Quantitative inventories miss the lived quality that makes a place meaningful

Evidence

But the numbers themselves miss the point. Such lists remind me of the inconsequential facts tossed off by a tour guide, the number of steps to the top of the Washington monument or the number of granite blocks used to construct it, when what I really want to know about is the view from the top and the jokes told by the stonemasons. Berlese funnels yield a good inventory of the biota, I suppose, but I’d rather go walking through a moss clump and see the thousands of creatures living out their lives than count their bodies in a jar. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss, 258

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The Washington-monument contrast — fact-count versus felt, lived encounter — is a crisp statement of the interpretation-over-inventory philosophy running through the whole polyad’s reading of landscape.
• SEED: The ‘steps vs. stonemasons’ jokes’ distinction is a ready-made epigraph for an essay on what field observation in the polyad’s pedagogy is for — data collection versus learning to see.
• XREF: connects to: Aerial landscape reading reveals clear-cut forests as fragmented mosaic scraps expressing social indecision. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural…, 563; Leisure submitted to metrics becomes impossible to justify as worthless — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the…, 86; Experiential value is unquantifiable and independent of how production is organized — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism, 785 (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Experiential value is unquantifiable and independent of how production is organized #expands (0.80) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 785
• Money erases qualitative distinctions by reducing everything to quantity #corroborates (0.80) — Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 9785
• Leisure submitted to metrics becomes impossible to justify as worthless #corroborates (0.78) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 86
• Computers fail at the rich texture of ordinary lived experience #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1023