What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite. An inordinate amount of activity is devoted to building new representations and tools to support them, compared to the effort given to evaluating those tools, and that claims are made for these notations and environments which are subtantiated far less vigorously. You can not evade quantity. You may fly to poetry and music and quantity and number will face you in your rythmns and your octaves. Alfred North Whitehead Change is inevitable, growth is optional.
Science is what happens when preconception meets verification.
On the dangers of excessive empiricism Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death. The case is one of many where statistical ability, divorced from a scientific intimacy with the fundamental observations, lead nowhere. Permit me to leave your planet, for I do not share your faith in the glory of great numbers when there is nothing more to them that what may be counted. The chances of getting eaten up by a lion on Main Street aren't one in a million, but once would be enough. Lockwood's Long Shot Give me a fruitful error any time, full of seeds, bursting with its own corrections.