eventually catches up with the analyst, too. Perhaps it is equally arrogant to attempt a theoretical treatment of a subject others have already thought through more deeply and written about more persuasively. So instead, I’ll simply admit what happens to me when I think about the combination of obsolescence and evaluation criteria. Under that impression, “penny for your thoughts” and “food for thought” begin to seem strangely apt. As though before my eyes a kind of food chain is gradually taking shape, one in which thoughts produce other thoughts, which then nourish new thoughts, while the whole system somehow depends on keeping that circulation going and duly documented. We have, then, a great many of our own thoughts and those of others, and we feed on them mutually. And if there is some kind of order, or at least an ambition for one, the question of value inevitably arises: how much is a thought actually worth?

Today, however, we behave as though this question is at least partially answerable: as though intellectual work can be sorted, described, and evaluated with sufficient precision. And all of this is, without a doubt, serious, orderly, and commendable. Yet it seems to me that in the process we lose sight of one important fact: Thoughts are, in fact, food. And as such, perhaps they ought to fall under a somewhat different classificatory framework. I will therefore permit myself a modest, if bold, proposal: scientinutritional criteria.

Let’s look at the other phrase: “food for thought.” What is the value of that which expands our thinking and provides material for it? Perhaps it’s something that can be weighed; after all, some books are heavy and some are light. Today there exist sophisticated smart scales—devices that do not merely measure weight but attempt to see inside the body, estimating body fat, muscle mass, hydration levels, and even deeper, less visible layers such as visceral fat or overall metabolic health. In other words, it is no longer a question of how much something weighs, but of what it is made of, and what effect it ultimately has.

If academic work can function as food for thought, then this shift from weight to composition opens the possibility of evaluating value differently. We no longer ask only how much has been produced, but what its composition is and what effect it has. And with that, almost imperceptibly, a space opens for new criteria: ones that measure not merely the presence of content but its density, quality, and impact.

The brain is a demanding organ that requires varied intellectual nourishment: not only new material but challenging, unsettling, joyful, and even entirely misguided content. But as with any diet, it is important to identify what is genuinely valuable. In that sense, we can speak of content that functions as a kind of ally—that strengthens thinking over time, deepens understanding, and does not exhaust itself in an immediate effect. And if we carry the analogy through, there are also academic papers that satisfy us quickly but leave no trace.

If we are speaking in this language, then, by what criterion—while still retaining some elements of measurement—might we evaluate such content?

I propose the scientinutritional criteria. If we view academic knowledge production from this perspective, we can imagine it as a space in which diverse food for thought is produced. Not all of it is equal, nor does it need to be. Some content is more demanding, some more accessible, some experimental, and some may be overly processed—recycled, repackaged, and served again—but that too is part of the menu.

Let us therefore introduce some basic scales:

• Nutri-Score. A paper has a high Nutri-Score if it is written according to disciplinary standards, relevant, and well-developed. But it is flavorless. It is consumed without side effects and without lasting impact.
• Caloric value. Low caloric value means the paper is light, the arguments easy to follow and digest. It gives a brief energy spike, followed quickly by a crash.
• Glycemic index. A paper with a high glycemic index spikes the blood sugar and provokes sudden reactions—you become agitated because the author didn’t cite you, even though you worked on the topic before them.
• Degree of processing. A high degree of processing points to recycled arguments, repackaged concepts, reheated conclusions served multiple times.
• Mixed profile. The paper contains a bit of everything.

These are tools through which we experience some papers as more demanding and others as slower to digest but more durably influential. Some papers are provocative, some soothing, some stimulating, and some, perhaps most uncomfortably, are the kind that force you to admit that someone else was right.

The nutritional analogy, of course, is not without its problems. Talking about academic papers as food can sound trivializing, even offensive. And it’s not exactly comfortable to assess someone else’s work—or your own—as a banana. In American slang, calling someone or something “bananas” is already a fairly loaded diagnostic category, requiring no second opinion. Because food, and food for thought alike, is necessarily tied to habits—and for habits to be healthy or of good quality, they must be balanced. There must be room for everything: bananas and caviar alike.

But what’s a banana to one person is caviar to another. Still, the analogy has a deeper problem. The phrase “food for thought,” especially when applied to academic work, contains an internal tension: It joins food—which we measure nutritionally, in calories, fats, and salts—with thinking, which is not a product but an activity. Food has a label per 100 grams; food for thought has neither a unit nor a composition, yet is expected to be measurable. If understood as a product, it would need to be quantified somehow—which brings us back to the question of density and effect. Without that, there is no label, and no place on the supermarket shelf. Not because it necessarily belongs there, but because evaluation criteria presuppose that it could.

And that’s the thing: Academic work doesn’t want to be merely a commodity on a shelf. It aspires to a guild-based recognition that doesn’t depend solely on formulas and spreadsheets. It wants to be recognized as a particular quality within a community and not merely another unit in a system. But for that, we have no formula.

If we understand academic work as a product, we must accept that we are all in some kind of intellectual food business: We produce, consume, and exchange food for thought. That food is diverse, and it is precisely in that diversity that its value lies—because it emerges from an enormous expenditure of mental energy. And expenditure implies hunger. The entire food chain is one in which no organ is superfluous.

I am sure you have experienced the state of thinking so intensely about a problem that your brain felt like it was on fire: You have worked yourself into a state of slightly elevated body temperature, from which your body desperately wanted to escape, craving movement, distance from the content that had consumed your mind, while your brain continued racing at a pace resembling a heart rate mid-workout. And then, at some point, you stepped away. That is intellectual satiety. You needed something else; some other content, some other food for thought.

It is precisely in that stepping back, in the moment of quiet, that the thought appeared: the solution, the aha moment, the new hunger that set you in motion again. Everything fell into place at once. Those enormous quantities of thought you then sorted into clusters, paragraphs, chapters and subchapters, into serious and less serious papers, into long and demanding books that will be comprehensible to some, incomprehensible to others, and life-changing for a third group. And you do it again. And again. And once more. From that alternation of effort and rest, texts emerge—articles, books, experiments—the various forms of what we call academic work, and what we try to measure.

The food analogy, for all its problems, does capture one important dimension: The value of content is not exhausted by its quantification. There is no formula that can measure the density of a single idea, its reach, or its capacity to change someone’s way of thinking. Just as there is no device that can assess the weight of a thought—though, given the pace of technological development, that too may soon become the project of some interdisciplinary center.

If we view academic knowledge through the nutritional analogy, we can imagine it as an elaborate spread, a buffet at which various specialties are served: molecular gastronomy and humble comfort food, blue-sky experiments and nuts-and-bolts empirical work, chia pudding with strawberry pieces, caviar, and a few other things that aren’t coming to me right now. We are not all at the level of haute cuisine, nor perhaps do we want to be. But we are all at the same table. There aren’t twelve of us—there are far more. And women are at the table too.

If we want to be recognized, perhaps we should be gentler with one another. Especially when, in nutritional terms, we are quite literally assessing someone’s work, or our own, as a banana.

Damn these metaphors and their simultaneous literal and figurative lives. When the literal reading suits us, we use it; when it doesn’t, we swap in the figurative. The whole point, really, is to avoid arbitrariness and enable some form of standardization. But the problem runs deeper: even as we measure and evaluate academic work through various criteria, what we are truly after is something that exceeds them. We seek something that eludes measurement, while depending on it entirely.