Quality and Quantity

If you can measure it... it is quantity.

Quality, by definition, escapes measurement.

This doesn't mean that measurements are a bad thing. They are useful. Only they are often praised for mystical reasons, meant to close any discussion.

Measurement introduces a distortion: one focuses on measurable facts not because they are important, but because they are measurable, and therefore convenient. Modern science, this of Galileo and Newton, was tied to the numeric part of mathematics. This is not true of contemporary, post-modern, science anymore.

-- MarcGirod - 15 May 2008