BRACKEN

摘要

It was the environmental academic Jerome Ravetz who said: "We believe in numbers, just because they are numbers." Other science historians, including Theodore Porter, have long held the same view. This statement could not be more relevant as the global economy recovers from the biggest financial crisis since 1929. Many in management privately agree that we use numerical decision models with near religiousness, to convince that our decisions are scientifically robust, as few will doubt a well-founded, widely accepted mathematical model: we call on the legitimacy of arithmetic to persuade rather than prove.