 The notion that only the measurable is real, this is a kind of reductionism that says that all of the difference, all of the uniqueness of every relationship in the world, in the universe can be characterized by numbers. It's a deeper kind of reductionism than just saying, you know, everything's built of these building blocks and that are built of smaller building blocks and down, down, down to the atom and the electron, etc., etc. A conceptual reductionism that says that all of the difference in the world is just number. And that, and if you want to be scientific about something, you have to be quantitative. I know graduate students who get into trouble with their professors because they haven't quantified their hypothesis or subjected it to a quantifiable approach. So the problem with subjecting the problem with this idea that only the measurable is real and the validation or the cult of quantity is that when we approach the world that way and begin to make decisions based on the numbers, and where do we get that habit anyway? It's from the money world where you are supposed to make economic decisions based on essentially solving a maximum problem to maximize, I mean, that's, it's turned into a theory of human nature that human beings seek to maximize their rational self-interest and then it's extended into biology too, that all beings seek to maximize reproductive self-interest and are performing implicit calculations every time they make a choice or enact their genetically programmed behavior, etc., etc. So anyway, what happens when we, and this sounds good, like science-based policy, metrics-based policy, what happens is that everything that we, it ignores everything that we choose not to measure, cannot measure, or that is unmeasurable. Usually what we choose not to measure are the very things that would disrupt the status quo and the interests of the institutions that are already in power. A prime example would be GDP as a measure for human well-being, as a measure for progress. So what is it actually a measure of? It's a measure of the total amount of goods and services exchanged for money. And what does it leave out? It leaves out tradition, relationship, sacredness, beauty. It leaves out actually all of the things that make us rich, community. In fact, it's the opposite of community. GDP grows when you convert relationships into services and the things that people once did for each other without using money, like taking care of children, cooking, growing food, building houses, providing entertainment, singing songs, etc., etc., get converted into paid services. Okay, so that's what gets left out. And when we see reality through the lens of the numbers that we accept, then everything else atrophies. Same things happening in climate change. When we focus, so yeah, let's focus on, it's such a familiar comfortable habit to focus on the numbers that we look for the easiest way to do that, adopting a convenient problem in the place of an inconvenient problem that we don't know how to solve. So the convenient problem is, and the comfortable problem is greenhouse gas emissions, which we can measure on a global scale, and which have a linear cause, the levels of greenhouse gases caused by emissions that we can attack. Here's the enemy, very comfortable. What gets left out? And this is why I think that climate change, the climate change narrative is a disaster for environmentalism because it sucks the air out of the room for any environmental issue that seems to have no bearing on climate change. For example, the whales, like the whales, save the whales. Remember the days of save the whales when that was like an important environmental issue, and now you never hear about saving the whales? Because what do the whales matter when, I mean it's nice we should save the whales, you know, but what does it matter when we're facing near term extinction because of high greenhouse gases? Well, maybe what we are missing is actually the salvation, just to give an example. We decimate the whales, then the orcas are deprived of their major food source. So they begin to eat the seals and the sea otters, and they decimate the seals and the sea otters, which then no longer predate the sea urchins, so the population of sea urchins explodes. And then the sea urchins decimate the kelp forests, and the kelp forests actually sequester more carbon than land based forests. Oh darn it, we should have included that chain of causality in our measurements. The whales are important after all. So from the mindset of the cult of quantity, the solution to the failure of measurement is to measure even more. And the utopia of the metrics based approach to reality would be to encompass everything in one big data set so that we could rationally administer the world through the precise application of force.