Quantification Quotes

“Measuring our outer and inner world can be problem-solving, but emotions may resist quantification, needing flexibility, intuition, and contextual interpretation. (“ Measuring space »)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“We are beginning to play with ideas of ecology, and although we immediately trivialize these into commerce or politics, there is at least an impulse still in the human breast to unify and thereby sanctify the total natural world, of which we are. ... There have been, and still are, in the world many different and even contrasting epistemologies which have been alike in stressing an ultimate unity, and, although this is less sure, which have also stressed the notion that ultimate unity is aesthetic. The uniformity of these views gives hope that perhaps the great authority of quantitative science may be insufficient to deny an ultimate unifying beauty.

I hold to the presupposition that our loss of the sense of aesthetic unity was, quite simply, an epistemological mistake.”
― Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

“Learning can never be quantified with a flawed educational unit.”
― Louise Philippe Dulay

“Consciousness has no units. We can say it is like a fluid or gas, but without quantification, by Starman.”
― Jozef Simkovic, How to Kiss the Universe: An Inspirational Spiritual and Metaphysical Narrative about Human Origin, Essence and Destiny

“Hypothesis + Theory = Faith
Science without empiricism is nothing but religion by another name.”
― A.E. Samaan

“As William Bouwsma pointed out, the late medieval and early Renaissance crises of representation did not stall out at their skepticism of the old systems but rather progressed to an even more urgent defense of objective boundaries and quantifiable truths.27 In “The Secularization of Language in the Seventeenth Century,” Margreta de Grazia has shown how this pursuit of certainty led to a skepticism about language itself that dissociated words from God and deverbalized God’s message, prompting thinkers from Thomas Sprat of the Royal Society to Hobbes, Robert Hooke, Galileo, and Newton to seek cer- tainty in mathematical knowledge; quantifiable, identifiable substances; and trial, experiment, and experience.28 As Puritan propagandist Vavasor Powell put it in the middle of the seventeenth century, “Experience is like
42 Rituals of Spontaneity
steel to an edged tool, or like salt to fresh meat, it seasons brain- knowledge, and settles a shaking unsetled soule.” Paralleling more sec- ular quests for certainty, the Puritan quest for grounding religious knowledge in a literalist reading of Scripture focused ever more intensely on manifest, genuine experience confirming salvation and the personal application of scriptural truth. The spontaneous “pouring out of the heart” in prayer was just such an evidentiary experience.”
― Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth

“Not everything fits into a cost-benefit analysis. Just because something is difficult to measure or quantify does not mean it is not valuable!”
― Berend van der Kolk, The Quantified Society

“With all this measuring and comparing of performance, we have entered a never-ending competition.”
― Berend van der Kolk, The Quantified Society

“With more and more technology in our lives and the fact that this technology primarily speaks a quantitative language, the need for reflection on measurement and quantification increases.”
― Berend van der Kolk, The Quantified Society

“In The Quantified Society, I explore why we measure so much and what this does to us, individually and as a society. I discuss unwanted side effects, such as a blind belief in the objectivity of numbers, but also measurement’s ability to help us focus our attention on something important.”
― Berend van der Kolk, The Quantified Society