![numbers.JPG](https://cdn.steemitimages.com/DQmRPnd9WU38od7at5Hg9bw5EFrcp6jZMoiPEh5EPUmMbHD/numbers.JPG)
Science occupies a special place in many people's thinking  - to the extent that for some it as much as The Truth and The Way, as religion is for others.  That is unsurprising if we consider mathematics' earliest practitioner, Pythagoras of Samos and his followers. According to the philosopher Mary Midgley  it was he who first declared in the 6th century BCE "All is number." Indeed, he and his followers considered mathematics to be a religion.  Numbers, he explained, were divine beings, spiritual entities that we should contemplate because they ruled and directed the cosmos. After being purified through the exercise of daily virtues, students could rise to an exalted concentration on the ordering of this mathematical overworld through a meditative way of life.  

This reverence for numbers remains, especially in relation to our current mania for measurement. There must be a number for everything. Furthermore, that number possesses a truth: it tells a story about achievement, accomplishment and performance. Most of all, those numbers tell ourselves that things are getting better; we are making progress. 

This is not science but a kind of accounting. The confusion arises because people confuse science with counting and treat numbers as indicating scientific 'truth.' They don't. Numbers have no meaning outside of their context, or the meaning that we ascribe to them. Yet we treat them as signifiers or symbols of something else. So 15 000 people were reached through public communication about AIDS. That means nothing beyond 15 000 people attended a two-hour discussion about AIDS. Whether they spent those two hours texting, sleeping, talking to their neighbour, searching the internet, or catching up on their email is something we cannot say but they were 'reached.' We also don't know what they did after being 'reached' - went home after the free lunch and promptly forgot everything, wondered where the presenter got their cool outfit, ranted to their neighbour about having their time wasted, went home and gave up everything to become an AIDS educator - none of this we know. So it's an assumption that meeting targets means anything useful. Yet meeting targets has become the equivalent of a religious creed in the development world where they were imported by the corporate sector.

What meeting targets actually seems to indicate is that you have performed. They are like receiving the tick or gold star, rather than the cross, next to your work. Meeting your targets shows you perform and have ambition. That the ambition is peculiar is not the point; it's that you have ambition that counts.  That seems to be the meaning of the number - along with assumptions about value for money.  But why have we confused good works with counting? The one doesn't stand in for the other. In fact, counting and numbers erase what is human. Whenever we want to depersonalise or strip people of their sense of individual identity we give them a number. So numbers also seem to be a way of dealing with units, rather than people. 

But having been well-trained in the enumeration of everything, can we think outside of that framework?