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layout: post
title: Numericalism, our obsession with numbers
date: 2026-01-10
last_modified: 2026-01-13
---

Underneath the concept of money lies **Numericalism**, the idea that things
from real life can be quantified. The Code of Hammurabi might be the oldest
famous artifact we know of reflecting this way of thinking. And combined with
the idea that we can standardize on fair and credible value measurements, we
get the invention of Money, an objective way to measure the value of things.

Numericalism is an essential part of almost any epistemology. "If you can't
measure it, you can't improve it." But there is a loss of information when we
count things. Mapping things to numbers will never be **bijective**: my house
will never be "one house", my wife will never be just "a wife", proteins can
come from many sources and the way they are stored have different properties.
Taoists know this; that's why they distrust "[[the ten thousand things]]".

Numericalism is here to stay. [[Wigners The Unreasonable Effectiveness of
Mathematics|Wigner's famous essay]] explores this. Numbers give us superpowers.
They're incredibly efficient. Numbers are more universal than English or any other human language. Even in rural agricultural
self-subsistence, you need to know how many days are in the year to plan how
much surface to plant. There's no escape; we forgot how to live without numbers
long ago.

Computers are much better at numbers than we are. The Transformer architecture,
deep learning's greatest success, is essentially a matrix of numbers crunched in a
particular way. It's starting to understand the world with a generality humans
can't match. When the computer understands patterns better than any human, what
leverage do we humans have left? Perhaps the same we've always had: the
irreducibility of what we actually value. The parts that resist the
**bijection**.