“Quantification, like surgery, is an excellent thing in the right place, but a very bad topic for obsession. Unless you know just what you are counting--unless you are sure that the things counted are standard units--and unless you understand what is proved by results of your counting, quantifying provide you only with the outward show of science, a mirage, never the oasis.”

— Mary Midgley

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 87-88.
Context: The future will not "be with" anybody in the sense of falling to them as a conquest. The need for many different methods is not going to go away, dissolved in a quasi-physical heaven where all serious work is quantitative... Quantification, like surgery, is an excellent thing in the right place, but a very bad topic for obsession. Unless you know just what you are counting--unless you are sure that the things counted are standard units--and unless you understand what is proved by results of your counting, quantifying provide you only with the outward show of science, a mirage, never the oasis.

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Mary Midgley42

British philosopher and ethicist 1919–2018

Bill Watterson (1958) American comic artist

“Many of the things you can count, don't count. Many of the things you can't count, really count.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

“Whenever you look back and say, "If," you know you're in trouble. There's no such thing as "if." The only thing that counts is what really happened.”

D.J. MacHale book The Merchant of Death

Variant: Whenever you look back and say "if" you know you're in trouble. There is no such thing as "if". The only thing that matters is what really happened.
Source: The Merchant of Death