Most people are followers, not leaders. But even the leaders are followers in most ways. For example, most people, being followers, don’t come up with any of their own concepts. They mix and match the concepts of society without coming up with any new concepts themselves. But even the people who come up with their own concepts usually don’t come up with their own notation for those concepts. Somebody invented +. Somebody invented -. Etc. Who invents new notation nowadays?

Physics, mathematics, and mathematical physics being some of the most important achievements of the intellectual world, and the social sciences being so weak in comparison to the natural sciences, a lot of people think to themselves: “If only we could make the social sciences, which are at present the soft sciences, excellent like physics and mathematics, like the hard sciences!” But most of those people are cargo cultists. They don’t understand how the original physicists and mathematicians came up with their insights. They believe, wrongly, that what’s so scientific and hard-science-like about physics and mathematics is the quantification, the notation. That’s why modern mainstream economics is so number-heavy despite the prose-heavy Austrian tradition being so much better. The modern mainstream economists, unlike the Austrian economists, are obsessed with the trappings of hard science. That’s what makes them scientistic.

David Hume’s goal was to do for social science what Isaac Newton did for natural science. Where was the quantification, the notation, then? It wasn’t there because he wasn’t obsessed with the trappings. He understood what he was doing.

Alfred Whitehead is an example of somebody who understood what mathematics is. What makes the mathematics isn’t the quantification. It’s something else. He explained in his book An Introduction to Mathematics.

One of my goals is to make something like mathematical notation except for the social sciences. Am I obsessed with the trappings too? No. Notation is important. The problem is that most people haven’t understood how to invent new notation. They ape arithmetic, algebra, etc. The modern mainstream economists believe that they’re scientific because they use numbers. The solution, which I’m working on, is to make new notation from the ground up, new notation that’s made specifically for the social sciences and doesn’t ape arithmetic etc. In his book A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume used introspection in order to figure out some of the fundamentals of how the mind works. I’m working on notation for those fundamentals.