Words Worth Noting - October 26, 2022

“One of the most popular supposed short cuts is imagining that we can make our decisions easier by bypassing value judgments and assigning numbers to everything. Call this the numerical fallacy, or the fallacy of false precision. I’m not saying that it’s never useful to count things.... if a lot of people are out of work, I want some idea of how many, and if prices are going up, I want some idea of how much. The problem is that we rely on numbers too much, too carelessly, for too many things, and we trust them far more than we should. Excessive trust in numbers is part of the technocratic ideology which supposes that government by experts is not political.... There just isn’t a way of generating measurements that isn’t based on value judgments. The only question is which value judgments it depends on, and how transparently or obscurely it depends on them.... Fortunately, there is an instrument for making judgments: The human mind. And there is a way to calibrate it: Experience, deliberation, debate, and the cultivation of practical wisdom. Sorry, but there aren’t any short cuts.”

J. Budziszewski “Underground Thomist” Dec. 27, 2021 [https://www.undergroundthomist.org/the-technocratic-fallacy-of-false-precision].