You’ve heard it before. Someone will say something like the measure of a man’s worth is not his net, or actual, worth but is instead his capacity for love. Or that it is the thought that counts when clearly thoughts do not have the requisite mathematical skills to do any counting. If asked why, the speaker will probably say that some things just cant be measured without missing something essential and that to assign a number to something like love would negate it.
However this misses the point. The reason for measuring things is not to answer the question truly, so that it rings in harmony with the spheres, but to answer the question definitively so we can all get on with our lives. To put it another way, we measure not for accuracy, but for precision. If you are confused as to the difference between the two, think back to seventh grade science and remember the words of your teacher, whose lack of affect and general incompetence came--not from a lack of conscientiousness as you originally supposed--but from an experiment with 8 moles of C13H16CINO-HCL that never made the lesson plan. So while you scratched your head and stared as he botched a darts-and-target simile, you should have been learning from his example. He may have only been wrong some of the time, but he was always an asshole.
Qualitative Quantification: Infinite thumbs
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