On ‘equivalence’ in mathematics and counting:

“Counting may be said to take off on an originally distorting asymmetry because the first act of ‘seeing as’ which identified the object as belonging to a set of such ‘objects’ existing independently of us doing the categorizing (as well as the rest of the world) was a distortion carried out by us for our own ulterior motives. Perhaps putting an ‘*’ on ‘=’ so it reads =* (or something more elegant) might be a way to acknowledge such hidden perspectivalism…”

— an anonymous informant