Modern Numerology

How can you think without numbers?

This might seem like an odd question to some of you, but in business school it was a rhetorical question. The people who asked it didn't offer, and never expected to hear, an answer. To them, the notion of thinking without mathematics was absurd. It simply wasn't possible. Everything could be expressed as a cost, an equation, or a procedure. Numbers were objective. And math, they told me, was science. Anything else was superstition.

Could this be true?

There's no doubt that math is useful. Every culture on Earth has had some form of mathematics, even if it was just arithmetic, because some of the things in our world can be counted, weighed, and measured. But, not surprisingly, the more elaborate a culture's mathematics become, the more likely it becomes that the people in it will engage in a practice called numerology: assigning numerical values to qualities, instead of only quantities, and then performing mathematical procedures with those numbers. The Chinese, ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, ancient Greeks, and Medieval Kabbalists did this. And, yes, we do it too, perhaps more extensively, and more convincingly, than anyone else.

You might be surprised to learn that when our corporations and governments say that they have "studied" something, they aren't using the word "study" the way you might think. What they mean is that they have taken polls about, assigned metrics to, and performed statistical analysis on something or other. What's wrong with this? If what they're looking into comes in quantities, then nothing's wrong, but often they're using mathematical procedures for qualities also. And while they like to say that doing this is very scientific, scientists don't seem to think so at all.

In fact, when I was at Texas Tech, science students weren't allowed to take math classes from the math department, we had to attend math classes given by the science department. When I asked why, the reply startled me. Apparently, they believed that mathematicians have a tendency to think like Pythagoras — a very clever Greek mathematician, and the father of Western numerology — who insisted that "all things are numbers." Scientists, however, tend to think that, as Einstein said, "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."

I didn't think the scientists' assessment of mathematicians was very fair, however, because I had previously taken a statistics course in the math department. The course had been taught by someone who was so annoyed by the way organizations use mathematics that our final project for the semester was to find a statistical study, along with the methods used for it, and debunk it. He said he wasn't the least bit concerned that one of us would end up with a valid study, because, in the two decades he had spent in the industry, he had never taken part in, and had rarely seen, a valid one. The class consisted of almost two dozen students, and, sure enough, not one of us found a study that withstood even an undergraduate's scrutiny. The problem, this teacher told us, wasn't with mathematicians; the problem was that none of the companies he had worked for had ever been asked to perform a valid study.

The businesses who were commissioning those studies were trying to avoid thinking by counting instead, but the things they wanted to know about, like product quality, consumer needs, customer satisfaction, employee performance, or public opinion, can't be quantified. Companies are more than happy to assign numbers to those sort of things and do the math, but, because these things can't be clearly measured, weighed, or counted, the numbers won't mean much.

Think about it. If I were to ask you how many you felt about something, you'd probably think that I had gotten tongue-tied. But poll-takers ask this all the time. They'll ask you to rate something on a scale of one to ten, and most of us won't blink an eye. They'll also ask series of questions that we're supposed to answer with phrases like "strongly agree," "agree," "no opinion," and so on, and then assign digits to those responses and start crunching the numbers. We take part in this sort of thing so often that it's sometimes difficult for us to see how silly it is.

So, let's look at an example of something that we don't, yet, do very often. I've taken three papers on similar topics that I wrote for business school and fed them into a Markov-chain generator. What this generator does is perform a statistical analysis of my writing and then create new text based on that analysis. This text is statistically identical to the text in my papers:

They may work creatively with each other unless the techies have taken care of the different aspects. Similar problems, not only concerning the medium the information is held in obsolete or proprietary file formats, a situation which often leads to a better understanding of the distribution of personal information.

We'll also look at the nature of the week. In fact, the problem appears to be constantly transferred to new mediums and how those assumptions may effect your life. But how many cheeseburgers were purchased with your credit card?

It looks mildly convincing. I actually do say things that sound similar to that, but I like to think that I usually make a little more sense. Mathematics, it appears, can't be successfully used to analyze, understand, or recreate my papers. Oddly, however, some people call text like the above "Markov insights." And, not long ago, a few students did the same sort of thing with some technology journals and then submitted the results to an engineering convention. The organizers accepted the paper and asked the students to present it to the convention later that year. However, they changed their minds after the students revealed the origin of the paper to the public and announced that their laptop computers would also handle the presentation.

But, before we laugh too long, and too loudly, at those engineers, let's remember that we're fooled by the same sort of thing every time an organization claims to have "measured" public opinion on some topic or a corporation gloats about how much consumers "value" its products and services. They've done little more than what the Markov generator does. They've invented "metrics," by associating numbers with qualities that mean something to us, that spew out mathematically-generated results which have little meaning, but look mildly convincing.

So, if math can only be used for quantities, and most of the things that matter to us are qualities, then how can we start thinking about things without numbers? We could try imagination & insight, deduction & induction, analogy & intuition, ethics & empathy, rhetoric & dialog, and reason & critical thought. It's not as easy as crunching numbers, but at least it's possible for them to produce sensible, and human, results. The same can't be said for numerology.