Like “an electron can be in multiple places at once” is also a lie, except that “an electron may have multiple solutions to its waveform equation” is a better formulation of the truth.
It is not so much numbers - or at least not them only that lie - so much as that the human brain is desperate to make use of literally anything and everything it can to achieve its objectives. And numbers happen to be powerful so it loves to grab ahold of those, but it would just as readily grab ahold of a bowl of petunias as we all plummet collectively down through the gravity well of time, decrying “not again”.
We would all do well to be more skeptical of things than we are now. And not only about numbers.
Required reading for a course I took https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trust_in_Numbers
Basically, it’s difficult to make numbers tell the truth, but somehow people really trust things that are quantifiable, and it’s totally unwarranted.
I mean, except, you know, for it being the very bedrock foundation for all of STEM.
Totally agree!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences
But also … Lies, damned lies, and statistics
Absolutely, or rather I should say relatively.
Like “an electron can be in multiple places at once” is also a lie, except that “an electron may have multiple solutions to its waveform equation” is a better formulation of the truth.
It is not so much numbers - or at least not them only that lie - so much as that the human brain is desperate to make use of literally anything and everything it can to achieve its objectives. And numbers happen to be powerful so it loves to grab ahold of those, but it would just as readily grab ahold of a bowl of petunias as we all plummet collectively down through the gravity well of time, decrying “not again”.
We would all do well to be more skeptical of things than we are now. And not only about numbers.
Nice link!