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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 13/05/2026

The Technocrats - a protofascist Italian movement that once captured the imagination of Musk's great-grandfather, and now are frequently quoted and alluded to by the likes of Mark Andreessen - were addicted to the quantitative fallacy that infects economics and other disciplines. 35/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 13/05/2026

That's the idea that every social process can be expressed as a mathematical model, which can then be optimized. The problem, of course, is that much of the real world is *qualitative*, and the act of quantizing those qualia is a *very* lossy process. 36/

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By Cory Doctorow (GPG 0xBF3D9110957E5F4C) @doctorow.pluralistic.net · 13/05/2026

To quantize a qualitative question is to incinerate all the qualitative aspects and then do mathematics on the dubious quantitative ash that is left behind: locusmag.com/feature/cory... 37/

locusmag.com

Cory Doctorow: Qualia - Locus

Last summer, the pandemic was in its first wave and the nation was in chaos. A lack of federal leadership left each state to figure out how to interpret the science, and many states punted public heal...

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