After spending four years in an engineering curriculum and the last several years designing structures I would like to think I have an above average appreciation for numbers. Every day I throw around an exorbitant amount of figures, checking this versus that and verifying that I have numbers to back up my solutions.

That being said there is one caveat: the numbers actually have to represent something coherent. In other words there has to be a basis for the numbers and some way of verifying their accuracy. Unless numbers are precise, or their level of imprecision can be known, they are worse than useless – they actually hinder logical thinking. That is why I am so unconvinced when I see statistics that somehow quantify subjects that are seemingly unknowable. Some of the subjects I am very doubtful about include the age of the earth, the long term influence of certain foods/activities on the body, and the amount of any given substance in the universe.

For example, below is a clip from an article from the NY Times entitled “Slow Down, Brave Multitasker, and Don’t Read This in Traffic”.

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.

That total is an update of research published 18 months ago, based on surveys and interviews with professionals and office workers, which concluded that 28 percent of their time was spent on what they deemed interruptions and recovery time before they returned to their main tasks.

Mr. Spira concedes that the $650 billion figure is a rough estimate — an attempt to attach a number to a big problem. Work interruptions will never — and should not — be eliminated, he said, since they are often how work is done and ideas are shared. After all, one person’s interruption is another’s collaboration.

I found this article by reading an excerpt from it on 43folders.com. The above section was quoted and guess what part made the cut….the first paragraph only. Why is that? Because it includes the juicy number. Besides that fact that the number’s accuracy is in doubt I don’t believe there is even a number to be known. It cannot be quantified. It is like saying “Every year there are 784 trillion minutes spent in wasted conversation.” Apart from the problem that the number cannot be quantified, how can anyone determine what is wasted conversation in order to quantify it? By the way, I absolutely agree with the first sentence of the first paragraph quoted above.

Another quick example: I am supposed to believe the earth’s temperature is going to rise by x degrees in the next fifty years when a meteorologist cannot consistently predict, at 7:30 am, what the high temperature will be, within a range of 7 degrees, that very same day. I realize that climatology and meteorology are two different fields, but many predictions do not have a solid, verifiable basis for their numbers. A meteorologist will predict the high temperature based on past data of typical trends, but he will have to admit there is no absolute way to know what will happen on any given day let alone years away. On a side note, the idea that a 7 degree range can somehow be called a “Three Degree Guarantee” is an absolute farce.

I’ll tell you what is truly unquantifiable – the audacity of many researchers, scientists, archaeologists, climatologists, meteorologists, members of the news media, etc…