Number worship

David Warren has at the worship of numbers. It is all too easy to believe that if we have a number for a thing we must know it in a more fundamental way. Even if we assume the number is well-measured (usually it isn't), then you have to ask what it means. Just having an equation doesn't make your social theory right; as Pauli said, it may be "not even wrong."

And when a government or quango collects numbers about people, they get delusions of grandeur.

How we live our lives is God’s business, & none of the government’s until we are reasonably suspected of a crime. Their job is to provide for our defence against rapine & massacre by foreign powers & domestic criminals, in return for modest taxes. It is an important job, from which they should not be distracted by their own alien & criminal propensities.