The Uselessness of Mathematics

Math helps you gain power over your environment, but it doesn’t help you gain power over yourself.

In other words, technological advances since the Renaissance, spurred by the use of mathematics to scientific ends, give us the means whereby to heal or to harm at a scale unimaginable to men and women of earlier civilizations. But the choice to heal or to harm is not one on which mathematics can guide us. Change begins not with the conversion of the world to your point of view, but with your conversion to the world’s.