The introduction of quantitative methods has tended to paralyze social sciences thinking

The introduction of quantitative methods has tended to paralyze social sciences thinking. 

... A fetish has been made of quantitative methods and whole laboratories have been devoted to solving, with elaborate statistical machinery, problems which had very slight importance. 

... What we have done in the past is to try to borrow quantitative techniques from physics and chemistry and I believe that this was on the whole a naive procedure, the quantitative techniques while valuable whenever they can be applied to social data are in general not well suited to our type of inquiry.... If instead of borrowing their techniques, we had borrowed their ways of thinking, we might have made vast strides by now... Especially in our handling of equilibria we get into trouble because our discursive wordy methods of presentation can scarcely handle the differences between stable equilibrium towards which phenomena return when disturbed, and unstable equilibrium away from which the phenomena will move faster and faster. 

(Letters, LOC, 18/01/1944)

Correspondence, Library of Congress (LOC) Unpublished Letters of Gregory Bateson Consulted or Cited, 1926–1947.