The Quantitative Mind

Monday Map

Godan dag, it feels great to sit at my keyboard and write today’s Monday map. Today is one of those days when I deal with a nagging feeling that I am wasting my precious time and should be doing something harder and tangible. But here is my reply to that voice “get thee behind me Satan. This is good work.”

 I believe in little steps, nonlinearities, and the compound effect of life. I believe in the compounding power of little things chained together by consistency. If you feel this way sometimes, I endear you not to give up, no matter how useless the good work you are doing feels. If it is good work, it is good work. 

Let’s get into the deal for today.

QUANTITATIVE WORLDVIEW

Worldviews are ways by which we see the world. It is the color of our mind lens that summarises our experiences, empirical occurrences, and the way we navigate the chaos of life.

Your worldview is important because it lies deep beneath your habits, motivations, and daily actions. A bad worldview will produce a bad man. A good worldview will produce a good man. The Bible succinctly says that "as a man thinks in his heart, so he is" - Proverbs 23:7

A quantitative worldview is one that summarises the world in quantities. The quantitative worldview uses mathematical metrics to shape their view of life including the things that do not originally fit with numbers.

Anyone with a quantitative mindset will see the world mostly in figures, in terms of money, IQ, exam and test scores, and things can be measured accurately in figures. The problem with this is that there reaches a point where numbers become the mismeasure of man.

One of such problems with the mismeasure of man comes with the qualitative elements of life like happiness. For example, a man with a quantitative worldview will find it hard to believe that poor people are truly happy. This is because they have tied qualitative elements like happiness to trackable figures like money in order to spot a progression. This is the kind of thinking that leads a man to think that more money means more happiness. If you have thought deeply about life, this is false.

A quantitative view of the world relies heavily on numbers to track progression. They believe things are fine because the numbers say so. Well, numbers don't describe all there is to man. Some things are found deeply and only within the reach of speculation and introspection. Numbers don't reach there.

It is hard for a quantitative mind to swallow this statement "our children lost one year of their lives because of the measures taken during the pandemic." This is because a quantitative mind sees a good life as the one that is long-lived. But a qualitative mind knows that a life without risk, danger, thrill, randomness, chance, growth is nothing. A qualitative mind knows that indeed kids lost a quality part of life in a year because of some of the measures taken during the pandemic.

There is more to life than numbers. And I would not like to live in a world where all that matters is what the number says. Maths is great. It is not supreme. Data is good. But sometimes I prefer to go with my eyes (thank you Ten Haag)

Maths is good. It interprets the world. But man should not be a casualty of numbers. There is more to life than figures. And here, I end my lamentation.

Ciao.

Hold this picture tho