Jung Hanna

25. Numbers & Society

Democracy and capitalism have in common: they both rely on numbers—they love high numbers. mainly, they choose a lot of numbers from fewer numbers.

In a sense, it’s an almost instinctive decision—we can imagine cavemen needing to decide whether to gather four apples or six just to survive. it is just simple systems require us to decide comparative advantage through numerical comparison.

The social policies or economic measures decision by numbers are essentially meaningless, because they don’t account for everything else. Numbers can only tell us a very small part of the whole thing— it is just like we talk about somebody with how much he weighs, how tall he is, how much of him is made with protein or carbohydrate and water. Or his wage, properties, grade, Social Credit Rates. Those are a lot of true information and we can guess many things through those, it is easier information we can get to know surface of him without really knowing him. but it actually doesn't really matter to understanding his essence as a person.

In my view, if people want to stepping beyond pure instinct to be human, then the people's choice not to base on the decisions only on comparative advantage—but instead to choose what we simply desire, what we’re drawn to, what we love—is what really makes us human. 

*David C. Knill & Alexandre Pouget, The Bayesian brain: the role of uncertainty in neural coding and computation,Trends in Neurosciences, 2004
*Rajesh P. N. Rao & Dana H. Ballard, Predictive coding in the visual cortex, Nature Neuroscience, Volume 2, 1999

*Elle van Heusden, Anthony M. Harris, Marta I. Garrido, Hinze Hogendoorn,
Predictive coding of visual motion in both monocular and binocular human visual processing, Journal of Vision, 2019