Number Go Up

"Number go up" is not exclusive to Homo Economicus; one might also find it in the hopefully antiquated notion "tie the programmer's bonus to the number of lines of code written" where more lines is better. Various computer games and sportsballs tend towards number go up (* -1 golf). Buddhism has the notion that spreading the good word accrues merit, so therefore one might find folks aiming to write the longest sūtra or have the most scrolls in their monastery. Whether or not such are read or even readable may be besides the point.

Dharma Devices, Non-Hermeneutical Libraries, and Robot-Monks. Fabio Rambelli. 2018.

Number go up is not necessarily bad, though can tend towards abuse or mania. Abuse is where certain folks find creative ways to make the number more favorable: cheating, Hedonic Quality Adjustments, securities fraud, etc. There may or may not be a mania associated with abuse; someone could be gaming the system but not really care too much about it. Mania is when the metric becomes a bit too exalted: a corporate stock price, a government that obsesses over the GDP, or a monastery aiming for sūtra quantity maximization. There are degrees of mania here; individuals or organizations might have numbergoupitis pretty bad, while others may only suffer from milder forms such as a brief obsession with some game or Gemini posting character counts per unit time.