What's in a Number?
Date
2015-07-01
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Citation: Hohn, K. L. (2015). What's in a Number? Catalysts, 5(3), 1304-1305. doi:10.3390/catal5031304
People like to distill complicated phenomenon into easily digestible numbers. Whether it’s a top ten list of the best movies of all time, the shooting percentage of our basketball team’s star, or a student’s score on an exam, we like to quantify phenomenon that is unquantifiable. We like the comfort of a number which we can use as the basis for our decisions. This is an imperfect process, as underlying human behavior can, ultimately, not be boiled down to a single number. But we try anyway.
People like to distill complicated phenomenon into easily digestible numbers. Whether it’s a top ten list of the best movies of all time, the shooting percentage of our basketball team’s star, or a student’s score on an exam, we like to quantify phenomenon that is unquantifiable. We like the comfort of a number which we can use as the basis for our decisions. This is an imperfect process, as underlying human behavior can, ultimately, not be boiled down to a single number. But we try anyway.
Keywords
Chemistry
