I want to get clearer on the relationship between quality and quantity. My view is this: every quantification is an indicator of a quality, and it is solely from this that the quantification derives its significance. Further, our concern for the quantitative is rooted in and derived from qualitative concerns.

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The quantitative seems more real than the qualitative because on principle it is follows explicit rules of thought. It is easy both to see for oneself and to demonstrate to others correctness or incorrectness of such thinking, and therefore it is easy to establish synesis (shared understanding), around the correctness of the calculations. (The same is true for logic.) Agreement on qualities (and measuring them) on the other hand is much harder to establish.

As a means to establish agreement, the quantifiable and the logical are indispensible tools, and absolutely should not be seen as opposed to the quantitative.

However, these tools are a means to qualitative ends.

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Failure to examine the linkage between the quantitative to the qualitative is where we go wrong (in business, in education, in politics, etc.).

The urgency of finding agreement and stabilizing reality in some kind of expedient synesis causes us to gloss the hard questions in order to have easy answers.

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In the shell game of modernity, experts shuffle quantities before us until we forget what qualities are hidden beneath. Eventually, we forget  about the qualities contained in the quantities. Eventually, dazed by the blur of Whats and Hows and Whos we forget Why.