There’s an ongoing quest to reduce everything to mathematics. It’s part of the reason we’re in a dark age. Seems like a good time to ask the question: is everything quantifiable? Were the Pythagoreans correct in saying that “All is number”? Consider three statements:
I agree with the basic sentiment of the post, but not the framing. The problem is not that these things are literally unquantifiable, but that they are quantifiable in too many ways and dimensions to allow us to summarize them in a single canonical number, or even a vector of numbers, in a way that captures our intuition adequately. Judgement requires us to take all these dimensions into account when we act, but it is difficult, probably impossible, to formalize that process in a satisfactory way, especially considering that we are always learning from the feedback from our actions.
I agree with the basic sentiment of the post, but not the framing. The problem is not that these things are literally unquantifiable, but that they are quantifiable in too many ways and dimensions to allow us to summarize them in a single canonical number, or even a vector of numbers, in a way that captures our intuition adequately. Judgement requires us to take all these dimensions into account when we act, but it is difficult, probably impossible, to formalize that process in a satisfactory way, especially considering that we are always learning from the feedback from our actions.
Not sure, though, well ever figure it out. Unless of course we can solve EVERYTHING which would then put us in the realm of the eternal?