I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.
So when the computer came along -- and more particularly, when I understood that a computer is not a number cruncher, but a general system for dealing with patterns of any type -- I realized that you could formulate theories about human and social phenomena in language and pictures and whatever you wanted on the computer and you didn't have to go through this straitjacket of adding a lot of numbers.
That seemed to me a tremendous breakthrough. And one of the first rules of science is if somebody delivers a secret weapon to you, you better use it.
