"In rating ease of description as very important, we are essentially asserting a belief in quantitative knowledge - a belief that most of the key questions in our world sooner or later demand answers to 'by how much?' rather than merely to 'in which direction?'"
About this Quote
Treating "ease of description" as a top-tier value is less an innocent preference than an ideological vote. Tuley is pointing at a quiet but aggressive assumption built into modern policy, business, and even personal decision-making: that the world becomes most real when it becomes countable. If something can be described cleanly, it can be compared; if it can be compared, it can be ranked; if it can be ranked, it can be acted on with the confidence of a spreadsheet. The subtext is that measurement doesn’t just report reality - it edits it.
The quote’s sharpest move is its distinction between "in which direction?" and "by how much?" Direction implies judgment, interpretation, and mess: you can agree we’re trending worse without agreeing on the scale, the cause, or the fix. "By how much?" sounds more adult, more responsible, more scientific. It also invites a particular kind of power: once debate is framed as magnitude, the winners are the people who control the metrics, the baselines, and the categories. Quantification becomes a gatekeeping language that turns moral or political arguments into technical disputes.
Contextually, this reads like a critique from the metrics-and-management era: standardized testing, KPI culture, evidence-based everything. Tuley isn’t anti-knowledge; he’s warning that the demand for numerical clarity can smuggle in a belief that what can’t be quantified is secondary, suspicious, or simply not worth funding. The line works because it exposes a bias that often masquerades as neutrality.
The quote’s sharpest move is its distinction between "in which direction?" and "by how much?" Direction implies judgment, interpretation, and mess: you can agree we’re trending worse without agreeing on the scale, the cause, or the fix. "By how much?" sounds more adult, more responsible, more scientific. It also invites a particular kind of power: once debate is framed as magnitude, the winners are the people who control the metrics, the baselines, and the categories. Quantification becomes a gatekeeping language that turns moral or political arguments into technical disputes.
Contextually, this reads like a critique from the metrics-and-management era: standardized testing, KPI culture, evidence-based everything. Tuley isn’t anti-knowledge; he’s warning that the demand for numerical clarity can smuggle in a belief that what can’t be quantified is secondary, suspicious, or simply not worth funding. The line works because it exposes a bias that often masquerades as neutrality.
Quote Details
| Topic | Knowledge |
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