Why do you need to measure quantities?

Answer 1

I don't know. Maybe measuring is totally unnecessary, and a waste of time. If you own a store, and I come into your store one day, I give you some money, and I take some groceries off of your shelf and drive away with them, is there any reason for you to measure how much product I walked out with ? Is there any reason for you to bother to count how much money I gave you ? When you made your morning coffee, you started by dumping some ground coffee into the basket, and after that, did you measure how much water you poured in ? (Don't say you "just looked at it"; if you watched the water pour and decided when to stop, that's a measurement !) If you have a woman and a few babies in your cave, chances are you go out once in a while to chase something down, hack off part of it, and bring it back for everybody to chew on. Or at least take a stroll once in a while and rip some berries off a bush. How do you know what size berry-sack to take with you ? How do you know how much everybody needs, how much you can carry, when you have enough, or how much to bring back ? How do you know how far away from the cave you can go before you're in the other guy's berry bushes ? How do you know how far away from you that beast is standing or how fast it's running away, or how high to raise your spear before you throw it ? How do you know if you have enough gas in the tank to bring the whole beast back ? Tonight, after everybody finishes their roast beast dinner, how do you know how much wood to put on the fire so that it'll burn all night and the woman won't wake up freezing and grab all the skins ? Maybe there are a lot of things you need to measure.