Quantification Quotes

We should not forget that before being inscribed in Western consciousness as the principle of quantification, harmony, and classical non-existence, Greek measurement was an immense social and polymorphous practice of assessment, quantification, establishing equivalences, and the search for appropriate proportions and distributions.

We can see how introducing measure is linked to a whole problem of peasant indebtedness, the transfer of agricultural properties, the settlement of debts, equivalence between foodstuff or manufactured objects, urbanization, and the establishment of a State form.

The institution of money appears at the heart of this practice of measurement. ~ Michel Foucault

Quantification, experimentation, rigor, repetition, prediction - all of these are part of the experimental sciences. There's an iconography also namely man, and I do mean males in white coats who spin dials and wait for numbers to appear. ~ Richard Lewontin

I want my words and actions to be the quantification of my love. To make tangible the passions in my heart for the world and the people in it. ~ Anis Mojgani

Strategic management is not a box of tricks or a bundle of techniques. It is analytical thinking and commitment of resources to action. But quantification alone is not planning. Some of the most important issues in strategic management cannot be quantified at all. ~ Peter Drucker

There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians. ~ Richard Lewontin

The visible universe is subject to quantification, and is so by necessity. ... Between you and me only reason will be the judge ... since you proceed according to the rational method, so shall I. ... I will also give reason and take it. ... This generation has an innate vice. It can't accept anything that has been discovered by a contemporary! ~ Adelard Of Bath

In theory, the risk of business failure can be reduced to a number, the probability of failure multiplied by the cost of failure. Sure, this turns out to be a subjective analysis, but in the process your own attitudes toward financial risk and reward are revealed.

By contrast, personal risk usually defies quantification. It's a matter of values and priorities, an expression of who you are. "Playing it safe" may simply mean you do not weigh heavily the compromises inherent in the status quo. The financial rewards of the moment may fully compensate you for the loss of time and fulfillment. Or maybe you just don't think about it. On the other hand, if time and satisfaction are precious, truly priceless, you will find the cost of business failure, so long as it does not put in peril the well-being of you or your family, pales in comparison with the personal risks of no trying to live the life you want today.

Considering personal risk forces us to define personal success. We may well discover that the business failure we avoid and the business success we strive for do not lead us to personal success at all. Most of us have inherited notions of "success" from someone else or have arrived at these notions by facing a seemingly endless line of hurdles extending from grade school through college and into our careers. We constantly judge ourselves against criteria that others have set and rank ourselves against others in their game. Personal goals, on the other ha ~ Randy Komisar

God does not wait for us to go to him, but it is he who moves toward us, without calculation, without quantification. ~ Pope Francis

The idealized market was supposed to deliver 'friction free' exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers' performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that 'More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority's services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services'. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as 'market Stalinism'. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement.
[…]
It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the 'true spirit' of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only ~ Mark Fisher

The variables of quantification, 'something,' 'nothing,' 'everything,' range over our whole ontology, whatever it may be; and we are convicted of a particular ontological presupposition if, and only if, the alleged presuppositum has to be reckoned among the entities over which our variables range in order to render one of our affirmations true. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

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

English general and singular terms, identity, quantification, and the whole bag of ontological tricks may be correlated with elements of the native language in any of various mutually incompatible ways, each compatible with all possible linguistic data, and none preferable to another save as favored by a rationalization of the native language that is simple and natural to us. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

Military analysis is not an exact science. To return to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and paraphrase the great Chinese political philosopher, it is at least as close to art. But many logical methods offer insight into military problems-even if solutions to those problems ultimately require the use of judgement and of broader political and strategic considerations as well. Military affairs may not be as amenable to quantification and formal methodological treatment as economics, for example. However, even if our main goal in analysis is generally to illuminate choices, bound problems, and rule out bad options - rather than arrive unambiguously at clear policy choices-the discipline of military analysis has a great deal to offer. Moreover, simple back-of-the envelope methodologies often provide substantial insight without requiring the churning of giant computer models or access to the classified data of official Pentagon studies, allowing generalities and outsiders to play important roles in defense analytical debates.

We have seen all too often (in the broad course of history as well as in modern times) what happens when we make key defense policy decisions based solely on instinct, ideology, and impression. To avoid cavalier, careless, and agenda-driven decision-making, we therefore need to study the science of war as well-even as we also remember the cautions of Clausewitz and avoid hubris in our predictions about how any war or other major military endeavor will ultima ~ Michael O'Hanlon

Consciousness has no units. We can say it is like a fluid or gas, but without quantification, by Starman. ~ Jozef Simkovic